The Media Landscape Is Changing. What Does That Mean For PR?
Welcome To The People founder Christian Cerisola takes a dive into two important announcements affecting the media landscape this week.
On the same day that Reach announced another 160 editorial job cuts, a former Reach editor in the North East was telling a packed room about his new attempt to build an independent news business.
Another day, another announcement from Reach that they’re cutting more editorial staff. A net 160 editorial jobs to go in its latest round of cuts and with it the closure, among others, of the KentLive and AberdeenLive websites.
Reach runs hundreds of titles in UK media, from nationals like The Mirror, The Express and the Daily Star, to big city regionals like Manchester Evening News, Newcastle Chronicle and Strangely, this comes just a couple of months after Reach declared it would be much more about quality over quantity
On the same day as Reach’s jobs cut announcement, a former Reach editor in the North East, Brian Aitken unveils the launch of his new, independent news platform in The Source.
Brian has valiantly pursued his determination to offer a viable news alternative from Newcastle for some time. He’ll likely be the first to admit he struggled to gain traction with his original launch, The QT, in early 2024. It toiled to gain sufficient paid subscribers and evolved into Eyes & Ears, a frequent free news round up mailed to interested free subscribers.
The Source relies on paid subscriptions, but has won important, high profile backing from TV celebrity, journalist and champion of the North East, Steph McGovern as well as a number of high profile senior editors. The proof will now be in the pudding.
The media landscape has become hugely fractured and disparate. Traditional titles are no longer competing with those in their class. It’s no longer The Times or The Telegraph, or The Mirror vrs The Sun. The Source can point at the likes of The Mill in Manchester and London Centric in the capital as success stories for deep dive journalism on stories that carry true meaning for subscribers.
In addition, citizen journalists, much of them laughably poor and heavily swayed by political allegiance, creators and influencers are trampling all over traditional media’s playground and eating into a once-loyal audience.
Both The Source and Reach’s own titles have to consider how to tackle this. Claiming political neutrality is admirable, but our distorted human nature in recent times, mostly accelerated by social media algorithms, means those who enjoy waving flags from lampposts will happily find, and stay with, the media source that most represents them.
Quality, trusted independent journalism, those that hold power to account, is probably more important than ever. Some time ago Reach decided to compete with those new entrants above, producing clickbait-laden headlines and pushing regional news that, well, wasn’t regional in the hunt for commercially-driven eyeballs.
It clearly hasn’t worked. They publicly switched tack in July when they explained their new approach would be quality over quantity.
So why is all this important through a public relation lens? Let me revert you to an excerpt from the PRCA’s new definition of PR it released early this year:
“Public relations (PR) is the strategic management discipline which enhances reputation, improves brand value, builds culture and enables organisations and individuals to achieve and maintain legitimacy with stakeholders and the public.”
It’s our job to enhance the reputation of our clients, improve its brand values and legitimacy in the eyes of its stakeholders and its audience. Media relations is just one of the myriad ways we deploy that strategy now.
Identifying a client’s potential audience, and understanding where that audience then seeks information and influence has undoubtedly become harder.
Traditional titles were enormously powerful in that regard. Their audiences trusted them implicitly. It’s ironic that the places we now seek information and understanding, whether that be through Google search or a rapidly growing discovery of the power of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, are showing an enormous reliance on these very same traditional media titles to return the most trusted information.
There’s a route back for traditional media titles, but they have to rediscover what made their audience believe in them and trust them in the first place, because you fear it may otherwise be only a matter of time before the AI overlords stop trusting them too.
