Media relations is dead? Long live media relations…

Media relations typically form an essential cornerstone in any PR project or retainer.

Historically, agencies have put their clients into the media spotlight to promote, raise profile, respond to negative publicity, repair reputations and create thought leaders and indeed thought leadership.

Done well, media relations can be extremely powerful; enabling lawyers and indeed the broader firm to broadcast their key messages to their target audiences and often beyond.

Strategy-led media relations is a tactic used to support a broader set of business goals, themselves driven by the firm’s business strategy; and is usually therefore just one tactic amongst a range of other effective and measurable tactics aimed at achieving or exceeding the said goals in order to deliver the strategy.

But over the course of the past decade (and probably earlier) media relations and the media has been changing. As social media has grown as a news source (albeit an unregulated and often factually incorrect one), some traditional media sources have contracted. The printed newspaper is the most obvious casualty, with readership figures for the National publications tending to have halved over the previous decade, for example:

• The Sun – readership figures: 3,006,565 in 2010; 1,410,896 in 2019.
• The Daily Telegraph – readership figures: 691,128 in 2010; 360,345 in 2019.