The PR industry provides a large and, apparently, growing share of media content:
Macnamara said the data showed 30-80 per cent of media content was sourced from, or significantly influenced by, PR practitioners, depending on the outlet, with estimates of 40-75 per cent common.
The definition of PR material included all information released to the media by outlets such as PR companies, corporations, statutory bodies, government departments and ministerial press secretaries. Quality newspapers and broadcasters relied least on press releases.
Using them most heavily were smaller outlets such as suburban and rural newspapers, some types of magazines, trade press and specialist publications.
The heaviest users of all were travel magazines, which in some cases were overwhelmingly dominated by handouts published with barely a word changed.
In fact, this survey itself was released, or promoted, in order to generate publicity for an event organised by the Public Relationas Institute of Australia.
Nothing wrong with that.
Nevertheless, the sheer size of the PR contribution has to make you wonder about the value-add of many media outlets.
The value-add of the media is not supposed to be just about distribution, journalism should be part of the deal.
Yet faced with declining revenues and increasing costs, the media has tended to cut back on its investment in journalism and rely more and more on all that ‘free’ content from PR.
Journalists end up being little more than media release sub-editors.
No matter how good PR content is, and it can be very good and it can be awful, it’s not the same as journalism.
I believe the audience can sense the difference, not in every instance but more generally, and the public’s ability to know that they are getting advertising dressed up as journalistic content might be one reason why they find media less compelling and engaging than a generation ago.
One Comment
Hi Trevor. Good points, particularly your last two pars. But I have to point out that this piece illustrates a key issue in relation to media and PR. A healthy media depends on journalists and other media writers checking facts at source and verifying information received via intermediaries or from other media reports. Re your first paragraph, there was no survey. Therefore it was not released to generate publicity by the PRIA. I was asked to speak about research in the area to set the scene for the so-called debate and I summarised findings of many studies done over the past 80 years – a kind of meta-analysis. I included some of my own and recent UTS research, but I was careful to point out that there have been many studies – I directly quoted 10 or so – and that data on this goes back 80 years. I believe PRIA did contact Sally Jackson and mentioned my upcoming talk and she interviewed me, after which Crikey asked me to write a summary. But other than that, few people commenting on my talk actually interviewed me. Many media reported other media which can be a problem. Cheers.