NEW MEDIA AND CHALLENGES IN PUBLIC RELATIONS PRACTICE

New media technology is the application of digital (computer) technology to mass communications (Hoggatt, 1999). Today, new technologies are being developed and updated continuously and there are some challenges for public relations professionals in term of keeping equal of not only what is available but also of what is being planned for release in the future. According to Stephens (2007), Internet news services are not just relying on the news wire services but turning increasingly to other places for raw materials. Public relations practitioners would be aware that ‘transcripts, reports and budgets are regularly being placed on the Web, either by organizations themselves or by citizens trying to hold those organizations to account’.

            There are some implications for public relations practitioners in order to prepare material faster than ever before being able to produce what is required almost immediately and with the required level of accuracy. In-house public relations practitioners may need to form stronger alliances with IT departments and may have to engage with the organization’s legal advisers in order to refine content clearance procedures when content is demanded immediately (James, 2007).

         

   Public relations practitioners will need more technical skills in areas such as web publishing, new software operation, online security, search engine optimization, web analytics and web trend analysis software operation (James, 2007). However, writing for cross-media delivery will continue as a major component of practice but the demands for multimedia elements will bring even more challenges in this area.

PR News Online started their PR Digital Report earlier this year and is now regularly covering stories on issues such as blogging, online communities and podcasting (James, 2007). Only a few years back it would have seemed unlikely to many practitioners to have to plan campaign components to hold website possibilities such as YouTube, Facebook, My Space and Twitter but it is obvious that many organizations even election campaigns are doing that.

        

    Practitioners will need to be able to analyze how new technologies can assist or hold back traditional public relations roles like public information dissemination, media relations, reputation management, marketing communications, investor relations as well as issues and crisis management.

References

Hoggatt, L. (1999). New Media Technology: A Design for A Mass Communications Graduate Seminar. Retrieved October 5, 2012 from http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/kheraiji/Documents/NEW%20MEDIA%20TECHNOLOGY.htm

James, M. (2007). A Review of the Impact of New Media on Public Relations: Challenges for Terrain, Practice and Education. Retrieved October 5, 2012 from http://www.pria.com.au/sitebuilder/forms/forms/file/34174/Melanie%20James%20article%20Asia%20Pacific%20PR%20Journal.pdf

By Nur Syazwani