The press release is dead. The media is dying. It’s beginning to feel like we work for the industry that cried wolf.
While I am by no means saying PR pros shouldn’t be concerned about and keenly aware of the intricacies of the media’s evolution, it’s time we stopped panicking and took a look at the facts. Or more importantly, a look at the newspaper industry’s proposed solution—a new and improved online product. Can it work? Is it a universal solution?
Before I started my business, I thought PR was about getting press. Period. A bunch of my friends are entrepreneurs, and they hire PR agencies to convince journalists and bloggers to write about them, TV shows to feature them, and twitterers to tweet about them. Some of these friends have entirely separate crews to handle their publicity (but isn’t that part of the whole PR thing?). So I sat down and asked some of my most successful small-biz owner friends what they pay for these services. And I about died. Since I’m running a start-up, my PR budget is exactly zero. As I mentioned in my first post, it was about then I decided I’d do this PR thing myself.
After I was “laid-off” from the job that never was, I dove right into my search for a new position. Begrudgingly, of course, since I hadn’t thought I would need to do one in the first place. I was surprisingly optimistic about it, thinking that my experience would help get me a job relatively fast. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After countless interviews and nothing but unexpected disappointments, I came to my senses. As confident as I was in my potential to be an awesome entry-level candidate, I was literally competing for jobs with every other person my age who had graduated with a degree in PR (okay, my degree is in Communications, but that’s besides the point) and lived in the tri-state area. How was I going to make myself stand out and shine?