Journal Review 24: Brave New World of Public Relation

by Nur Sukainah Mansor

This journal is about the changes of Public Relation practice since World Ward II until now. There’s changes from aspect such as publics with which practitioners communicate, internal and external communication channel happened, sources from which publics obtain information, results sought by clients, employer and practitioners and way in which those result are measured. 

The magnitude of these changes happened also is big and we can see the vocabulary changes occurred in concert with socioeconomic, demographic and technological changes that shaped the development of public relations practice. Even the media such as newspaper, radio and even television has been affected by these changes. 

Even during this time, publicity was the primary focus of public relations. Practitioner prepared and distributes news releases to news outlets at a pace that today would at best be considered lethargic. Through much of 1960s, public relation followed an information paradigm. The traditionally secretive ways of most organizations were supplanted by a new philosophy of openness.

Deterioration in the quality of public education however spawned growing numbers of functional illiterates and continues to contribute to progressive deterioration in mass media audiences. Other factors driving the process include growing numbers of new media spawned by emerging technologies, fragmentation of audiences across new and traditional media and fundamental shift from supply-push to demand-pull in the world of information.

The latter factor is especially significant in that it represents a quantum change in the ways individuals obtain information. Traditional mass media have gathered and packaged information and offered it for sale to consumers (supply-push). Today information consumers use the Internet, computer databases, and information supplies such as Google and Yahoo to obtain information as needed. We can see now that demand-pull has become the dominant form of information acquisition.

Especially in this technologies world where everything is needed as it is, one need to have skill in using the gadget in order to practice as  apublic relation practitioner more efficiently. We can see these happened with the  creation of new media press releases and much more.

source: E W Brody, Public Relations Quarterly, 2005