This is from a social video I posted: “PR pros without a strategy for supporting and growing journalists and creators are like safari tour guides without a strategy for protecting endangered wildlife.”
Journalists subsidize PR. That’s always been true. But today, there are now six times as many PR specialists than journalists in the United States. It’s untenable. Let me share how we got here and what we can do about it.
A PR specialist has many roles but a big one of them is to get so-called “earned media” for their clients. They build relationships with or just follow what journalists, and increasingly influencers and creators, are interested. They send the emails and the calls and do prep to shape what story gets told.
A foundation of PR strategy is third-party validation, the idea that a person or a brand can’t only tell their own story. So even if today a client, or a company or a government can build their own audience. We know it is a lot more effective if someone else says it about you. So in the early 1900s, we began to see the first professional PR specialists. As journalists kept attacking big business, there was a sense that someone’s job needed to push back.
Though certainly always criticized, for a time in the 20th century, the relationship between PR and journalism was reciprocal. It had its problems, which is for another video but PR folks would have important information, and journalists could trade tips and work to get context.
I’m a journalist and I run a news organization that employs real full-time human reporters. I personally have lots of good relationships with outstanding PR professionals. But I’ve always this strange relationship PR and communications reps. Because as I’ve fought and struggled to pay journalists and put my own time in finding new information and perspectives to help a community learn about itself, I always had this sneaking feeling that every one in a while we just do free work to help someone do their job.
Per the BLS, there are now 300k PR specialists in the U.S. How many journalists and editors and TV people? 50k. Across the whole country. A Pew survey in 2022 put the number a bit higher but the point is very clear. Because the model for local and community news is so much harder than for national, the majority of those journalists don’t cover local. There are ever more people being hired to reach ever fewer people.
PR firms will set up press conferences and journalist tours, they’ll send out media advisories and build these monstrous lists of news organization email addresses. But there is increasingly no journalists to reach. The BLS projects continued growth in PR and continued shrinking among journalists. Everyone hopes individual creators can fill the gaps, but this is moving something we know to be important to a crew of mostly volunteers.
I did the math back in 2019, and it’s only gotten worse: There are more coal miners than local journalists in the United States.
What can we do? Three tracks: You really should pay for news providers. Yes that might be subscriptions and memberships, but if you hate journalists that can also mean other information providers, like a PAtreon for your favorite Youtuber. I just beg that you make sure you aren’t only being told what you want to hear. Individuals are great.
A big push into philanthropy feels important too. In this case many of us, myself included are arguing not that philanthropy has to “fund journalism” but instead fund this glaring information gap. For example, if you fund workforce development and other local economic development strategies, I want to ask you: How will these programs amplify their work, and be held accountable?
Efforts to use tax policy and government intervention is interesting but given our climate I’ll save that for another time too.
Last, in another way, I also want to challenge my friends in PR and communications. This is your crisis too. Many news organizations, including mine, have built systems in which large institutions and companies can underwrite, or financially support some of our reporting. For example, an organization can sponsor our non-controversial profiles of people’s tech career paths. That then has allowed our journalists to do our data-journalism, chase toxic startups and look at crumbing city IT and cybersecurity infrastructure.
Two decades ago, we were were worried about all journalism and did not do too much. National media survived but not unscathed, local news collapsed, and this has contributed to our hyper-partisan, fact-free world.
Do something about it.”