Public Relations in the Age of Fake News
In the era of fake news and a tsunami of content, it is more important than ever to have third-party endorsement, but paid content is having the effect of making some more educated consumers less trusting of media and more wary of what is real news. Graham Medcalf takes a look.
When the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) conducted some research in 2018, a concerning feedback was that a high proportion of both in-house and agency practitioners believed that many in their own organisations, in the case of the former, and agency clients, in the case of the latter, didn’t understand what PR was all about.
“There is a perception that PR is media relations,” says PRINZ CEO Elaine Koller. “There is not an appreciation of the breadth of what PR practitioners do.”
For the record, the list is a long one, and in order of time spent, the most frequent activities include: content creation, media relations, strategic planning, digital and social media management, content curation, crises and reputation management, business planning and objective setting, measurement and evaluation, influencer relations, internal communications, branding, event management and more.
Marketers don’t necessarily come into contact with some of the key specialisations of the PR industry and a focus on marcomms is often a misleading bias for this audience in their perceptions of the practice.
It is not well known that 70 percent of PRINZ members work in-house in a combination of corporate, public sector and not-for-profit organisations, only 20 percent practice within PR agencies and about 10 percent are self-employed. This breakdown can, however, be misleading as only 1,400 of an estimated 10,000 people working in some guise categorised as PR are PRINZ members. Although, in 2018, more than 2,500 attendees engaged in PRINZ events and professional development activities, meaning non-members also tend to take advantage of the services offered by the industry body.
In an age of fake news, there