Thursday, February 13, 2014

Why media relations is important in public relations

A non-profit or profit organization may have the best strategies, goals, ideas in place, but if these ambitions and goals are not conveyed to the public, it serves half-the purpose. Hence as PR professionals, it is very important to build a rapport with media to communicate the organization's goals and ambitions (Epperly, J). As the name suggests, public relations is about building relationship with the public, but it is equally important to build relationships with the media to be able to reach out to the public.

Dennis Rutzou from PR Blog says that just building media contacts and relation is not enough. It is more important to churn out newsworthy and convincing stories that your media contacts will be ready to publish (Rutzou, D. 2011). According to Rutzou, media is always on the lookout of news content that is competitive with their competition and there is no way that they will publish your story because they have a good relation with you.

Media relations have many benefits. It can help with raising funds for research, help get offers of consultancy and helps promote brand name (E.S.R.C.). Media attention can also raise the public profile of the organizations discipline and in turn increase public discussions.

A study Examining Modern Media Relations: An Exploratory Study of the Effect of Twitter on the Public Relations – Journalist Relationship, author Drew Wilson says that Twitter has changed the traditional relationship between PR and media professionals. It has changed the way practitioners and journalists interact. The traditional forms of writing a press release and sending it to journalists is becoming outdated. Social media has opened public platforms for public relations professionally to reach out to the public. And the need to the media is slowly dying. Public Relations don’t really need the media anymore to reach out to the public (Wilson, D. 2013).

Thus looking at all the studies and expert opinion on the relationship between PR and journalist practitioners, it can be seen that public relations is slowly weaning off from being dependent on journalists to get their stories out to the public. Thanks to the internet and new technology like Twitter and Facebook, public relations practitioners can reach out to the public themselves.  

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