5 things I learnt from reading PR blogs this week

Posted by: Hannah Elkes on: March 23, 2011

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• The first blog I came across told me that the PR profession is dominated by women and 90% of students on undergraduate PR degree courses and studying for professional qualifications are female. This is a sign of progress with the potential for any young women entering PR and becoming high up in the profession. Pay levels are comparable and senior executives are as comfortable as taking strategic advice from women as well as men. However in some areas of PR there is a clear gender divide as men still get more senior positions. 
• I also learnt what a media advisory is. It is designed to encourage a reporter to come and cover and event. When writing a media advisory you should keep your client in mind and make it as simple as possible for the reporter to find details. It should include pertinent contact information, a catchy headline and the 5 W’s, Who, What, Where, When, Why. The Why is the most important because you should use your persuasive skills to convince the reporter that the story is newsworthy.
• Twitter will soon turn 5 years old and now has around 190 million users. It is social media but also used professionally in the PR field as it is a trusted community. Many people could not live without twitter.
• I then read a blog about ‘churnalism’. According to PR week, senior PR professionals are worried that churnalism.com is threatening to undermine the PR profession. The website invites users to enter some text and it then correlates it with coverage in national newspapers and the BBC to show how much was cut and pasted, or ‘churned’. But maybe churnalism isn’t that bad after all? With journalists under more pressure to turn copy around quickly with less people, the need for good quality press releases is greater than ever.
• The relationship between journalists and PRs is very complex. As I have already found out, it is inter­est­ing that nearly two-thirds of those in PR in the UK are women, while Women in Jour­nal­ism says women are under­rep­re­sented in Britain’s newspapers. The journalist’s com­mon complaint is that PRs don’t put out enough proac­tive stuff or enough usable proac­tive stuff. However PRs are aware of journalist’s needs because many were once journalists themselves. In the future though, PRs will be forced to focus on com­mu­ni­cat­ing directly with their key audi­ences – cus­tomers, share­hold­ers, peers and the pub­lic — through social media and the inter­net rather than rely­ing on the media.