Imagethief

A friend of mine, who is one of the editors at ITJourno Asia, a trade publication for IT Journalists in Asia, wrote to me recently and asked me to comment on a speech given by Richard Edelman, CEO of the eponymous public relations firm at a PR awards ceremony. The speech apparently hailed the rise of PR in an era where exploding media channels, especially online, are diluting the power of mainstream media. The speech included some pretty provocative statements with regard to the declining influence of mainstream media and traditional journalists, but neither ITJourno nor I saw the Edelman's entire speech, so we didn't see those statements in context. Instead, we saw an article on the speech by columnist Jason Horowitz of the New York Observer:

Publicists Lauded for Flackery; P.R. Gods Get Freedom From Press

“In a world where we don’t have a belief in a single source, you don’t have a Walter Cronkite anymore. P.R. is the discipline on the rise,” said Richard W. Edelman, president and chief executive of the public-relations firm Edelman.

 

“P.R.,” he said, “plays much better in a world that lacks trust.”

 

The salt-and-pepper-haired C.E.O. stood in a tuxedo in Tavern on the Green, basking in the admiration of a thousand publicists swirling around him. They had stepped from behind the scenes and into the public eye on March 2 to celebrate one another at the Pubbies, or Spinnies, or whatever you want to call PR Week’s annual public-relations awards.

 

And the world must be short on trust, because public relations is long on profits. According to Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private equity firm that analyzes media trends, the industry was estimated to be worth $3.4 billion in 2004 and is expected to increase at an impressive annual clip of up to 10 percent, reaching $5.2 billion by 2009. Other industry journals, like O’Dwyer’s PR Report, consider such estimates conservative.

 

“It used to be I would schmooze you and I was your flack,” said Mr. Edelman, whose firm netted about $260 million in 2005. “Today, if we want to get a message into the public’s conversation, we just make a post on a blog. If The Wall Street Journal goes after a client, we don’t have to accept that anymore. Let’s post the documents we gave The Journal; let’s show the interviews the newspaper decided not to show.

 

“You’re not God anymore,” he said.

 

Mr. Edelman—and he is not alone—believes that the erosion of the public’s trust in bedrock institutions after scandals in government, big business and the press only contributes to the industry’s success. Without anyone holding a monopoly on truth, the argument goes, P.R. people can get their messages across without pesky filters like, say, the news media.

-more-

The headline of Horowitz' article and the tone of his writing suggest that he has a fairly dim view PR and its practitioners. That makes using it as a basis for commenting on Edelman's speech a bit dangerous. As every journalist (and speaker of Chinese) knows, context is important. Certainly Edelman's statements as reported by ITJourno Asia raised some journalistic hackles, with some ITJourno readers threatening --perhaps in jest, perhaps not-- to boycott Edelman, refuse to take phone calls from Edelman, and such. That is silly.

The tone of his speech aside, Edelman was making the following points: First, that there has been an erosion of trust in mainstream media in the United States. This is not Edelman's assertion; it has been widely reported and commented upon. Second, the rise of new media and, especially, user-generated media (such as blogs) makes people less dependent upon the mainstream media and reduces their influence. Third, that this kind of climate is a boon for PR companies.

Imagethief feels that, whether he put it diplomatically or not, Edelman is correct on all three points. Given that I have a particular interest in new media, I want to focus on that. What follows is a slightly edited version of the comment I sent to ITJourno Asia:

I think Edelman is right in some very important ways, but I also think --without having heard the whole speech-- that some of the comments can be taken the wrong way. This is aggravated by the fact that a lot of people misunderstand what is happening in the media right now.

It is very trendy at the moment to dismiss mainstream media as irrelevant in the age of user-generated media. That's a mistake. Diversity of sources is just that: Diversity of sources. It does make us re-think about what media is important, how messages are disseminated and who is trusted. But mainstream --which is to say, commercial-- media is not going to go away. Therefore, I think it's safe to say that journalists are not going to go away.

However, things do change, and we ignore the changes in the media at our peril. I think it is true that no individual newscaster will every hold sway the way the network newsmen did in the old days. But cable and the proliferation of channels and news organizations with different points of view had ensured that was the case long before digital media got going. People still look for celebrities and pundits, and there will always be an element of this spread between the commercial and user-generated media. Different organizations and voices will have different degrees of credibility. It means that we have to consider more voices and channels as we plan and execute PR.

I think there are two mistakes commonly made in analyzing this situation.

The first is to fixate on the decline in print media and to take that as a proxy for the decline of commercial media in general. The New York Times may be losing paper circulation, but it runs the most visited media site on the web according to Technorati. And it has resources and facilities that no blogger ever will. It doesn't matter if people get the stories off of newsprint, from their browser or in an e-mail sent by a friend. You need to separate the evolution of the delivery mechanism from what is important about the product itself . Now, changes in the delivery mechanism can shake up the business model (for instance, it can be harder to make advertising dollars off of the web, and people don't like to pay as much or at all for content), but they don't necessarily invalidate the product. Music is another good example. The Internet is destroying the classic business model of selling CDs (or records) through retail outlets. But people still want tunes -- just by the track online as opposed to by the album from a store. I think the same thing is true about news. They still want it. But they'll take it by the article online with a hefty mix of new choices as opposed to as a printed monolith dropped at their doorstep every day. That is going to change business models and it is going to affect the resources available to news organizations and possibly the entire model by which investigative and original reportage are generated.

The second mistake is to see a zero sum game between UGM and mainstream media where the latter takes over at the expense of the former. I think what is much more important is the eventual relationship that evolves between UGM and mainstream media, both of which are here to stay. Indeed, UGM, such as this blog, relies on mainstream media for its feedstock.  Today, we PR people can't just consider the newspaper article. We have to consider the cloud of blog or social network comment that erupts around it, or that initiated it. The two feed off each other, and PR needs to recognize that and account for it in strategy development.

Journalists will still be relevant, even if their jobs are a bit less stable or the structures they work within are different. Journalists will still not necessarily be the same thing as bloggers (although I know a lot of blogging journalists). Anchormen will still exist, even if there are more of them catering to different audiences. Newspapers and magazines will still exist, if mostly online, and even if trusted somewhat less. And all mainstream media will be wrapped in a cloud of UGM.

What the article is right about is that this is a great opportunity for PR people. More channels, more diversity and more complexity make our job more important. That job is to understand the complex relationships between different kinds of media, the public and our clients, and to figure out how to harness those relationships for our clients' benefit. Media is transforming. If we understand that transformation, we win. If we don't, we lose.

Edelman is smart, and understands well  the things that makes blogs important, especially in terms of their relationship with mainstream media. He explains some of them on his own blog.

Disclosure: Imagethief does not work for Edelman.
Note: Apologies for the formatting error earlier. Never cut and paste directly from GMail.

Update - March 18: Edelman responds
Edelman has responded to ITJourno Asia's story, in a somewhat conciliatory statement and interview from their Hong Kong office:

[Edelman Asia Pacific president, Alan] VanderMolen also stepped up and reaffirmed PR agencies' need for traditional media in Asia despite the mounting presence of citizen media.

"While I was commenting about the emergence of new media, such as citizen journalists, I did not intend for my words to be understood as a lack of respect for the media," wrote Richard Edelman in an email to ITJoruno Asia.

"I have an enormous amount of respect for the media.

"Edelman works extremely closely with the media all over the world and values this professional relationship.

Richard Edelman described "the overall effects of the changing media landscape will have are varied".

"…In my opinion, the PR profession needs to continue to work with the media, both new and traditional, to provide information from which the media can form a balanced view," wrote Richard Edelman.

"I believe that traditional media, as a whole, has superior credibility in this regard, partly as a function of resources and partly due to the expertise of the reporter. And as a profession, we have to accept that sometimes the media will not be interested in the information they receive, sometimes they will.

"This reality of the industry has not changed."

With reference to his CEO's mention of trust, VanderMolen said it is not just the media that has been gradually losing public trust.

"Overall, trust in institutions, like governments, businesses, and the media, is declining," said VanderMolen in a phone interview.

More at ITJourno Asia (subscription).