PR Week reports today that legendary IT journalist and editor of CIO magazine, Martin Veitch, is leaving journalism for the verdant pastures of PR (with Bite).
This follows on the back of some other notable moves in a similar direction recently.
So what does this mean about the state of IT journalism and, indeed, the attraction of PR (an industry which many of these movers no doubt bemoaned on a regular basis!)?
Media woes
The problems the media face have been well documented by myself and others for a long time and need no re-evaluation. And the IT sector is no different, especially when we consider the more traditional ‘print’ titles. After the demise of IT Week in 2008, Computing has recently gone fortnightly and even Computer Weekly has made redundancies (not very insightful, but I also think the continually decreasing quality of the paper used by Computer Weekly is a bad sign…!).
The changing face of PR
And whilst the future looks less and less rosy on one side of the pond, PR perhaps offers an increasingly attractive proposition. I covered an article in the Independent last week which reported the appointment of a number of key journalists by Edelman recently. As the article states:
“In generating their own video and text-based digital content on behalf of clients, [PRs/their clients] are not only taking the bread from the table of a weakened advertising sector but encroaching onto the old territory of television and press companies.”
I took a bit of a (deliberately) controversial line of argument suggesting that journalists were therefore not really needed by PRs anymore and, whilst this is certainly not entirely the case, what it perhaps shows (as I stated in the comments) is that some of those traditional skills that journalists have always had (ability to craft a story, find an angle, write great content) are increasingly being needed by PRs.
It’s therefore no surprise to see Bite and Edelman creating ‘client strategy’ and ‘chief content officer’ roles for ex-journos [and it's certainly not the first and/or last time a journalist will turn to PR]. For those of us living and breathing this ‘new PR’ already, the question will be, whether hiring journalists is the way for PR agencies to go, and/or whether there are new skills that we all need to be learning to put us in the best position to help our clients enter into this brave new world!
