Wednesday, May 25, 2011

More on PR

Little did I know that this week's Economist magazine had a great column on public relations and the relationship with journalists.

It helps that it is fuelled by the recent Google/Facebook fracas. But it notes the ever increasing rise in the number of PR practitioners as the number of journalists decline.

It in particular also targeted the role of "bloggers" as "trusted influencers, which made the use of Charlie Brown in that iSelect release all the more informative.

The article beautifully summarizes the essentials of the PR task;

There are few new tricks in public relations. Mud-slinging against a client’s rivals; offering newspapers ready-made articles containing plugs for a client’s products; cutting off reporters who write negative stories and rewarding malleable ones with exclusives; bribing experts to lend their reputation to a client’s cause: examples of all these and more can be found way back in the industry’s century-long history. But the increasingly thin staffing of newsrooms seems to be encouraging the spinners to be more shameless than ever with such tactics.

(The significance of trusted influencers was reportedly first identified in a 1928 book Propaganda.)

Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

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