Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Why PR is winning the battle for news

The business model for news broke long back and a new one is yet to be found. Till then companies and think tanks will continue to drive the news agenda through their PR armies

In the 1980s the ratio of public relations (PR) professionals to journalists was 1.2:1 in the US, according to a study by Robert McChesney and John Nichols. The country now has 4.6 PR people for every journalist, states the 2013 data from the US Bureau of Labor. That is roughly the ratio for the UK and Canada among other markets. This is indicative of two things. One, all the staff cuts at newspapers and news outlets in the US and Europe have created an information gap that is being filled by PR people. Two, this information is being created, curated and funded by advertisers, marketers, think tanks or lobby firms.

India is different from any of the mature markets in sheer numbers and heterogeneity. And also because newspapers remain a robust, profitable business here.

Some things, though, are changing. Against 301 million newspaper readers there are more than 319 million internet users in India. The readership of English newspapers is stagnating. Even without the rise of digital, more and more companies are hiring top-notch PR professionals, putting up walls that block the flow of information to mainstream, social or other media. Increasingly, access is becoming a problem and journalists are swamped with pitches for what PR people think newspapers should write about. As online news consumption rises in India, it is time to talk about the relationship between PR and journalism, where it is headed and what it means for the business of news.

Note that much of what this column says holds true for business journalism, my area of operation for over two decades. Political or other forms of journalism may be different.

Last week, after an interview with the India head of one of the world's largest media firms appeared, the communications person quibbled that there was nothing in it about their new show. It did not strike this person that a national business paper could not possibly run an interview with a CEO regarding one show. On the other hand are dozens of PR people, who efficiently facilitate your interaction with the firm without insisting on guiding where the interview should be headed or underlining their expectations from a piece. They simply do their research before facilitating any meeting.

Much of this has to do with training, internal key result areas and how broadly or narrowly they are defined. Increasingly, PR (paid 35 to 40 per cent more than journalists in the US, going by Pew Research data) is being pushed to control what is being said, how it is being said and who is saying it about a firm. They write multimedia press releases, give detailed briefs and control every aspect of communication with a company. And increasingly, there is the ill-trained junior reporter, who thinks the press release is the story - not the possible beginning of one. And that research means speaking to five talking heads.

Then there is the nature of the relationship between PR people and journalists. It is a bit like that of a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law - rife with possibilities for conflict, which are frequent. This power play is now changing. For decades advertisers, clients and marketers have wanted to push the agenda; digital gives them the tools to do it. Whether it is through the listicles on BuzzFeed or its Indian avatar ScoopWhoop or a research report on Quartz, native advertising, which works by making an ad look like an editorial, drives anywhere from 30 to 70 per cent of revenues for online news outlets. Then there is advertiser-funded programming/content, sponsored content and search results, which are paid for.

In the midst of all this sits the old-fashioned idea of writers and editors being the arbiters of what people want to read. And the online world proves they are good arbiters: Almost 70 per cent of the content that works online comes from mainstream media brands in the US. But Google, Amazon and Facebook walk away with the bulk of the money it makes. Essentially, mainstream news outlets subsidise the growth of online through their content, which has been gathered the old-fashioned way - through feet on the street, number-crunching and analysis.

There is no good or bad about this. It is just the way things are. While many readers are choosing the professional news outlet by paying for specialised news - in business or finance, for instance - the overwhelming majority, however, is happy with the PR-driven free news. The business model for news, as we know it, broke long back and nobody has found a new one. Till then, companies and think tanks will continue to drive the news agenda through their PR armies.

Twitter: @vanitakohlik