Saturday, 28 February 2015

SO LONG, JOURNALISTS

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.


stack of newspapers
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.
The rise of PR

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.

7 comments:

  1. oh, no Journalists are important despite the fact that there is social media I understand when you speak about PRPs dont have to go through journalists to get their News release published but there are other organisations which a closed systerms they might not even use social media to convey their message but rely on the Journalist to do so what about them?? and some people dont know how to use social media e.g. a church organisation not everyone lives in the world of technology some people are still stuck to the old way of doing things

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  2. oh, no Journalists are important despite the fact that there is social media I understand when you speak about PRPs dont have to go through journalists to get their News release published but there are other organisations which a closed systerms they might not even use social media to convey their message but rely on the Journalist to do so what about them?? and some people dont know how to use social media e.g. a church organisation not everyone lives in the world of technology some people are still stuck to the old way of doing things

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Excellent point but keep in mind that the demand for journalists is decreasing more by the day, those who cannot use technology, they out source those skills by hiring a PR agency to run their social network accounts or campaigns.

      Delete
    2. Excellent point but keep in mind that the demand for journalists is decreasing more by the day, those who cannot use technology, they out source those skills by hiring a PR agency to run their social network accounts or campaigns.

      Delete
  3. we can not rely on digital media that much because some people can feed you wrong information. nice article brother

    ReplyDelete
  4. I disagree with you because digital media has never disappointed us, in fact its been proven that we can actually rely on it, because if someone does feed us the wrong information, its easy for us to detect that.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I disagree with you because digital media has never disappointed us, in fact its been proven that we can actually rely on it, because if someone does feed us the wrong information, its easy for us to detect that.

    ReplyDelete