Public Relations Firms Have Become The New News Wires

The destruction of newsrooms throughout this country has been well documented. Other than a handful of news organizations, regional and local dailies and weeklies have seen their staffs reduced to mere skeletons, local radio is mostly rip and read, or network feed at best, and television news is increasingly discharged by one-man crews. That’s the good news!

Trade media and ethnic media has generally been hit harder. Trade editors and reporters, once the thought-leaders and brain trusts for industries are retiring or being phased out due to shrinking advertising, circulation and costly salaries. The ethnic media has not been spared this grim fate. I know of at least a dozen well respected ethnic news outlets that have gone out of business or been reduced to small staffs just trying to keep up with posting to their websites in order to keep afloat.

This has created a new and energized opportunity for public relations firms. We have long been defined by our contacts in the media as a news agency. Because we employ former journalists and issue press releases that are real news, most of our media contacts are able to take our press releases and with little to no editing and maybe a tweak of a headline, can post and print our work. We are not alone as there are other good public relations practitioners who follow the same practices. Like the Associated Press and Reuters, we feed the media the core news they need to inform their readers and viewers.  

Our numbers show the effectiveness of this work. Last month for one client alone, our team generated nearly 5 billion media impressions! One press release easily generates more than 200 media pickups. The numbers go on and on.

Hence, the importance of what we do is to  fill a void in newsrooms around this country. If we ply our trade with integrity, our client materials are eagerly awaited and picked up. Our clients benefit –and so too does the media and their readers and viewers.