PRSA Delegates Not Ready for the Future Yet

The PRSA National Delegate assembly voted down a non-binding resolution today asking the association's Board to regularly consult the elected delegates on "issues of concern" by submitting them to the  assembly's electronic discussion group. The vote was 95 for, 118 against.

Unfortunately for PRSA, this vote told me that the association is even more entrenched in its business-as-usual way of doing things than I thought. Further, it told me that a broad cross-section of the association isn't prepared to embrace the present and future of communications and engagement.

PRSA formally created the "Leadership Assembly" last year as an acknowledgement of the need for broader input into the association's future role in PR and communications. The Board is supposed to seek advice and counsel from the assembly, as opposed to its prior role of simply doing the legal business of a membership organization. Along those lines, the formal business of the assembly was limited to the first half of the day today, followed by a discussion of the near-term future of the PR industry in the afternoon.

As noted by the advocates of the resolution, the electronic discussion group gives the Board the ability to consult the Leadership Assembly throughout the year, but it didn't do so. The authors, tech-savvy PR people from Boston and the Bay Area, hoped that the resolution would help move the association in that direction. It didn't happen.

[2010 PRSA International Conference]

PRSA Fails to Strike APR Requirement for Board Service

The PRSA Delegate Assembly today voted resoundingly against removing the requirement that potential national board members hold an Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) in order to stand for election. The vote, which required a two-thirds majority, failed to even garner a majority, falling 104-172.

The voted ended a passionate and looong debate this year for and against this change. To summarize, those for the amendment felt that removing the requirement would open board leadership to a much larger pool of candidates, while those against argued that holding an APR demonstrates the necessary commitment to the profession and the society.

I voted for the change, twice actually, as I held a proxy for our chapter's other vote. I did so at the direction of the PRSA Silicon Valley board, which voted to support the amendment.

What made this debate interesting to me is that it encapsulated many wider issues in the transformation and evolution of the PR industry. From my point of view, those arguing against the amendment (at least those who spoke or wrote publicly) were largely motivated by a desire to slow change, to affirm their support for "the way things are" and to support the APR accreditation as a symbol of PR expertise.

On the other side, those supporting the amendment seemed to be crying out for the organization to modernize, to open its leadership to a wider pool of candidates, and to recognize that "public relations" as a profession and marketing function is rapidly evolving.

In the end, I think the amendment lost because it addressed a narrow issue, the APR requirement, rather than rewriting the entire "minimum requirements" bylaw altogether. In addition to the APR requirement, the minimum requirements still call for potential Board members to have served as a chapter or section board member or, at a minimum, to have been in the profession for 20 years.

As a membership organization, the only *minimum* requirement for board service should be that the person be a PRSA member for a minimum of 2-3 years. Such a low threshold would allow anyone with a demonstrated commitment to the organization to run for office, only barring insurgents seeking for some reason to take over the organization.

Why the bare minimum? Because the nomination and election process is the proper place to vet qualifications for leadership, not the bylaws. The pool should be as wide as possible, thus hopefully turning the election itself into an opportunity to debate and discuss the future of the organization and the profession.

If there's anyone out there worrying about the business efficacy of this organization, I recommend that you take this vote as a warning sign of a hidebound association that may be too slow to change to meet the needs of tomorrow's PR and marketing professionals.

[2010 PRSA International Conference]

canadian pharmacy Clozaril

PRSA Looks to the Future

The PRSA National Delegate Assembly is coming up next month, October 17 in Washington, D.C. I'll be there representing the Silicon Valley Chapter.

The assembly is a requirement of PRSA's bylaws, and past assemblies have been mind-numbing affairs in which delegates from around the country were asked to consider and vote on administrative minutiae regarding the business affairs of the group.

In response to voices like this one, the assembly has been modernized, and the preliminary agenda only calls for us to spend the morning dealing with such issues. The afternoon is turned over to a "Town Hall Meeting" on "Defining the role of the public relations professional of the future." We were asked to solicit input from our chapter on the questions below.

My plan is to post the questions here, solicit your input on any or all of them, and write up my own thoughts in the next few days. So here they are:

• What role will the public relations professional play in 2015? How is this different from their role today?


• What other knowledge, skills and abilities are necessary for success in the future?


• How will knowledge, skills and abilities be impacted by:
  
  
  
  • Social media?
  
  
  • Integrated marketing/communications?
  
  
  • Globalization?
  
  
  • The disintegration of traditional media?
  
  
  • The demand for results — focus on measurement and evaluation?
  
  
  • Other?
  
  
  
  


• How will knowledge, skills and abilities differ by:
  
  
  
  • Career stage?
  
  
  • Industry?
  
  
  • Organizational setting?
  
  
  
  

"Vitch" is the first new PR catchword of 2010

Why send a plain old written PR pitch when you can send a "vitch" -- a video pitch?

That's right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It's certainly simple enough to do -- plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.

Makes a lot of sense, too. Video is such an incredibly powerful medium, and now, through the evolution of technology, we can all be fast and cheap video producers.

The key thing here is that a "vitch" can't just be you reading your boring, stilted press release into the camera. You need to show something -- the newsmakers, the location, something, anything tangible. This, by itself, takes PR people out of their jargon-filed comfort zone.

I just picked up on this word so I don't have any good examples of video pitches and their results, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. I plan to try it this month just to see what happens.

Company Gets $500,000 in VC Funding to Bridge the Gap Between PR and Media

I am one who believes there will always be a chasm between the media and PR, unless and until the media dies and all media is PR. Which I hope does not happen.

I've been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people figure out if they had a story for me, and as a PR person, I've worked hard to teach PR people how to do a better job interacting with the media.

I've mostly considered it a lost cause to try to educate the media about PR, even though that was one of my original goals. Media people generally split into two camps: those who "get" the role of PR and deal with it, and those who "hate" PR and always bitch about it. Sometimes those in the latter group migrate to the former, but they need to do it in their own time. No use trying to teach them -- their ears do not hear.

Despite this persistent divide, some people obviously think it can be overcome. At least, that appears to be the gist of the strategy of a new company, Plato's Forms, which says is mission is:

developing solutions for companies and journalists that help address some of these challenging aspects of communications in the online media environment.

At this time, they say no more. In Silicon Valley-speak, they are in "stealth" mode, meaning they are developing their offering behind closed doors and plan to make a big splash when they unveil it at a later date. For now, they've got a half-mil to work with, partly from the pocket of founder Darryl Siry.

Their name, btw, refers to the philosopher Plato, who, their web site says, "held that we could not comprehend the true form of things, and could only grasp the reflections of their true meaning, as if they were shadows reflected on the wall." At least one philosophy major disputes this reading, however, judging from the comments about the company on a TechCrunch post.

Vote Yes on PRSA Bylaw Revisions and Move on to What's Really Important

The PRSA National Delegate Assembly will take place this Saturday in San Diego. I'm a delegate but I can't make it, so I'm sending a proxy voter. She asked how to vote and I told her she was free to vote as she pleased. But I wanted to go on the record to the industry and urge approval of the main item on the agenda, the revision of PRSA's bylaws.

PRSA is a national membership organization based in New York. A staff and Board run the organization, but as a membership body, we have to have an annual meeting to conduct certain business, such as bylaw revisions.

Here's my take on the bylaw revisions -- just do them and vote yes! Then move on to the truly weighty and important issues facing our profession, and not dwell on bureaucratic minutiae.

Almost all nonprofits need to revise their bylaws periodically, as the organization and the external world change. Bylaw changes are almost always overdue, because they are a pain to push through. That's the case here.

I've reviewed the changes a couple of times, looking for nefarious consolidations of power or simply bad ideas, and I can't find them. The revisions appear to me to both modernize the association and streamline decision-making, two worthy objectives.

I took a second close look because there is a faction that has gotten itself extremely worked up about these revisions, but I can't find any cause for alarm.

What does alarm me, however, are the things PRSA's national meeting OUGHT to be dealing with, namely:

• The lack of enforceable professional standards of practice


• The lack of clear and low-cost ways of measuring the effectiveness of PR


• The revolutionary changes roiling the media, communications and the PR industry brought on by the Internet, and how to position and support current practitioners and train the next generation

With delegates across the country representing the best and brightest of the profession sitting in one convention room in San Diego, it would be a perfect time to address and work on these issues. But they won't be on the agenda. And that's the real shame here.

In the end, it's all corporate communications

One of the reasons I became disillusioned and left the mainstream media was that while it purports to be "independent" and "objective," it's really just corporate communications. That is, the media of today is largely owned by massive corporations who want to make money, and they do so by researching and reporting "news" and delivering it in an attractive enough package that people will buy/watch/listen to it.

Now that I'm older, wiser, and jaded, this seems like, duh, but back in my younger days, this really seemed like an issue to me. It was certainly evident that we journalists were largely steered to cover "acceptable" stories -- city hall scandals, urban violence -- while understanding that other stories -- such as corporate control of the country, for instance -- would not be career-building subjects.

So I left the media, did a half-dozen years of community service type work, then trended over to real corporate communications, figuring -- seriously -- that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Just so you know, I don't always sleep well with this deal with the devil, but mostly, I've found a way to make a living while doing relatively benign "corporate communications."

Today's sermonette is prompted by the item in the Times today about the Los Angeles Kings hockey team hiring "their own reporter" to write stories about the team on the Kings' web site. The story assures us that "reporter" is being given "complete autonomy to post reporting or commentary."

However, the story goes on to fret: "how sure can readers be of tough, impartial coverage when image-conscious businesses are paying for it?"

As if the Gray Lady herself, the Times, isn't image conscious.

First of all, this story isn't news -- Major League Baseball has had the same set up for its teams for several years. Secondly, it's a damn good idea in today's world. It's a world of instant publishing on a global communications platform. Why wouldn't you post your own fresh content?

And this brings us to "credibility." Every media outlet has a point of view -- you just have to figure it out and deal with it, whether you are a media consumer or a PR person. So this is just one more example of a type of media to deal with. Like I said, it's all just corporate communications.

Rachel Maddow Deftly Injects Anti-Racism Into the National Mainstream

Racism has been one of the greatest stains on the American experiment and remains an insidious and destructive force in today's society. The election of Barack Obama has done two things: 1) it has shown that a majority of the electorate is now ready and willing to trust a non-white as the nation's President and 2) energized a vocal minority of Americans who still seek a white-dominated American society.

In the mainstream, there's probably no more "prominent" spokesman for white supremacy than Pat Buchanan. I put prominent in quotes because the man is self-appointed, having never won election to anything.

In a recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, where he is a regular contributor, Buchanan once again spouted his white supremacy, non-white inferiority line of "reasoning" during a discussion of Sonya Sotomayor, and as usual, played fast and loose with the facts. While Maddow let him get away with it during the original segment, she took him to task in a follow-up segment, and in the process, gave the most eloquent and forceful endorsement of anti-racism I've ever heard on national TV.

This is a big subject, but let me summarize, because this is important to me:

• White supremacy means a world dominated by people who pass as white, and seeing the world through the lens of white peoples' experiences and standards


• There's a world of non-white people out there, and they have been systematically discriminated against by white people (don't believe me -- read some of these links)


• People like Pat Buchanan are completely bought into defending white supremacy and white privilege


• There is very little in the mainstream media as yet about combating racism and white supremacy, but I'm happy to say that in my personal/religious life, I'm deep at work on it.

I can't do Maddow's takedown justice by quoting her. You just have to watch it for yourself.

BTW, the relevance to PR: This country will be majority non-white in my children's lifetime. If your comms aren't changing to reflect this reality, you're falling behind.

Silicon Valley PR Gets the New York Times Treatment

I was out on holiday for most of last week and so missed the opportunity to offer some timely insights into the glorious coverage of Silicon Valley PR in the New York Times on Saturday, July 4 (an aside -- why does our industry get coverage only on national holidays and other B-list days?).

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="111" caption="Miller"][/caption]

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter's Notebook, Batman -- stop the digital presses!

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="252" caption="Hammerling"]
[/caption]

Among Miller's other "findings" in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client


• "In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial."


• "Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers ... PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out."


• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK -- enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling's expense. What are my takeaways?

Pitching Business Media Is Getting Tougher and Tougher

One of the untold stories of PR over the last quarter century has been the great rise in business journalism, from a media backwater to a front-and-center element of the media. It just so happens that I had a front-row seat for this transformation, as I entered business journalism in 1981 as part of the first wave of expansion. Back then, for perspective, the Wall Street Journal was only one section, and the New York Times' business section was behind the sports section. There was no CNBC.

This has been a boon for PR -- the more business media, the more PR people and resources needed to deal with them and pitch them.

It has never been easy to get coverage from the business media, but this year, it has gotten much tougher. Buyouts and closures are sweeping the media, taking out scores of talented and experienced business journalists.

Talking Biz News, a very good blog that follows the business media, reported today that 250 business media jobs were eliminated just during the first six months of 2009. That included the entire staff of Portfolio, the ill-timed new business mag from Conde Nast, and 100 positions throughout Bloomberg Media, which is heavily dependent on sales of its information to the financial services sector. But there have been scores of other jobs lost at national newspapers, regionals, magazines and business journals.

What does this mean for us in PR? It means we have to work ever harder to get stories placed. It means we can't waste precious time pitching non-stories to over-worked journalists. It means that when we do pitch a story, we need to be ready to provide facts and figures, human interest, quotable quotes, photos, graphics and other sources for the story.

I know it's hard to do. But that's reality. So get back to work, people. Break's over.

dna13's new Enterprise edition is the next generation of reputation monitoring

We're now far enough along in the development of the Internet and desktop software that corporations can now access very sophisticated tools to monitor the messages flowing out there in the world about them. I recently had a chance to demo dna13's new Enterprise software and it looked to me like the future of reputation management.

First, let me say that I do not ordinarily tout PR tools and technologies, and this is not an endorsement per se. But I was sufficiently impressed by the depth and breadth of dna13's software that I wanted to write about. If you want to stop reading my drivel and go straight to their site for more information, here's the link.

Maybe Dan Abrams Is On To Something

Dan Abrams, the MSNBC talker and would-be PR counselor, has been taking some heat (from this blogger and elsewhere) about the stated strategy of his Abrams Research shop to use working journalists as moonlighting PR consultants to his clients.

With journalism under siege and journalism jobs vanishing faster than you can say "Huffington Post," it does make some sense that these professional communicators would look over the hedge and see public relations as a place to earn some cash in today's (and tomorrow's economy).

As I said earlier this week, Abrams' use of freelancer journalists as PR consultants is not really new. Get a fulltime NY Times staffer to serve as a consultant, and now you've got something innovative (if not desirable). But those on the margins have been making a living wearing different hats for a long time.

Anyway, it turns out Abrams as either sparked a debate or just been early to the trend. Via Ragan's daily email blast, here are some links that also relate to this emerging trend:

• Reason magazine: Will PR pros take the baton of investigative reporting?


• TechNewsWorld: The 21st Century Journalist: PR by Day, Reporter by Night?


• Society of Business Editors and Writers: Keeping it Honest in a Freelance World

Dan Abrams Update: My "Journalists" Are Really Freelancers And the Like

As previously discussed here, I've been quite skeptical about whether MSNBC's Dan Abrams had a viable business plan when he created his Abrams Research, a new PR shop that claims to use working journalists as corporate communications consultants.

Dan is speaking this morning at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit, so I've got some fresh insights into his "secret sauce."

First off, his team: while Abrams says he has a database of 2,500 journalists willing to work on one of his projects, Abrams says that he has only used a tiny fraction of those, and they were people he and his colleague, Rachel Sklar, have recruited.

And they're not full-time working journalists, naturally -- they are freelancers and others on the margins and gray areas between PR and media. This is actually not terribly new -- I've known people who straddle the line for years.

My other question was clients -- who has actually stepped up to take his counsel? Abrams admits that so far, he has gotten litigation crisis work, which makes sense, since he is a trained lawyer. Abrams joked that as a lawyer, journalist and PR person, he may be a "walking, breathing axis of evil."

Aside from these nuggets, I would say that Abrams came across as a newbie communications professional who has some basic insights into business communications (e.g., "you've got to a build a tunnel of trust before the water can flow through it."). Clearly, with his name recognition, he is getting and is going to get clients, but time will tell if he's really got anything novel to offer.

Interesting Peek At What Real "New Media" Might Look Like

You can call things like Facebook and Twitter "social media" all you want, and they are certainly an interesting new societal development, but they aren't professional media. There will always be professional intermediaries, storytellers if you will, who will seek to get paid to tell you what's going on in our world.

Will the media continue to look like the New York Times or local TV news? Obviously not. But what will it look like? I don't think we've seen a proven example of the future yet. A lot of "new media" looks to me to be either old media in new online clothes (most if not all MSM media web sites) or unproven business models that may be here today but will not necessarily be here tomorrow. We've already seen a slew of these would-be new media outlets, such as Citysearch, Yahoo Finance and others, and they've all gone bust.

But I was very intrigued reading about the site EveryBlock in the good 'ol New York Times (here's the online link to their story), in a story about "hyper-local" web sites. I read the story with some skepticism because this isn't the first time this idea has been tried. But what's different about Every Block is that it isn't trying to put reporters on the street in neighborhoods to report on the meeting at the library. Instead, it's harnessing the power of the web to gather information that's geographically tagged, such as police reports and other government information, restaurant reviews, photos, and blogs. THIS strikes me as a plausible new media model, particularly if they can get a little traction, figure out some decent revenue streams, and hire a few young reporters to add some bulk to the content.

Every Block is funded in part by a private foundation, and this is another trend that bears watching. Private foundations are starting to step up to fund journalism, and it makes perfect sense. No one ever said that department store ads and classifieds were the God-given funding sources for investigative journalism, though they were for more than half a century. That's over now. But if journalists want to investigate, and rich people want to pay them to, that may be how it gets done in the coming years. And foundations may have to fund sites like EveryBlock until they figure out how to survive.

This post is mainly about the media, not PR, but here's the PR lesson du jour: where there are professional storytellers, there's a need for professional media relations people to help them, provide information, and represent their client or company's interest.

UC San Diego PR Nightmare!

It's that time of year again, as parents and high school seniors anxiously await the 'fat' or 'thin' envelopes from the colleges of their choice. Only this year and for some time, colleges have also sent out emails announcing the news.

That's what UC San Diego did this week -- except they sent the "you're accepted" email to all 47,000 people who applied -- not just the 17,000 who were accepted! Oops!

“It was one of the greatest moments in my life and then, boom, it was one of the lowest,” said Arya Shamuilian. “UCSD was my first-choice university.”

UCSD apparently recognized the mistake immediately and sent out a correction and apology. Then, the admissions office stayed in late to take angry phone calls.

One of the hallmarks of a crisis is that it becomes public and requires a public response. After all, we all face fire drills every day in our jobs. They only become crises when our problems become big and widely known.

In this case, it would seem that UCSD did a pretty good job. They quickly issued a follow-up email, they made themselves personally available, and they posted everything on the web.

This last part is the learning of the day. Since we all have access to web search, it's crazy to hide behind false walls trying to avoid sharing information under circumstances like these. People will find the stuff anyway, and you'll look extra bad in the process.

So I give UCSD an A for how they handled this crisis.

The Online-Only SeattlePI.com Will Be a Media Relations Challenge

Take a moment and note that this is a landmark day in American journalism, and by extension, American public relations. A major American metropolitan newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has completely dropped its print edition and gone online only.

It's hard to imagine this not being the first of a trend, and perhaps even the beginning of the end of big-city print newspapers. Their old business model is gone forever -- print newspapers will never again be chock-full of classified ads or display advertising from downtown department stores. Make no mistake, these were the two big revenue streams of metropolitan newspapers, and they're gone for good. Meanwhile, these once proud and profitable newspaper franchises have been incredibly slow to adapt to the opportunities of the Internet, exposing the weakness and passivity of their management teams. As much as I am a child and creation of big-city journalism, I won't shed a tear as these dinosaurs vanish or morph into fossil fuels (to stretch the metaphor to its breaking point). They had it coming.

I've moved on, way on, from my days as a big-city journalist, and now I'm a media relations consultant. And in that role, it's my job to look at developments like these and tell you what it means for our profession. Here are my thoughts:

1. As newspapers downsize, shrink, die or go online only, it means absolutely one bad thing for us: fewer people to pitch, less space to generate high-quality media placements. Our jobs get tougher.

2. The old way of doing PR, spraying press releases out to a captive media audience, takes another mortal blow. Fewer mainstream journos means fewer targets for this outdated style of media relations.

3. Yet again, this evolution creates an opportunity for talented and creative PR people. Fewer resources on the media side means they need us more. That isn't going to make the media more receptive to non-news puff pitches -- it means that if you can develop and produce real media-friendly information full of facts and figures, anecdotes and examples, and real-world emotions, you're more likely to find a media audience.

4. We're all going to have to get better at working with online-only, jack-of-all-trades journalists. As SeattlePI.com "executive producer" Michelle Nicolosi wrote today about their team, "We don't have reporters, editors or producers—everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page." Do you know how to work with this new breed of journalist? If not, you better find out soon. Your job in PR depends on it.

If your corporate web site looks credible, media sites will link to it

Time and again, the biggest complaint from journalists trying to do company research on the web is corporate web sites are hard to navigate and hard to use. "If they're not usable, we'll just go to Google," says Dan Gaines, managing editor of LATimes.com.

But a good credible corporate site? Gaines says that more and more, LATimes.com and other media sites will link directly to your site if you've got relevant information for their users.

Take that as golden advice. And for more such advice, tune in next Tuesday, March 3, at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar I will be moderating with Gaines, and Ibrey Woodall, Marketing Communications Director of TEKgroup International, a purveyor of corporate newsrooms. You can sign up for the webinar here.

This free 60-minute webinar for PR professionals will explore and analyze the results of the latest Bulldog Reporter/TEKgroup International survey of journalist usage of the Internet and other resources to research, follow and report news and features material.

More than 2,000 journalists participated in the survey, which covered how journalists use news sites, social networks, email and online newsrooms to research the news.

The Great Thing About Twitter: You Can Lurk Before You Leap

One thing to understand about Twitter: you can follow someone without their permission, unless they have set their profile so that they have to approve you [which is rarely the case].

This means that you can get someone's Twitter handle, find them on Twitter and click "follow" and if it doesn't give you the privacy notice, you're following them and what they have to say in 140 characters or less.

For instance, check out Anderson Cooper's Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/andersoncooper -- he's got 6173 followers, but he's only following 7 people. Because in order to have a relationship on Twitter, the other person has to follow you back.

This is in response to Peter Himler's otherwise very good post on Twitter, where you can find more links to journos on Twitter that you can follow and maybe have a Twitter relationship with.

This Week on Catching Flack

I've decided that it's dumb to just let 21st Century Media Relations wither while I write a blog over on BNET.com. On the other hand, my deal with them is that I'll mostly blog over there instead of here. So what to do? How about a weekly digest of what I'm talking about over on BNET?

Here's a summary of last week's posts:

• Can You Put Limits on Social Media Coverage: The NCAA recently issued rigid and arguably laughable guidelines about exactly how much 'credentialed' media could blog from an NCAA game. I explored the subject of whether it is possible or even wise to place such limits.


• Deloitte & Touche's annual "State of the Media Democracy" report: I blogged about it.


• Who and What to Watch in 2008: A review of PRWeek's predictions of who the movers and shakers will be in PR in 2008.


• Crisis Expert's Secrets of Success: A look at uber-crisis-expert Sam Singer's methods, prompted by a front page story about him in the San Francisco Chronicle. He's the PR man for the San Francisco Zoo in the tiger attack case.

Newspapers Are Still A $60 Billion-a-Year Industry

Great piece this morning on CNN.com/Fortune about the current state of the newspaper industry. Despite all the bad headlines, reports Richard Siklos, newspapers are still generating $60 billion in sales and still generating "decent profits." Yes, public stock investors are unhappy with the performance of newspaper stock prices, but that's another issue. And for sure, the major mainstream newspaper industry has done a terrible job adapting to the changing media landscape.

But Siklos' point, and one that I've made here many a time, is that newspapers are still a major medium that is going to evolve, not dry up and blow away. Savvy PR pros simply can't afford to either ignore or dismiss newspapers in favor of online communications.

Siklos mentions a few counter-trends that support the evolution-not-extinction theory, including the rise of themed special-interest magazines like the New York Times' "T" style mag. I would add a few other things I see:

• Healthy newspapers in fast-growing markets such as Las Vegas


• Tons of classified shoppers and other free media, such as hyper-local tabs


• Newspapers slowly adding social media features to their sites (example: the Springsteen section of NJ.com, an aggregate site for 14 New Jersey newspapers)

Bonus for PR pros: all of these are pitchable. They may be different journalists but they are still working journalists. So as they evolve, we need to as well.