The Future of PR: Changes in Media Relations

The increase and improvement of technology over the last two decades has created an 'instant messaging' society. A society where patience is now considered a rare and valuable virtue.  The waiting time for information is decreasing as technology improves. While this is a wonderful thing, it creates a problem or more like a challenge for those involved with media. For public relations it means thinking creativity, keeping up with the latest media trends and identifying the merging lines of social networking and news media sources.  

In the recent article The Future of the Media Relations: Expect the Unexpected, Pr News interviewed three professionals about their thoughts on where public relations is headed toward in the not so distant future.  

Steve Cody, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, predicts that companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and IBM will be in direct competition with major media networks like USA today, CBS, and Fox.  In the future people will turn to these major companies as their source of news instead of the networks. 

Ronn Torossian, Founder and CEO, talks about how public relations agencies will have the power to shape the future of communications in social media.  This would amazing if we had the ability to hold the strings of the social media in the future. 

Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President/Director of Insight , explains how the line between media communications and social communications is slowly disappearing and morphing into one.  Rublel suggests that PR professionals should rethink how they measure the media. I think it will be interesting to see in the future how will measure decide what is considered valuable media to the public.

It is hard to think of where the future of media will go. It is an important issue, especially for pr students to stay on top of, considering this will be the meat of our jobs.  I believe that this is a very critical and essential issue that will always be around, but that we as ‘the communicators of the world’ should always be on the front line if not one step ahead of the change.  One of the most important part of our jobs is media relations. How can we relate with the media if we stay in the dark about the changes in media?  We can not predict the future, but we can prepare for it.