New media landscape “a dream for the PR industry”
By Ian Pocock, Communications Director, Leepeckgroup
 
The media once turned a reference to “shifting tectonic plates” into a week-long political crisis that threatened to bring down the Prime Minister. 

As a journalist with the BBC and the Sunday Times, I was part of the industry that made great hay with John Prescott’s comments about Tony Blair’s government.
Yet while that story provoked a minor rumble, it was under the media’s own feet that a permanent landscape-shifting earthquake was taking place.

The figures are damning.  Since 2000 nearly 3 million readers have deserted the national newspaper market, the BBC’s audience share of the television market has slipped below that of smaller satellite channels and more than 2.5 million people have tuned out from the nation’s favourite radio programmes.

But while the atmosphere in many newsrooms is undoubtedly gloomy, the mood on the other side of the communications industry is increasingly upbeat. 

Commentators are unanimous in their view that the combination of declining journalist numbers and the growing demand for content by newspapers, internet sites, broadcast channels, presents a major opportunity for PR firms.

In the Cision newsletter Oliver Poole, a former Daily Telegraph media correspondent, highlights the prospects for communications companies with strong industry contacts and a way to reach the audience, as ‘a dream for the PR industry’”.

“The number of ways in which PR professionals can get their key messages across – and their chance of these messages being uncorrupted – has greatly increased,” says Poole.  “With newspapers desperate for content and less able to find it for themselves, news desks and reporters have never been as reliant on the good news story coming in from communication departments outside.”

“Now the approach to the newspaper does not even have to be direct.  If a story/product/video clip gets suitable traction on the web and start generating a big enough buzz, then it is likely that some newspapers will adopt it and project it onto their own pages.”

The bottom line? All change.  As the audience evolves so must the industry.  Getting the message across is the main challenge facing us, doing so may require the tried and tested ways to change too.