Hotwire UK colleague Drew Benvie got the opportunity to write a column for PR Week UK. Quite an industry recognition in its own right and a great sign that our firm has reached the top position we have been working for so hard in the past years.

Drew shares his thoughts on the evolution of PR, advertising, digital media production and journalism which, through the web get more and more interlocked. PR folks like us have a good chance to come out on top of the list, he says, if we learn to create strategies, stories and content beyond the traditional intermediary function between press and our clients.

“So now the grey area emerges between PR and digital media production. Some of us will learn these new skills ourselves. Some will buy in that expertise. But we are now seeing PR practitioners who cannot (and will never need to) write a feature for a magazine, or don’t know which journalist to call at a newspaper for placing a story.”

This seems quite optimistic when transferred to the German media landscape at this point. Here, we see outright fights happening even within the journalist profession between traditionalists who see blogs as a danger to “quality journalism” and blogging journalists (still very few!) who take the newly found openness as an opportunity to engage in discussions with their readers more directly. Handelsblatt editor/blogger Thomas Knüwer spearheads this second group on public speaking occasions and in his blog (German) and personally I think, he’s right. For the press, blogs are nothing to be afraid of but an enrichment to the media landscape.

For us PR pro’s the time when we fully turn into digital content/media producers and forget about the journalists we used to pitch for stories in the old days is still a long way ahead. But hey, go prove me wrong!