16 Feb If Twitter Breaks the News, Where Does That Leave PR?
It’s no great secret that the social web is impacting the PR industry. You’d have had to have lived on the moon not to know that (although I suspect that given astronauts can now tweet from the International Space Station, even the moon may not be far enough to escape news and trends from planet Earth). But I think there’s more to it than simply evolving skill sets or the changing tools of the job. The decline of newspapers and the way that news now spreads online within minutes of an event occurring means that PR’s entire raison d’etre is altering.
Back in December , FIFA announced the host countries for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup Finals. The event was broadcast live on TV and radio across the globe. While I sat at my desk in the office, I tuned in to BBC radio to listen to the announcement through my PC. And then, about 20 minutes before the official declaration even took place, news started to spread through Twitter that England had failed in their bid to land the world’s biggest sporting event and that Russia and Qatar would host the competitions. I took these rumours with a pinch of salt at the time but, low and behold, they turned out to be spot on. What this proves is that Twitter doesn’t report the news: Twitter IS the news.
And if Twitter breaks news before any other source anywhere, where does that leave online news sites and, even worse, newspapers? It’s no wonder that paper circulations are in decline: at one time the morning papers broke the news, then TV broke the news but papers followed it up pretty closely. Now, however, Twitter breaks the news before it even IS news – papers seem positively prehistoric when they report it 24 hours later.
As for PR, our job used to be to provide newspapers, magazines and broadcast media with stories; facts and comments about client projects that managed or created reputation and demand. But is our job now to feed Twitter? Do we try to create news ‘breaks’ through seeding news to Twitter sources and journalists? Is that the way to create a real buzz? What do you think?
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