As newsrooms disappear… IPR 536

Inside PR

We have our own news to break on this week’s Inside PR. Gini and Martin are going to be working together. Martin has joined the Spin Sucks team. Gini has been building Spin Sucks as a community for a decade – and growth has reached the point in which she needs help leading the content team. Enter Martin. Gini and Martin talk about the Spin Sucks editorial approach, in which Joe hears some traits of Jay Rosen’s community-interest-driven alternative model for journalism. We also talk about the role of the Spin Sucks Slack community.

We also talk about the acceleration of job losses in journalism. In one way, it might be like that old saying that, “I went broke very slowly for a long time, and then very quickly very suddenly.” So, there’s no doubt that the journalism job losses this year have been massive. But even more remarkable is where most of those losses have been this year — in digital media. Digital media, which only a couple years ago many investors and entrepreneurs were betting on as the platform that would replace traditional media. Clearly, online journalism has proven no less immune to the hoovering of advertising support by Google and Facebook. So, in 2019, we’re still waiting for the new model that will save journalism as we know it.

And talking about PR in a world of disappearing and shrinking newsrooms, Martin and Gini argue that PR pros must stay true to the core value of relationships while making the search for the new influencers and news brokers with whom they must establish working relationships.

Having said that, are we in a world in which we are playing for time. Do we need to find a new core to PR to replace the central role that media relations once played. At one time, we thought it would be social media. But that has fragmented. And it seems that the pace of change is accelerating. So, we continue the search for the next key leverage point.

Linkworthy

• More than 2,300 people lost their jobs in a media landslide so far this year, Benjamin Goggin
• 2009: The internet is killing (print) journalism; 2019: The internet is killing (internet) journalism, Jeff Israely
• NYU’s Jay Rosen says 2020’s political journalism will be even worse than 2016’s, Eric Scott Johnson

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Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer. Inside PR is produced by Joseph Thornley.

As newsrooms disappear… by Joseph Thornley, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.