We’re at the halfway point of 2023 and it’s about to be closer to 2024 than 2022.
It’s a good time to reflect on whether you’re keeping up with the communications trends that have been exacerbated of late that maybe you’d only think about at the beginning of a year.
First, it’s important to understand what’s happening in the media business, which significantly affects anything that tries to resemble media relations. A recent piece in Axios reports it starkly: halfway through the year, there have been more media job losses (nearly 20,000 nationally) than there were in all of 2022 and even in the spring of 2020.
There reasons are many, including advertising uncertainty, what’s being described as “subscription fatigue” and multiple business models that are struggling to make it. Media organizations of all kind, including news organizations, aren’t waiting until the end of the year to make cuts.
If you’re in the PR business, this means that the news coverage you’re expecting or, tougher yet, promising, is statistically tougher to come by than it was six months ago. It’s time to adjust plans and expectations and being honest about what’s news and what still fits.
With news coverage being harder to “earn,” it’s also important to think about how you’re reacting to news opportunities when they come your way. It’s more important than ever to remember that communicating a message has power. A “no comment” is more of a missed opportunity, even a waste of one, than it was even a short time ago.
It’s also an opportune time to review what you’re doing on social media and how it’s tracking. For many Twitter just isn’t registering like it used to. Post content that used to see thousands of interactions are now seeing just hundreds, at least according to the platform’s own stats. Is it worth it to put resources into a platform that has lost momentum or maybe, as many believe, lost its way, just because that’s how you’ve been doing it for years? That’s a decision that doesn’t have to wait for the end of the year.
It may not be time for a resolution, but if you get a long weekend here at halftime for the year, it’s worth some gray matter to consider the opportunity of reshaping on the fly to react to the new realities a fast-changing business presents.