Multimedia article on the impact of new media on the public relations industry by Michelle Bouse
Storified by Shel Bouse ·
Sun, Mar 23 2014 14:12:48
The traditional platforms of which
news was delivered on was an event in homes once upon a time. The scene
illustrated above was common place during the state broadcaster’s main evening
news. The news was a source of one-way communication. There was a small amount
of players involved in reporting, reading and gathering content and the
ordinary citizen was a mere spectator of the news.
Today because of the Internet news
has changed dramatically in a short space of time and how we get our news will
evolve further again as technologies continue to advance. Mark Little, who is
widely recognised as both an innovator and early adaptor of the changing news
environment details how ‘things’ have changed;
When
I became a reporter, almost 20 years ago, my job was to dig up scarce, precious
facts and deliver them to a passive audience. Today, scarcity has been replaced
by an unimaginable surplus and that audience is actively building its own
newsroom.
Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair columnist
wrote in 2007 ‘news – as a habituating, slightly fetishistic, more or less
entertaining experience that defines a broad common interest – is ending.
Newspapers, the network evening news, news magazines, even 24 hour cable news
channels, these providers and packagers of the news, are imperilled media.’
The consumer can now choose their
news, apps like Flipboard has millions of people logging in every day to read
and collect the news they care about, curating their favourite stories into
their own magazines on any topic imaginable. Prior the ‘New Media Age’ the news
chose us, now we choose the news.
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w Media? New Media might be considered a superior term
for the social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook but it’s a lot more
than that. Wikipedia has become one of the most popular storehouses of
Knowledge in the new media age and it’s interesting to know how they define New
Media
“A broad term in media studies that emerged in
the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a
possibility of on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital
device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and
community formation around the media content. Another important promise of new
media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing,
distribution and consumption of media content. What distinguishes new media
from traditional media is the digitizing of content into bits. There
is also a dynamic aspect of content production which can be done in real time,
but these offerings lack standards and have yet to gain traction”
So what is old media then? Old Media,
or as it more commonly known as is traditional media, refers to broadcast and print, the media that talked
‘at’ us.
Stagnant traditional media has no survival
rate but radio and television still have a life and can actually strive when
they statically merge new and old, making news interactive, a two way
conversation, engaging the consumer and digitalizing it and allowing people to
take what they want and dispose of the rest. The humble newspaper will have a
harder fight on their hands in the physical sense as people will no longer feel
the need to pay for new and it is estimated that in less that thirty years we
will see the last of newspaper as we know them today.
When a news story breaks today, it’ll break on social media first, it
will be in the next hour when it hits the hourly news bulletin on radio, hours
after that the state broadcaster has it and it will be the next day before one
reads it in their newspaper but in the mean-time the conversation keeps going
via New Media platforms. Many learnt of Michael Jackson’s death on June 25th
2009 through social media first, then the web, then radio and television, and
finally, newspapers – and other print media such as magazines.
We are all journalists and
photographers today, creating and gathering content on platforms such as
twitter, Facebook, blogs etc. Newspapers
are citing twitter handles for pictures they are printing and tweets they are
quoting. So is the profession of journalism dead? No but the profession has
changed.
“People still need journalism skills,
but they will just be used in a different way. Today there are so many
different variants of journalism now –
people need to have that knowledge of cross platforms and what’s going on in
different types of on-line journalism”
said Gary Mullen, co-owner of recruitment firm prosperity.
Think of Ernie Pyle, the American
journalist most known for reporting on World War II, he understood his
responsibility as a witness, he didn’t just write, he summoned images that made
suffering intimate to a distant audience. The reader wasn’t there but Ernie
made them feel they were.
The characteristics that made Ernie a
good journalist are still needed today. Technology changes but humans don’t,
the element of the news hasn’t changed, we still want the human story, a
Malaysian Airline goes missing and it’s the personal story of those 239
passengers that people want to know. We as people are interested in other
people and that won’t change but New Media gives us bigger scope to find out
the personal story behind the headlines and two minute news bulletins.
News driven
talk shows across radio and television such as The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk
and Prime Time on RTE implore the news further, collecting the human story and
at times create and gather stories with professional journalistic ability that
would never surface if they hadn’t, we saw this especially with the crèche
investigation. It’s worth noting that
Prime Time and Tonight with Vincent Brown ( #vinb ) are two current affairs
programs which often find themselves in the twitter trending list.
Televised current affairs programs
have a future but people are watching them differently, double screening and
continuing the conversation long after the one hour televised broadcast ends. We
are living in a time where everybody is interested in the news, but just not
the same story.
As viewers are taking the information, discussing
it, taking an angle of it and writing about it on our blogs.
Journalists compile facts and tell a
story that interests the public. Public Relations practitioners are
storytellers too. They public relations practitioner needs to ask what story do
they want to tell about their company or client? But how can the PR practitioner be picked out
as the storyteller when we are essentially all storytellers.
The field of Public Relations is
increasingly a world driven by capitalizing on opportunities to speak directly
to the audience, unfiltered and bypassing what was traditionally the “middle”
man – the reporter, print or broadcast. No longer is the PR person’s principal
job to mail or fax the press release and follow up with a phone-call. Today,
because of New Media people in public relations are becoming more like reporters
conveying direct, unfiltered good news about their client rather than before when
the Public Relation professional was only called in to deflect bad publicity.
Today anyone with a laptop and Internet
access can produce and distribute informational content that once was the domain
of the print / broadcast journalist or the public relations professional. The term “Citizen Journalist” has come to
represent a person who uses all tools of the multimedia journalist – text, audio,
video and graphics – telling a story that might not otherwise receive coverage
in traditional media platforms. But how does the Citizen Journalist effect the
profession of Public Relations? First of all before a public relations practitioner
could easily identify all media organizations but now the blogosphere is
doubling in size every 200 days. Civic Journalists can develop a large
following and the public practitioner needs to recognize that the blogger’s
voice is as important as the journalist writing for the Irish Examiner.
Citizen journalism allow PR practitioners have wider
access of the information and demonstrate them and have more reliability of the
news that helps PR practitioners and professional journalists prove the news
however, it’s major weakness is that the stories of the citizen journalism may lack quality and crediability. A student studying
Public Relations today is well advised to put social media on his / her most
needed skills set.
“With changes in
technology & the explosion of media channels, classic public relations
models can no longer adequately describe public relations, especially as the
relationships between organizations and their stakeholders have grown
increasingly complex and malleable” Bey-Ling Sha
Public Relations is still about building relationships,
it’s often joked about that ‘twitter is just a collection of PR people and
journalists’ and to an extent there is truth in the joke, it’s easier than ever
to get in touch with a journalist and it’s even easier for a public relations practitioner
to build relationships with journalist via social networking sites like twitter.
Then there is the power of social media, the best example of a company capitalizing
on an opportunity via social media was during the blackout at last year’s Super
Bowl when Oreo tweeted this;
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The tweet was re-tweeted 10,000 times
within one hour, it even had a bigger reaction than the television advertisement
that was broadcasted that night during a commercial break of the sporting
event.
So what does all this mean for Public
Relations, well the growth of social media and citizen journalism means that
the old ‘push’ system of PR distribution, in which clients and their advisers
largely decided what information to release and when, has been replaced by a
pull mechanism in which global audiences including customers, the media,
regulators, investors, politicians and others are firmly in control of how they
consume all manner of news and content. There has been a rapid reassessment
among PR companies of their digital capabilities. They have opened the
floodgates to a raft of new firms claiming skills in managing technology or
monitoring social media. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and old media masquerading as
new media has led to a loss of control in corporate communications. It has
reduced response times for potential problems. Audiences can make assumptions
based on scant and unverifiable online data.
Tim Burt writes ‘ the perceived
behavioural change in the media has prompted new engagement tactics by the PR
industry. The old ways of doing things, the simple art of story placement has
been transformed into the communications equivalent of three-dimensional chess,
in which clients and their advisers have to consider several moves ahead before
making their opening play.’
The newspaper is dead, long live the
newspaper…..the speech of course was Rupert Murdock’s address to the annual
meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in Washington DC on
13 April 2005, in which he outlined what he perceived to be the ‘fast
developing reality’ confronting the newspaper industry and today a more apt
edition of the is a traditional proclamation would be ‘The News is dead, long
live the News.’
