The Opportunity for PR in the State of the News Media

According to The Pew State of News Media 2013 Report, there was a 3.6 to 1 ratio of PR people to journalists in 2008 (up from 1.2 to 1 in 1980). I am not surprised. InkHouse grew 45 percent last year, and we’re on course to do the same or more in 2013. Why this growing gap? In short, the news media’s business model is in painful flux. As the Pew notes, “newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30 percent since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978.”

The opportunity for PR is growing as we see new ways to engage with audiences directly and plentiful opportunities for content. Is the news business going away? Absolutely not. It’s changing.

The Content Opportunity

From our Content Bureau (read how to use content for PR in my piece for PRWeek), it is clear that thoughtful content designed to spark conversations drives engagement and often action. The content inflection point is here.

On one side, media outlets are looking to provide their content expertise to marketers. As the Pew notes, Fortune’s TOC (Trusted Original Content) program pairs Fortune writers with brands to create original content for exclusive use by marketers.

On the other side of that coin, more outlets are experimenting with contributed content from external sources. Business Insider was one of the first to introduce this model with its Business Insider Contributors (Huffington Post, as well, was an early entrant and has a host of contributors). Today, Forbes has a full roster of contributors and The Atlantic’s Quartz offers a unique approach for digital content that is organized around its stated current “obsessions.” Lauren Brown who headed up contributed articles for Business Insider is the deputy ideas editor for Quartz. And of course, many many many other high profile blogs consider guest posts that meet their editorial standards and focus, including GigaOm, TechCrunch, AllThingsD, etc.

New models of content curation and syndication are bubbling up to proliferate content beyond the boundaries of its original home. PandoDaily took the bold step of making its content freely available for reuse (through a tool called repost.us). As we recommend for infographics, the repost feature uses an embed code that likely gives PandoDaily credit for the Web traffic anywhere those articles land (it also looks like the ads get embedded with the article).

Then there are newer media models such as Buzzfeed, which I started following regularly after its “26 Moments That Restored Our Faith In Humanity This Year.” Read it. You won’t regret it. Mathew Ingram of GigaOm wrote that, “Newer digital-native publishers such as BuzzFeed are pinning their revenue hopes to sponsored content and other forms of ‘native’ advertising, in which the site creates content that is indistinguishable from its regular content.”

Don’t forget your press release, the original PR content. Releases are great for SEO, but given that “reporting resources” are “cut to the bone” with “fewer specialized beats,” (according to Pew) your press release has never been more important. Often, it provides language we see verbatim in news stories.

The Social Opportunity

The Pew report confirmed what good PR people already know -- if you have great content, to make it take off, you need to get the press to pay attention and get it into your audience’s social streams. According to the Pew:

• 72% of U.S. adults most commonly get their news from friends and family (in person or by phone). Of those, 63% somewhat or very often seek out a news story about that event or issue.
• 15% of U.S. adults get most of their news from friends and family through social media. 77% of those follow links to full news stories.
• Almost 25% of those between 18 and 29 rely on social media as their primary source of news.

Like the rest of the world, we at InkHouse are interested to see which news media model will ultimately win. I think (and hope) the tide will shift back to thoughtful reporting and I applaud some of the media outlets with which InkHouse works regularly for their part in driving important conversations, including Xconomy, PandoDaily and GigaOm, which have made their brands through thorough and thoughtful reporting and analysis.

People have not lost interest in thoughtful news, they just need to be able to find it easily and understand its importance quickly. This is the job of PR.