مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Public relations have been intertwined with the mass media since its rise in the early twentieth century (Hallahan, 2010). Communication departments use mass media to monitor news and public opinion, source content for internal news services, evaluate media coverage, and cooperate to produce quality content or create topical platforms on the Internet. Today organizations explore new practices going beyond traditional media relations. They are paying for published content aimed at consumers (content marketing) (Pulizzi, 2012, 2014; Rowley, 2008) or for content appearing in the form and function of its host platforms (native advertising or embedded marketing, e.g. Facebook posts). Organizations also produce newsworthy content that promotes brands by using journalistic skills (brand journalism) (Brito, 2013; Bull, 2013; Hallahan, 2014; Macnamara, 2014a). This blurs boundaries between journalism, public relations, and advertising (Hallahan, 2014). As Macnamara (2014b) observed: “PR is developing new tactics and techniques at the same time as journalism is struggling to adapt in a digital networked world and these developments and evolving interconnections need to be examined” (p. XIII). This paper explores media relations and widely discussed new practices in this field (i.e. content strategy, content marketing, native advertising, and brand journalism) as a part of public relations. It starts with a literature review in which it presents traditional concepts of interacting with the mass media and outlines the new concepts mentioned above. These are followed by the results of an empirical survey among public relations practitioners working in communication departments and agencies across Europe. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research and it proposes a new concept: “strategic mediatization.”