PR 1.5 and the end of journalist competition?

One of the many things I love about Twitter is the ability to share ideas and thoughts about marketing with people from literally all over the world.  It’s great to hear different points of view from marketing vets to those still in school.

One such moment came the other day in the form of a Twitter reply from @tyfn or as he is known to his friends, Phillip Jeffrey from Vancouver.  Phillip posted “@jonnew The future of news may be in collaborative efforts (e.g. pooled resources with same photographer to cover an event).”

He then pointed me to this recent article in this AP story (somewhat ironic) on the Editor and Publisher website, detailing stories of content sharing that I had heard of before.  For example, the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun plan to share content on Maryland-related coverage.  The Dallas and Fort Worth papers plan to trade some sports coverage (they still will battle over the Cowboys, however) and so on.

This on the heels of WUSA-TV in Washington DC announcing a move to have reporters shoot their own video.  In my day in TV news, this was called one-man-banding and while the equipment now is much lighter, I’m sure the reporters are not happy about it.

These are just some of the ripple effects the bad economy has had on journalism, that coupled with flat out job cuts and outlet closings provide an interesting set of issues for PR folks both 1.0 and 2.0.

On the 1.0 side, we will mourn the days of more reporters, more competition, more traditional folks to pitch to, etc.  Added to that is the lack of time reporters can now spend on your pitch.  Recently we have also seen a dramatic increase in the amount of work reporters expect PR people to do for them relying on PR people more than more to provide subjects around which the reporter can localize or personalize the story.  The bottom line:  Less reporters, with less time, relying more on PR people, with less of an ultimate payoff for the organization or client because of lack of space.

On the 2.0 side, we expect those folks to resurface online and in blogs.  My guess though is that this group will inherit some of the issues there traditional brothers and sisters are saddled with, as PR folks migrate over to this group as well.

Both sides will also be mourning the lack of competition at least for the time being for as those in the 2.0 camp will argue that there will be plenty of media to cover stories online.  The truth is in the short term they will lack the money and manpower it takes to cover the stories in the same manner that their traditional counterparts in the past.

As another one of my Twitter friends, John Sternal @sternalpr points out, it is unreasonable to expect social marketing platforms like Twitter to provide the depth that traditional media does.  While Twitter broke the recent “Miracle on the Hudson” since one of the people on the plane sent a tweet seconds after the landing, Twitter, at least as currently configured will not be able to write a profile or an in-depth stories about it in 140 characters.  It can only provide a link to one somewhere else.

I have no immediate answer for PR folks in either camp, or for those like me who are somewhere in the middle.  It is something we’ll keep tabs on together as the dust settles.

For now, I mourn the beginning of the end of media competition as we knew it.