Leaders of the PR/IR industry, in a remarkable show of community, gathered Jan. 13-14, 2003 in Madison, N.J., in an effort to restore credibility to the business community.
Lou Thompson, president of the National Investor Relations Institute, noted that the scandals at Enron, Worldcom and Global Crossing, as well as the dot-com bust, had chipped $7.3 trillion off the stock market since March 2000.
 Murphy |
All sessions of the "PR Coalition 2003 Summit" were open to reporters and on-the-record. This is in stark contrast to today's picture, where almost all PR groups are either in communications lockdown or close to it.
The PR industry, in terms of being responsive to press questions, has staged a vast retreat since then.
An Australian PR group openly says that “PR is dead.”
What they mean is that PR is dead as a means of answering press questions.
Groups Participating
Groups present in 2003 included PRSA, NIRI, IABC, Arthur W. Page Society, Council of PR Firms, PA Council, Institute for PR, National School PR Assn., Council of Communications Mgmt., Corporate Communications Institute and Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College.
Reed Byrum, president of the PR Society, led a session on "What You Believe and How You Act."
Participants included Marion Pinsdorf, Ph.D., Fordham, representing Page, and Martin Taylor, Institute for Global Ethics.
"Trust: What it is and how is it measured" was discussed by Ward White, co-chair of the Institute for PR and Lou Williams of IABC. Among planners of the meeting was Julie Freeman, president of IABC.
Meeting organizer James Murphy, then with Accenture and now in his own firm, concluded the program by reviewing possible next steps for the Coalition.
Murphy received the Alexander Hamilton Medal of IPR last year for lifetime service to PR.
PR/Media Coalition Needed
Flash forward to 2013 and we find a radically different picture.
Not only is PR on the ropes, in terms of credibility and informing the public, but so are media. The latest Gallup poll shows only 23% of Americans have "a great deal" of confidence in newspapers.
Newspaper ad revenues, which were $44.9 billion in 2003, were $25.3 billion last year including web ads and "non-daily publication ads." Newspaper ad revenues were $22.3B.
Traditional media have lost a lot of their clout and stealing a lot of their thunder are "social media."
SM at times resembles a bar-room brawl.
New York Times columnist Joe Nocera on July 16 headlined, "My Case Against Twitter."
'Brings Out Worst in People'
 Sturm |
He agrees it can be "a personalized news engine" but also that it "can be so hateful. It can bring out the worst in people, giving them license to tweet things they would never say in real life.”
He notes that CNBC commentator Douglas Kass regularly tweeted his thoughts but stopped after being hit with "the foulest language imaginable." He even received life-threatening tweets.”
Twitter, writes Nocera, with its 140-character limit, "exacerbates our society-wide attention deficit disorder: nothing can be allowed to take more than a few seconds to write or read."
The "negatives outweigh the positives”"of Twitter, says Nocera.
As someone who is being called all sorts of names by PR Society associate PR director Stephanie Cegielski on Twitter, this writer agrees with Nocera.
PR & Newspeople Need to GatherWhat is needed now is for newspaper executives to meet with executives and elected officers of the PR groups to tackle the issue of the disintegration of mass media.
Caroline Little has succeeded John Sturm as president and CEO of the Newspaper Assn. of America.
Sturm retired at the end of 2011, collecting a final pay of $4,062,204. He had been CEO since 1995.
The funds had been accumulated since 1996 under a retirement plan made in accordance with the IRS, NAA said. The fund totaled $3,659,442 and was in addition to his pay of $402,762.
NAA, a 501/c/6 non-profit, filed its return on Nov. 14, 2012, the next to the last day for such filings. Initial deadline is May 15 but non-profits frequently ask for extensions on one ground or another.
Trump Media & Technology Group today reported a $58.2M net loss on $4.1M in 2023 revenues, a disclosure that drove its stock price down 22.6 percent to $47.96.
Barry Pollack, an attorney at Wall Street’s Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler, has registered Julian Assange as a client with the Justice Dept. “out of an abundance of caution.”
Paramount Global to slash 800 jobs in what chief executive Bob Bakish calls part of an effort to “return the company to earnings growth"... Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman is exiting at the end of the month due to disagreements with chief executive Gus Wenner over the direction the magazine is taking... The New York Times broke the $1 billion barrier in annual revenue from digital subscriptions in 2023... Press Forward is investing more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms.
The majority of news articles are read within the first three days of publication, according to a recent report.
The Los Angeles Times gives pink slips to 115 people or 20 percent of its newsroom staff... TIME is also laying off about 30 employees, which is approximately 15 percent of its editorial staff... The Baltimore Banner, which was launched by Stewart Bainum in 2022 after he failed to buy the Baltimore Sun, added 500 subscribers per day in the three days following Sinclair Broadcast Group's deal to purchase the Sun.
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