With the second post in his PR is dying series Tom Foremski is saying that the agency world has a future as bright as Larry Fortensky’s.
To refresh your memory, when we last checked in with Tom he was questioning why PR agencies are thriving while the media is dying. Now for some reason he’s at it again.
This time Tom maintains that today’s PR agencies will be unwilling to abandon their current business models to adapt to the new environment. This, he says, will give rise to all kinds of new communications firms. In the immortal words of Bill and Ted, “bogus, dude.”
The problem here is that Tom’s underlying principle is STILL wrong. The media isn’t dying, it’s morphing. Thanks to the weight of the Long Tail, the media ecosystem has shifted. There are fewer big media dinosaurs roaming the Earth and a lot more bloggers and stand-alone journalists who operate like quick salamanders. The total media population is actually increasing, not decreasing.
As Richard Edelman showed us earlier today, the public relations world is adapting to this new world, just as the media has. It’s all about evolution. Survival of the fittest. As the media evolves to include the citizen journalists in the reporting process, so will PR adapt to do the same. The end game is we are far from dead. We’re staying alive!
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
