OPEN

PR agencies  risk being left behind insist on championing a medium in decline as their number one focus…

Two articles in today’s Media Guardian provide further evidence of the woes of the UK newspaper industry, which should also sound warning bells in PR agencies across the land.

ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations) figures also point to a "systemic decline" in the circulations and advertising revenues of regional newspapers.

Meanwhile, Kim Fletcher finds some comfort in a survey from British Journalism Review. What’s more interesting than the figures is Kim’s accounts of the mentality of those in the newspaper business today, bluffly denying problems in public while simultaneously talking about "managing decline".

The truth is that newspapers are in slow decline but the smartest ones (the Guardian chief among them) are becoming formidable online properties in their own right, as discussed on Open last week.

The problems for newspapers are two-fold: fewer people reading them each year and an even faster exodus of advertising budgets to online and other marketing disciplines.

What does this mean for PR? Working with print media has been the chief focus for PR campaigns traditionally and still is in many cases. That’s why we used to call ourselves press officers.

PR has been slow to adopt meaningful evaluation methods, but even weaker has been the industry’s investment in research and analysis at the start of campaigns. As a result some agencies will risk being left behind if they are still championing the value of a main focus, sometimes to an exclusive one, on the value of a medium in decline.

I see a lot of debate in the blogging PR community about the value of press releases – some more attention on the planning (advertising got this right two decades ago) of campaigns rather than tactics would be a good idea at this point.

technorati tags: newspapers, UK_media, circulation, Guardian, PR