What do journalists do? They seek stories from well-protected sources, add the masala to it and bingo! But ever since PR came into the scene, that’s couple of decades back, it has become a filter between the news and the journalists. No longer journalists get news in the raw form, but rather now it is polished and presented gift-wrapped with all the pampering that any media person could get in a lifetime. Many journalists are ruffled by this new profession and want to go collecting news the old way. In fact, many have question the PR profession innumerable times in the best way and in the best platform they could.

Leaving aside this grumpy section of the media, everybody else seem to have embraced PR. The role of Public Relations today is undeniable. What to do? It is a cut throat competition in the market place. From small traders, multi-national corporates, NGOs, politicians, political parties, sportspersons, filmstars, yoga experts, sadhus and religious leaders, criminals, mafias, institutes, universities, schools, stockbrokers, associations, clubs, shops, Prime Ministers, Presidents, governments, States, nations, countries, world bodies, council of countries- the list is increasing day by day. Even the local halwai shop lalaji or the neighborhood beauty parlor auntiji knows what PR can do for his shop.

The point is PR has indeed become a filter to raw news, and this filter is becoming more and more powerful and bigger day by day. Many journalists today have begun to realize that they have to work in sync with PR to get the best information from a news source. If he or she denies PR, some other journalist will get tomorrow’s exclusive news item. It is slowly happening.

But again the new challenges posed by all these developments are enormous for the PR profession and the professionals. On one hand, competition is increasing. So there will be more competition to catch the worthy journalist. What defines a good news item today will become just sales literature stuff tomorrow, unfit for the editorial space. So PR people have to keep on redefining news. PR has to seek more and more news within his organization or within his immediate surroundings to seek for competitive news items. In turn, he will become more and more of exactly what they used to mention in PR schools- that a PR person is the journalist of journalists.

On the other hand for journalists, there will be fewer and fewer raw news sources. No longer will they have the exclusive mobile number of a MNC CEO, as more and more corporates realize it is better to route all media queries through his PR department. What PR people do to pitch to journalists today, journalists will do that to PR people tomorrow. The trend will be reversed.

It is already starting. See the PR departments or PR agencies of big MNCs today. Their job is not to get maximum amount of positive media publicity, but rather control jounalists’ expectations, politely ward off all media queries and do stories only when it matters.

But it is not to say that journalism will not grow on its own. There are newer avenues today, and journalism is evolving on its own merits.

Nevertheless, the role of PR in journalism cannot be denied. What jounalists used to do to get information yesterday, they no longer can deny that they need to do the same today. What they are doing today, they wouldn’t need to do it tomorrow. What we know of journalism today would not exist anymore tomorrow.

(P.S. The objective of write-up is not to offend anybody but present alternate thinkings of a layman into the PR profession from the normally accepted speeches of PR gurus. People are welcomed to criticize and present their views. And if any friends from the media are reading this, I just have one thing to say. We are like cats and dogs. We may scratch and bark against each other, but ultimately we have to live in the same household.)

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