Why PR is Less About Relationships and More About Storytelling
By Jenna Oltersdorf, CEO and Founder
PR has evolved quite a bit during my career, but particularly in the past 10 years as the media landscape has shifted away from print and to the ever-widening digital sphere.
Now, with AI becoming more widely used, we are facing another decade of disruption.
So, what does that mean for our industry? When I first started my career in public relations, I heard the same line again and again: “It’s all about relationships.” My colleagues competed to see who had the thickest Rolodex. (For the young’uns out there, a Rolodex was a rotating address book that allowed you to store all your contacts and flip through them easily.)
Sadly, as newsrooms have downsized, there aren’t as many people in traditional news reporting roles. That means fewer people to reach out to and more publicists than ever doing the outreach. With all those media layoffs, I think the whole industry is shifting away from relationships as the primary metric of success to two very important things:
- A well-researched media list that doesn’t just rely on a five-minute reporter database scan
- A personalized story that’s told in different voices to different types of reporters
While press releases and fact sheets are still useful tools in our craft; the ability to tell a story in different ways to appeal to different audiences is the true cornerstone of the work we do. Product launches, expansion of services, and new locations are still news, but the bigger stories are the heartfelt human interest stories that we can pitch to writers we know are interested in articles that might not fit inside a traditional press release. If we can tell a story in an email, we can persuade journalists to want to tell their own version of that story to their readers.
Through PR’s evolution, the demands on public relations professionals have grown more demanding. Gone are the days of only needing a Rolodex and a knowledge of AP Style — although those are handy, I must admit. These days, you have to be a good writer, of course, but you also have to be able to think about storytelling from outside your own perspective. That’s how we break through the noise and connect with reporters who are feeling overwhelmed by the number of emails in their inboxes. This is why problem-solving and creativity are the top skills we look for in our agency recruitment. Storytelling is a puzzle that requires imagination and creative spark.
How do you cultivate that in your own team?
