News is a hungry beast, and getting hungrier. Rolling news, digital communications, the proliferation of news outlets and the rise of citizen journalism have changed the media relations function beyond recognition: David Benady reports

How times change. PR boss Al Golin started his career hammering out press releases on a mechanical typewriter and walking round to the three top publications in the Chicago area to deliver the notices by hand.

That was over fifty years ago. These days, the founder of PR firm Golin Harris is more likely to spend his time pouring out his thoughts through Twitter feeds than pounding the streets of the Windy City.

But it is not only the grand old masters of PR who harbour fond memories of the quaint media relations practices swept away by modern technology. Adam Liversage, communications director of music industry body the BPI, remembers stuffing press releases into envelopes and popping them into the out-tray to await dispatch to a newspaper office for publication a few days later.

Others recall hovering over fax machines sending out reams of pages to journalists, keeping their fingers crossed that the releases would avoid being sent straight to the shredder. Meanwhile many PRs are surprised that some organisations outside the political sphere still stage press conferences rather than running online conference calls or one-to-one phone chats with journalists.

A major anxiety in this brave new world is identifying the key influencers of perceptions about your brand or client. With so many bloggers and commentators online and news outlets springing up and collapsing regularly, monitoring influence has become a headache for many organisations.

As Trevor Gorin, global media relations director at Unilever, says: “It’s a funny time at the moment. The tricky bit nowadays is knowing who, outside of traditional media, you need to have a relationship with.” Gorin has commissioned an audit of the most influential commentators about the corporate and public role of Unilever whether in formal media or through blogs. “We haven’t got the results back
yet but it will be interesting to see how many key influencers there are out there we need to get in touch with – is it six or six hundred?” He believes the explosion of blogging and social media has become a worry for many media relations executives and the task of choosing outside agencies to help build influence has become more difficult. “A lot of people are slightly confused and a bit wary, they don’t know who to turn to for expertise. Everyone comes up with stuff but you don’t know if it works. I’m using agencies much more than in the past but not in an old style retainer manner, nowadays it is about running a cluster of agencies that are very specialised,” he says.

Another disconcerting shift is the rapidly accelerating news cycle. News stories appear on websites within minutes of their release so a notice disseminated at 9 am can be stale by lunchtime. Many newspapers are an aggregation of the previous day’s web news. The instantaneous nature of web news is an added difficulty for global communicators as time differences mean there is always a territory that is switched on, so it is tough to organise a coordinated release.

While media relations practices are being transformed, the shift for journalists is even greater. Editorial cutbacks mean journalists are writing four times as much as they used to, often doubling up on paper and the web and also composing instant analysis of stories they write. “Journalists are relying on the ability of the PR world to keep up with the volume of news they need,” says the BPI’s Adam Liversage, who previously worked at BT.

Some argue that the balance of power in media is shifting in favour of PR. In his book Flat Earth News, Guardian journalist Nick Davies claims that time-pressed journalists are increasingly re-writing press releases. At the same time, Liversage believes there are plenty of people to help out journalists, for instance by giving them exclusives, which he sees as increasingly important tool of persuasion in he febrile news environment.

But the pressure on journalists makes it difficult to forge relationships of trust since they rarely have time to leave the office for lunches and hospitality. One way round this is banding together with other companies to organise joint press trips. Unilever has run press trips to China to show off its operations to key journalists and has tied up with other manufacturers with plants in Asia to target particular journalists. If the journo can be offered three or four strong, separate stories, they may be able to persuade their news editor to unchain them from their desk for a few days.

If the medium is the message, that message seems to be changing along with the media. In the new ‘democratised’ world of web news, the biggest story from an editorial point of view may differ from the most popular story with readers. As many websites feature “most read story” links, people will click on them to get their news. These are often stories about celebrities and animals doing daft thing. When the public gets what the public wants, it seems to undermine established editorial processes. This can also make it harder for PRs to get the billing they believe their stories merit. How do you compete with a sneezing panda? But there is little doubt that a day’s big news on the web will heavily influence the news agenda for the following day’s paper editions.

Significant questions are being asked about the role of newspapers in influencing perceptions. Their authority is certainly being challenged, though they are still a convenient reading format and their picture power beats anything seen on screen. Broadsheets are still carried into boardrooms across the country and re scoured by decision makers. But the spread of iPhones, BlackBerrys and PDAs is presenting a real threat. Readers are constructing their own a la carte “virtual news services” comprising their favourite journalists, columns and blogs, with content picked from across the web. This is leading to the rise of journalists as brands in their own right, such as the BBC’s Robert Peston. PRs must pay particular attention to these commentators, though may find themselves facing stiff competition in their attempts to influence them.

Online democratisation is also forcing media relations into the field of customer relations. The web has fuelled the power of mass protest and discussion. Where once a dissatisfied customer might write in to complain and perhaps take their problem to BBC’s Watchdog, these days online chat rooms enable disgruntled consumers to link up in their thousands within days or hours. Computer maker Dell experienced this with the website Dell Hell, Landrover fell foul of the newly empowered mass consumer movement and online targeted advertising company Phorm has been significantly dented by mass online protest about the alleged invasion of privacy of its service. The BPI’s Liversage says: “PRs need to be cautious about their social media engagement strategies. You can’t put a limit on theopportunities for media relations extent of engagement with the public. If you jump into the pool, there are scenarios where the public demand a response.” Media relations has morphed into customer relations since online discontent is picked up by the media team through their monitoring operations.

For many media relations professionals, the most challenging job is to manage crises as they occur. But rolling news channels with their unquenchable thirst for new angles on stories test even the sharpest of media operators. It is 20 years since the launch of Sky News in the UK and 12 years since the introduction of BBC News 24. This has changed the world of corporate communications.

Take, for instance the death of Michael Jackson and the relentless search for new angles on this definitive event by 24-hour news channels. Some believe AEG Live, the organiser of Jackson’s comeback concerts at the 02 Arena, was caught out by the king of pop’s demise. It took the company over five days to release details of its ticket returns policy, during which 24-hour news channels repeatedly told viewers that there was “no word on ticket returns yet.”

“With rolling news, you’ve got to be a lot better prepared than you were before. If something hits your brand you’ve got to respond in a timely fashion,” says Jonathan Hughes, joint managing director at PR consultancy Golin Harris.

A curious feature of this new world is that it has created far more work in some areas, though has freed up time in others. Tim Holmes, Ford of Great Britain communications and public affairs director, says there is an increased workload dealing with TV  news, since many stations also have websites. “Many of these news outlets don’t share information, so if you deal with the BBC it is not just one person but three or four for different programmes and websites,” he says. However, this has been offset by a declining number of specialist motoring correspondents in the regional papers, which have cut costs and tend to source motoring copy from agencies. In the specialist auto press, the task of embargoing stories has become harder as each magazine has its own website thirsty for news input.

Meanwhile, new technology has wiped out all those tedious PR tasks like sizing up photos, faxing press releases and mailing out press packs. And it is saving Al Golin a whole lot of shoe leather.

Media monitoring
The upsurge in news outlets has made the task of monitoring the media more important than ever. A wide range of tools are available for monitoring web comment, from Google Alerts and blog search to web crawlers that analyse blogs and social media conversations for negative and positive comment. But in the end, there is no replacement for the human touch to judge the subtleties of what is being said about your brand online. As Emma Jacobs, global director for communication at FT Group, says: “Automated monitoring can give you the meat and veg but for the gravy you need human input. We make sure all our team are reading as much as they can about the FT online and we divide the work into different areas.”

Major media monitoring companies such as Durrants and Cision have added social media monitoring to their services as they seek to rival specialists such as Nielsen Buzz Metrics and TNS Media Monitoring. One of the big questions is how the influence of an online comment should be judged – is it just a voice in the wilderness or a commentator that has real clout? Durrants managing director Jeremy Thompson says: “No individual blog post is that interesting, no individual consumer can make a difference, but if a thousand people are saying the same hing it can have an impact.” Others are not so sure. “You need to really understand the publication and where they are coming from, you need to understand the wider picture,” says the FT’s Jacobs.