Lesson 6 Media Relations

Do media relations act as vital part in public relations?

The answer is Yes. After reading, I felt that media relations is crucial in public relations' field.
They need to depend on each other in order to achieve their own sets of agenda although conflicts do occured at times.

When people heard of media relations, most of them will relate to public relations as they are the sources of information provided in news story. In recent years, the ways that press demands had enhanced the growth of public relations industry.

“PR has become one of the most important external influences on journalism as it is now practiced” (Marshall and Kingsbury 1996:127)

I think the key points to remember from this week’s reading are although public relations practitioners play as vital role in the media, it is not an asymmetrical relationship. It takes two hands to clap. Public relations provide information to the media to raise public awareness and public interest whereas media get the information from public relations and get to publish newsworthy news.

So what are media relations all about?

There are media monitoring which is about being up to deal with issues, events, and crisis management. For daily monitoring, public relations practitioners cover a wide range of area (e.g : trends, government policy and legislations, debates and opinion) to deal with media so as to gauge public opinion and trends.Public relations practitioner will usually generate media releases that are too promotional and as threatening the job of working journalist.

On the other hand, the press will analyze and evaluate whether the media stories have a certain news value. There are 8 Conley news value to use as criteria to determine the media stories (impact, conflict, timeliness, proximity, prominence, human interest, the unusual, and money ).

The readings made me think more about public relations theory or practice that the relationship between media relations and public relations are inextricable. Even though there are always uneasy alliance with each other, but there is a potential growing interdependence in the two industries.

Strong communication will be achieved if there are clear understandings and respects between each other.