Yesterday morning I attended a Roundtable discussion put on by the Sierra Nevada Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America focused on the relevancy of journalism in today’s public relations market. In fact, our Director of Business Development, Josh Kenzer was one of the speakers.Before arriving to the event I was a little puzzled by the title, “Is Journalism Relevant in Today’s PR Market?,” because I thought, of course it’s relevant. A better title would consist of something like, why is journalism relevant in light of social media, or how has its role changed or been impacted. But the discussion ended up focusing heavily on new channels of distribution, search, blogging, podcasting, and new online social mediums or medias. Of course, I was happy that it did. Social media is having significant effects. If you haven’t seen any recent examples of how it has played a role check out what AOL recently had to deal with, or Dell, or Jupiter Research.Other topics of the discussion included truth, relevancy, media fragmentation, how impossible it is for journalists to report on everything, whether or not a blogger can really be a journalist, and the fact that pr professionals, reporters, and media companies are motivated by money. I certainly believe that both reporters and media outlets have a passion for truth, breaking news, and getting the facts straight, but there is still an undeniable and underlying influence attributed to money. PR professionals get paid to generate exposure just as much as media companies depend on advertisers.That does not change the fact that I am a news junky. I have my RSS feeds setup, receive my email newsletters, read cnn.com, nytimes.com, my local newspaper, turn on the TV at night for more local and national news, PBS, and, you guessed it, the Daily Show. From a local perspective, I am often frustrated when I simply see AP stories regurgitated, or some TV reporter sitting on the side of the road telling me its raining or snowing when I can simply look outside and see that it is. Bring me more in depth reporting about social, economic and environmental subjects. Take those paid reporters and put their energies toward something more meaningful - but to who? Me? Maybe they aren’t so concerned with me. Maybe their target market is the person who wants to see someone in their slicks standing by the side of the road in the rain. Many people are pretty apathetic about what is going on outside of their little sphere. I have friends that are this way.I appreciate the power of social media and self-expression, but I want it to resonate more in main stream media. Traditional media, namely print publications, are struggling to discover new channels of communication. They are looking at email, mobile, rss, blogging, podcasting, myspace, and the like, but I think they are considering it as a way of distributing the same old story; or advertisement. Maybe we as a collective whole can dig a little deeper than that.My biggest takeaway from the Roundtable discussion was the emphasis on truth, transparency, and relationships. Send a press release to a reporter with misinformation, and you can kiss that relationship goodbye. Also, you could wind up getting blasted in the blogosphere or somewhere else, and the negative implications of that could be extremely harmful. As a company, we’ve got to continually get our name out there to generate awareness, but it has to be done with these ethical and sensible principles in mind. Once you’ve got that in place, hit every possible channel you can. Technorati : journalism, public relations, reno public relations, social media
