An important question this morning….

How is the your public relations changing to keep apace with  the evolution of mainstream news making?

Are you still doing the the time-honored media relations, in which you propose stories, arrange interviews with clients and third party experts? Or are you pointing mainstream media to important posts by bloggers or to content posted by companies that is high quality and easily accessed (such as video).

We  have been inviting bloggers and digital media content creators to help create buzz around our client’s products and services  for over three years now. The results, as in our recent Brian Mac Farlane band launch of The Resurrection, speak for themselves: viral content is built, digital photos spread, consumer generated content creates in real time an immediacy and  authencity. We then use the content to feed a regional and international media audience. 

This is the new media eco-system.

I stumbled across an amazing story that further proves the point.

In this story a PR firm representing a diabetes drug is having difficulty getting mainstream media to cover the drug and its implications. The Account Executive  later comes across an interesting blog  attracting 30,000 unique visitors per month that is written by a Type One Diabetes patient. They also see that  the blogger wrote a letter to Steve Jobs which sparked the design of a next generation diabetes measurement gadget so they offer the blogger an interview with the doctor running an important clinical trial with a human interest angle with a few of the patients who have benefited. 

She posts a great story and soon after the Wall Street Journal picks it up for the mainstream news. Next comes the New York Times and the Boston Globe. All this from a  PR firm mining blogsphere.

We are operating in a whole new media world. Consumers are now part of new media and PR and old media  can tap into the vox populi for direction to their stories.  

If old media brands, like the Trinidad Guardian, have already begun  their restructure. 

My question is, as a PR practitioner, have you?