PR blogging to affect newspapers?

Posted by John Burke on March 9, 2006 at 10:19 AM

Public relations firms have discovered the joys of blogging, and could soon stop feeding their message to newspaper reporters, staples of PR distribution. Not only has it been reveled that WalMart is straying from newspapers and employing bloggers to spread the good corporate word, but the buzz at America's PR Week's annual awards just held in New York was all about blogging.

CEO of the PR firm that bears his name, Richard W. Edelman had some harsh words for newspapers: "It used to be I would schmooze you and I was your flack. Today, if we want to get a message into the public’s conversation, we just make a post on a blog. If The Wall Street Journal goes after a client, we don’t have to accept that anymore. Let’s post the documents we gave The Journal; let’s show the interviews the newspaper decided not to show. You’re not God anymore"

In a similar manner that PR firms are migrating to blogging, newspaper journalists, in the face of shrinking newsrooms and poor pay, are moving over to "the dark side," as one PR executive described her trade.

PR blogging is just adding fuel to the media shift fire creeping up the foundations of the newspaper establishment. Apart from circulation dives and newsroom job losses, stock pages are being eliminated, papers are dropping daily editions, and up-to-the-minute Internet news reading increases but without the necessary revenue substitution. How are newspapers to regain their waning clout?

Source: New York Observer (additional information at This is not a Blog)

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