DO WE STILL NEED JOURNALISTS IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Hola amigos,
Public relations practitioners have been relying on
journalists to publish their materials for decades now, weather a news release
will be published or not, it was only up to the journalists to decide, but
social media has changed that completely, nowadays public relations
practitioners don’t even have to go through journalists to print their
materials, this is all thanks to the power of social media.
Social media has come through for public relations
practitioners because now public relations practitioners can publish whatever
material they choose to publish, at any time they wish to do so, for instance
nowadays we have blogs, facebook, twitter, instagram, google+, pininterest etc whatever
message that the public relations practitioner wants to put out, he/she can
just tweet the message or put it on facebook.
This works better for the public relations practitioner because
social media is instant, one click and your post is published to the world and
social media has a wider range of audience, compared to publications of
journalists, facebook has just over one billion users across the world and journalist’s publications are only
limited to people living in the country or region of those journalists whilst
social media has the power to reach hundreds of millions of people within
minutes, another advantage for the public relations practitioner is that the
message that he/she is conveying reaches the eyes and ears of millions and
millions of people, the same can’t be said about journalist’s publications because
they only reach thousands of readers.
Social media is cheaper to use for advertising compared
to the rates that journalists charge, it is extremely expensive to advertise on
publications of journalists like newspaper or magazine or television because
one has to pay for the space that their advert takes up in the newspaper or
magazine of television, whilst on social media all that needs to be paid for is
the design of the advert because posting content is free and the best thing
about social media is that public relations practitioners can actually monitor how many people view or read their content and they also get feedback by means
of likes and comments on their posts.
Source
Therefore public
relations practitioners no longer need the services of journalists to help them
to perform their tasks, because journalist’s publications are expensive to use
as a medium of communication and their publications reach a limited audience,
thanks to social media public relations practitioners don’t have to go through
journalists in order for them to publish content.
