Media Relations

Media Relations, the new name that everyone associates with the “Public Relations”. Media Relations is one of the most critical areas in the field of corporate communication. Media is both a constituency as well as a conduit through which investors, suppliers, retailers, and consumers receive information about and develop images of company. The media’s role as disseminator of information to a firm’s key constituencies has gained increasing importance over the years.

The main goals of the media relations are to create, maintain, and protect the organization’s reputation, to enhance its prestige, and to present a favorable image. Media relation involves product, public, employee, financial, community, government and political relations, consumer education, and crisis communication. It deals with issues rather than specifically with products or services. It involves two-way communication between an organization and its public. Moreover, media relation requires listening to the constituencies on which an organization depends and then it analyzes and understands the attitudes toward and behaviors of those audiences. Only then, can organizations undertake effective public relations campaigns.
The news media are omnipresent in our society. The arrival of television moved the “headline news” that had formerly been found in newspapers to a new, nearly instantaneous medium. With the advent to television and tremendous growth in internet, the importance of print media is slowly disappearing. Today, with the World Wide Web (WWW), almost anything you want, or need to find about, you can Google it, and get it. The oldest tool of media is referred to as “press” in earlier times. Media is expanding and becoming a powerful part of the society. It’s entering not only into the public lives of people, but also their private lives. Even politicians believe that the media bring world of politics into the home of the average citizen.


Businesses have always had an antagonistic relationship with the press. Later, due to a number of developments, including laws governing the disclosure of certain information by companies at regular levels, and more media interest in business, the companies were forced to rethink this isolationist approach. Even today, some older business professionals resist accepting the importance of communicating through the media and would rather maintain little or no relationship with what they see as an institution that tries to tear down everything they build up. This kind of attitude is increasingly risky, and less common, however, as each industry – from oil and gas, to financial services, to pharmaceuticals – has found itself the subject of some level of scrutiny from the public and the media, and many companies have learned the head what that having poor or nonexistent relationships with the media in these situations will only make them worse.

As the public attitudes are changing, the business news sections in newspapers gained recognition and began to expand. Since the media are interested in satisfying the needs of readers and viewers, they had to meet the public’s growing interest in the private sector and its participants. By 2005, the impulse for more transparency and great reporting on business had morphed into a growing movement toward making journalism more transparent and treating the public as a partner in the process rather than a passive participant. The rise of online news from nontraditional sources in the form of bloggers is further proof of this trend and lends further support for corporation developing a thoughtful approach to its media relations with both traditional and nontraditional media.

It’s becoming imperative for the organizations to realize the importance of media, and build better and stronger relations with them. To achieve this organizations must take time to cultivate relationships with the right people in the media and should try avoiding falling into some of the common pitfalls, of what has historically been media relations “standard practice”. In a cluttered field of information coming from a variety of sources, most of the times what works nest for a company is to find out the right journalists for a given story.

Building and maintaining close relationships is a prerequisite for generating coverage. A company cannot simply turn on and off a relationship as and when is faces crisis. Instead firms need to work and develop long term relationships with the right kind of journalists that are industry specific.

A company should take following steps to build a successful Media Relations Program:
Involve Media Relations Personnel in Strategy
Develop In-House Capabilities
Use Outside Counsel Sparingly

The Internet Age has many implications for business; wireless communication and the net have transferred an enormous amount of power into the hands of individuals. In line with this, companies’ media strategies need to be augmented with tactics for dealing with this new dimension of coverage, including, for instance, establishing a forum for constituencies to share opinions, concerns, and complaints about the company, and a proactive effort to monitor information circulating about the company in various media channels including blogs.

Companies should view the internet as an unprecedented and ideal survey group. Online monitoring can help companies gauge the sentiments of constituencies, allow them to respond effectively and help them stay on top of today’s information surge. Hence, companies should not become so consumed by the power of the internet that they neglect other important media channels.

Here are a couple of articles that tells us the importance of PR in shaping the perceptions of the WWW and the media relations:

http://homepages.udayton.edu/~vorvormz/files/491/InternetPR_coursesite/readings/01_NewlandHil_White_2000.pdf

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4422/is_1_19/ai_82353625