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Health & Fitness

PR Insights: Digital Blurs Journalism and Public Relations

As digital platforms advance, journalism and public relations continue to grow closer. Media outlets that are expanding access for user-generated content are one key example.

Patch’s launch of its new format is sure to encourage more community members to publish their opinions, promote their organizations, announce their events and leverage this valuable on-line network to communicate important information.   

At the same time and in the same space, Patch editors and reporters will continue to break news and cover stories that are vital to both the geographic and virtual communities they serve.  One might consider it ironic that the “hyper-local” emphasis of on-line news organizations today is actually made possible by something called “the world-wide web.”  

The Internet has truly become a place where journalism and public relations have merged.  Professional journalists, PR practitioners, citizen journalists, casual posters and others offering “user-generated” content are increasingly sharing the same digital space with powerful connections to key communities.  

At our Long Island public relations firm, we certainly have focused on how the Internet has redefined both journalism and public relations. The erosion of traditional media and the emergence of electronic media have profoundly affected both us and our cousins in journalism.   In a little more than a decade, both disciplines have changed drastically and, one could easily argue, have become increasingly aligned.  Just as the Internet has democratized journalism, it has similarly redefined our discipline by emphasizing the “public” in public relations.  

Defining PR in the digital age is especially tricky: just as anyone who “publishes” on the Internet seems to have the right to call themselves a journalist, so too does anyone who promotes something online have the ability to call themselves a PR person.  And, to make things even more complicated, a blogger can be either a journalist or a publicist – or both!   

But, there are many common denominators between the PR of the past and “the new PR.” Here is blogger Michele Pariza Wacek who explains, “PR is the art of getting someone else to write or talk about you or your business. Preferably in a favorable manner. Traditionally, ‘someone else’ was the media. In this day and age however, someone else can also be a blogger, a freelance writer, an e-zine publisher or even an owner of a big website.”   

Finally, blogger Lee Odden writes that “Today’s PR professional understands the intersection of content, social technologies and marketing in ways that achieve common PR objectives: credibility, thought leadership, and influence. It’s less about managing information flow and pushing content – and more about creating content, networking and engagement.”    

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