• by May 7, 2004

AS IT TURNS OUT, THE BIG PICTURE IN MASS MEDIA MAY ACTUALLY BE MICRO - Imagine how odd the Riff felt when we found ourselves pitching a PR guy on a story. Odder still, was the fact that we were pumping him for the inside dope on his new news publishing enterprise, one that in some ways, might compete with the Riff and news outlets of our ilk. Oddest of all, was when midway through the interview, the PR guy turned the tables on us and began squeezing us for information on a story he was considering publishing about the Riff's anxiety over the emergence of this new form of publishing. Welcome to the world of "participatory journalism," possibly the fastest growing segment of mass communications, and one where almost anything can go.

"There are some big changes happening and my goal is to say they're happening," says Steve Rubel, publisher, editor and chief publicist of Micro Persuasion, a blog he created to cover the rapidly expanding field of, well, blogs. Specifically, blogs used by PR people to convey the kind of information they would normally try to get placed in traditional journalism outlets. Rubel, who when he's not blogging into the wee hours of the night, serves as chief spokesman for the Association of National Advertisers, and is vice president-client services at at PR firm Cooperkatz & Co., calls this field "micro media" and he says blogs are only one element of it.

Other aspects include direct "audience participation in mainstream news outlets" (think viewer or listener call-in shows), "home grown news information sites" (ie. Gawker.com or the Drudge Report), "full-fledged open source grass roots news sites" (IndiaMedia.com),"meta filters" or "thin media" applications like email lists and newsletters, and "personal video sites."

"You need to be thinking about all of these things in terms of how it affects your media plan," asserts Rubel, sounding more like a marketing communications executive than a newsman. Nonetheless, he is right. The emergence of micro media outlets are perhaps the biggest development to occur in the communications field since the emergence of the Internet. And while it is the Internet that is enabling much of the activity, it only just recently began to take on critical mass. Or maybe it's critical micro? In any case, it is beginning to change the way people send, receive and process information, and even how they process and think of "news."

This is not the first time the Riff has heard this theory. In fact, people in the PR field appear to be well ahead of this curve than journalists themselves. And from what we can tell, it's barely even on the radar screen of people on Madison Avenue. In fact, when Rubel uses the term "media plan," he's not using it the way ad agencies think of it, but how the PR field does, but the implications for the ad business are possibly just as big.

The good news is that all this comes at a time when agencies - especially big media agencies - are beginning to take PR seriously as component of the marketing mix. They've backed into the field of communications planning, which requires they think about the entire communications mix. You know, promotion, direct marketing, event marketing, any "communications contact" that touches the consumer they're trying to reach. So far, most shops have paid the PR part of the mix little more than lip service. One of the reasons, is that they claimed they didn't have the data to track PR impressions the way they track advertising media impressions. But even that has changed. Research firms like Delahaye have developed a wide variety of metrics and data tracking services that can not only tell you how many media impressions a PR campaign generated, but what the impact of those impressions were.

Tony Jarvis, the research guru at MediaCom who has been looking into this, calls this data PRPs (as in public relations points) and he says they are analogous to and comparable with the ad industry's GRPs (gross rating points). People in the PR field sometimes call them PRGRPs, though they cringe when outsiders try to directly correlate them as "advertising equivalencies." (The PR people believe their media exposures are actually more impactful than advertising's.)

It's unclear how many, if any, traditional media agencies are actually employing this data in their media mix planning, though they clearly are feeling pressures to do so. Just consider Procter & Gamble's radical communications planning makeover, which has incumbents Starcom MediaVest Group and MediaCom battling it out with Carat and MPG to see which shop can come up with the most "channel neutral" approaches to communications. We'd be surprised if PR doesn't factor heavily into that one.

The reality is that PR and advertising - as well as the rest of the marketing mix - have always overlapped in the minds of consumers, and it seems the industry is only just now catching up with that. The trend toward micro media and participatory media will only accelerate that, changing everything we know about how media professionals communicate with consumers, and how consumers perceive "news" and information outlets.

If you have any doubt of this fact, just consider what Delahaye CEO Mark Weiner told the Riff not long ago. "When they go online for news, many people cannot distinguish between the PR Newswire and newswires like the AP or Reuters," said Weiner, referring to the press release distribution system.

In an equally startling revelation, Donald Wright, professor of communication in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Alabama and president of the International Public Relations Association, recently told the Riff that company websites have begun to replace local daily newspapers as the primary source for employee news about companies.

Now don't get us wrong. It's not that we're feeling some kind of journalistic sanctimony. To be sure, "real" journalists have always had their share of the color yellow and lately it seems that many of the finest news organizations have deepened their hue. But these are big changes in terms of how society gets its news and information. How that news and information is filtered, or not. We're talking about context here. And while Rubel is the first to say, "The New York Times will always be The New York Times, at least I hope it will for all our sakes," the lines of distinction between "legitimate" journalism and "participatory" journalism are clearly beginning to break down.

"The big issue for PR people is how to look at this in the context of everything else and understanding how much attention to pay to this," explains Rubel, adding, "Right now I'd characterize that as some."

We think Rubel is on to something and the only problem we see with it is that we now have one more thing we need to read on a regular basis: Micro Persuasion.

But what really baffles the Riff is why PR guys like Rubel would want to lower themselves to the professional standards of journalists, which according to a recent Research International study, now ranks near the bottom of all professions, below advertising, marketing and PR, and ahead of only real estate agents.