Australian media is haemorrhaging. Multitudes of Fairfax’s most conscience-driven and insightful journalists gone. 50 odd journos from The West Australian gone or going. Where will it stop? But where one story ends, another begins. The reduction in skilled journalists and the concomitant reduction in time remaining editorial staff have, places a heavier responsibility than ever before on public relations professionals operating in a manner serving not just the interests of their employer(s), but also of their employer’s stakeholders and, by extension, society as a whole.

The PR industry globally is undergoing one of its biggest changes since social media boomed across the web – it’s called content strategy and it’s rocketing through the traditional corridors of marketing and PR.

In an ‘information obesity’ world, what can public relations practitioners do or say to cut through the online corporate corpulence and still add ‘meat’ with nutritional value? Two answers are that we need to ‘re-calorie-brate’ our focus and activities and add internal journalist and search engine optimization (SEO) expert calisthenics into the working skill set.

Five critical topics that public relations and marketing communicators need to know about and be adept at leveraging are content marketing, optimising online real estate for search, the value of 3RD party brand advocates, the subtleties of media relations and evaluation and measurement. This post touches on all five, referring you to some excellent PR and marketing bloggers who have recently explored these issues.

When answering the question, ‘why ex-journalists should not be ‘parachuted’ into the head of the organisational public relations function’, most responses were mainly defensive and could not tear themselves away from an obsession with media relations.

Ex-journalists are not qualified and do not have the relevant experience to be ‘parachuted’ into the head of the organisational public relations function. When this occurs, “it is a disaster waiting to happen”.

Ex-journalists should not be ‘parachuted’ into the head of the organisational public relations function. Discussions on this topic in a few LinkedIn groups. The responses were mainly defensive in character and most could not tear themselves away from a seeming obsession with media relations.

In the ever-clichéd – and oh-so-simplistic – battle between the good and evil of public relations and journalism, it is journalism that is more often the devil incarnate.