مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بازتابی رسانه سازی بازتابنده ( الزویر )

The emergence of public relations in the early 20th century was largely fuelled by the rapid mediatisation of society. As journalists gained power as middlemen between organisations and society, framing news and setting the public agenda in the mass media, organisations (corporations and governments alike) responded by introducing counter-parts on their side: public relations practitioners as middlemen between the mass media and organisations (Merten, 2004). Public relations practitioners enabled organisations to become reflexive to the mass media expectations and adjust their behaviours to journalistic needs – i.e. influence the news media (Hall Jamieson & Kohrs Campbell, 1997). Media relations – management of relations between organisations and the mass media, ‘an area of public relations that many nonpractitioners see as the only function of public relations’ (Zoch & Molleda, 2006, p. 279) – is the most practiced area in the public relations sector (Swerling, Thorson, & Tenderich, 2012; Wilson & Supa, 2013; Zerfass, Verhoeven, Tench, Moreno, & Verciˇ c, ˇ 2011). In the second half of the 20th century, more than 150 studies explored relations between public relations and the mass media and they found that between 20 and 80% of the journalistic media content was influenced by some sort of ‘information subsidies’ provided by public relations (Cameron, Sallot, & Curtin, 1997; Merten, 2004). But that was when journalism as a profession was at its peak and public relations was only becoming an aspiring practice. The numbers on changes in the relative weights of the two sides since the middle of the previous century speak for themselves. In the past 30 years, the number of journalists per 100,000 Americans dropped from .36 to .25. At the same time, the number of public relations practitioners per 100,000 Americans rose from .45 to .90 (McChesney & Nichols, 2010). From less than one public relations practitioner per one journalist in 1960 (the ratio was 0.75-to-1 [McChesney & Nichols, 2010]), there are now five public relations practitioners per one journalist (Williams, 2014). Between 2000 and 2009, the newspaper advertising revenue in the US dropped from $49 to $22 billion. Between 1997 and 2007 revenues of the US public relations agencies went up from $43.5 to $8.75 billion. The number of US newspaper reporters and editors dropped from 56,900 in 1990 to 41,600 in 2011. The number of people employed by the US public relations agencies increased from 38,735 in 1997 to 50,499 in 2007 (Sullivan, 2011). These numbers are from the US and they are different around the world, but the trend seems to be the same in the whole Western Hemisphere: in relative balance between journalism and public relations, public relations is gaining and journalism is losing (Lloyd & Toogood, 2015).

While the introduction of public relations practitioners since the 1920s has led to reflexivity in media relations, what is emerging today leads to a new phenomenon of reflective mediatisation: non-core-media organisations (business companies and government agencies, NGOs and movements) are reflectively mediatising themselves. From providers of information subsidies (Gandy, 1982), public relations is transforming into media producer and creator of news and stories. The CocaCola Company is experimenting with its own ‘brand journalism’ in its digital magazine – http://www.coca-colacompany.com (Working, 2013). In September 2013, Alex Aiken, the Executive Director of the UK Government Communications, declared: ‘The press release is dead’ (Magee, 2013). In January 2014, Kim McKinnon, the Canadian Government’s Communications Community Officer, published the following statement on the Canadian Government official website: ‘The Government of Canada is retiring the traditional press release format in favour of a more digital-friendly product that makes the key messages of announcements clearer, quick facts more accessible and integrates more effectively with social media channels’ (McKinnon, 2014). These examples highlight changes in relations between public relations and the media (PR Daily, 2014). The article starts with the notion of reflexive media relations, presents reflective mediatisation, and raises questions on organisational and societal consequences of these processes and the described changes.