Media Strategies

Managing content, platforms and relationships

Jane Johnston, Katie Rowney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000246599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Media Strategies maps the complex and disruptive media environment for the communication professional and provides the tools and methods to work effectively within it. Increasingly, communication professionals need to be accomplished content managers, capable of employing an arsenal of multi-media tactics across different platforms. This book presents new and innovative approaches to media relations, brand journalism and content management, providing practitioners with the tools to creatively develop, share and deliver strategic media assets and ideas that cut through the cluttered digital environment. The authors also demonstrate that personal and traditional skills are as important as ever, including the ability to tell stories, create memorable media pitches, write and lay-out media materials, and develop credibility and trust in relationships. Media Strategies sets a new agenda for anyone seeking to build a career as a professional communicator. It includes examples from around the world, from corporate, political, government, not-for-profit and activist communication and public relations practice.'The game has changed. Communications professionals should look to this as their guide when navigating a swiftly changing media landscape.' Ross Healy, Brand Social Media Specialist ' Media Strategies cuts through the hype to show how you can build your skills and excel as a communicator in both traditional media and the disruptive digital media platforms.' Elissa Trezia, Financial Technology PR Executive, Indonesia 'An excellent guide to the complex media landscape.' Catherine Archer, Academic Chair, Strategic Communication, Murdoch University

Chapter 1

Managing content, platforms and relationships in a transmedia environment

‘Today’s graduates require a high level of knowledge of all the basics of digital communication to be employable in the future.’

(Alexander, 2016, p. 1)

A changing environment

Over the past decade, the explosion of media choice has enabled anyone to publish, consume, make money, connect, share, tell stories, give advice, spruik their business, collaborate, comment, stir up trouble and develop a dedicated following of fans. Traditional media’s long reign of supremacy has given way to a converged media space where multitudes of media options coalesce, borrow from each other, promote each other and, of course, compete with each other. So what does this mean for public relations and professional communication? It means public relations (PR) practitioners and professional communicators are now expected to know how to use and navigate media strategically, comprehensively and cleverly. Yes, the job just got a whole lot harder! A study of PR industry expectations published in 2016 noted that ‘today’s graduates require a high level of knowledge of all the basics of digital communication to be employable in the future’ (Alexander, 2016, p. 1).

Media options have never been broader—but where to start, which to choose and how to make the best choices? For those readers who are from Generation Y—born between the 1980s and 2000s—you have been described as living ‘in perfect symbiosis with technology’ (Huntley, 2006). If that is the case, you’ll find many of the ideas in this book intuitive. You’ll be using media to develop your own personal brand and identity.

The purpose of this book is to start you thinking about using technol ogy and media strategically, for professional purposes or causes. Whether you’re a student, an upcoming practitioner or an ‘old hand’ in the trade, today’s media require you to be adaptable, informed and agile, to be prepared to multitask at multimedia. This book examines the complex and challenging media environment and how the individual, organisation or brand can navigate through what often appears to be a maze of options. Specifically, it examines the public relations and organ-isational communication role within the media maze. It is a role that uses an arsenal of tools to do the job and, increasingly, demands that the practitioner be an accomplished content manager. This requires practitioners to work across many and varied platforms, to be multiskilled and technologi cally literate, and to have the ability to target effectively while cutting through complex material in order to develop and deliver strategically timed messages and sustainable narratives. At the same time, in this age of disruption, personal and traditional media relations skills—the ability to tell stories, create memorable media calls, write and lay out media materials, and develop credibility and trust in relationships—is as important as ever.

In PR and professional communication practice, how we work with communication and media must take a more strategic approach than ever before because the world is so full of news, noise, messages, opinions, internet clutter and activity. In order to be heard above the noise, strategic use of media requires careful consideration of what to say, where to say it, how to say it and when to say it, and—perhaps most importantly—listening to what others have to say. It means that you’ll need to find the best combination of vehicles to deliver your message, whether on specific social networks, through human-interest stories, via video development, press release distribution, embedded promotions, blogs, live-streaming apps or in a multitude of other ways. In most cases, you will need to select carefully from a combination of many media tactics, driven by clearly understood media strategies. This is the essence of Media Strategies. It provides an examination of the shifting media environment and explores how to navigate through it and deliver your messages and stories to the people who make a difference.

As social networking has emerged as an overwhelming media force, the tendency to deal with it separately from traditional media has forced an unnecessary division, siloing the two fields into two separate parts. As this book explains, there is far greater logic in working with the two fields together, acknowledging that they have become firmly connected, enmeshed and integrated—made up of combinations of personalised media and mass communication options. Wu and colleagues (2011) call this ‘mass-personal’, while Castells (2009) refers to this convergence as ‘mass self-communication’. So, for PR and professional communication, what has traditionally been the ‘media relations’ role—the traditional role of the practitioner working with journalists (and other news media) to develop positive relationships and gain access to the news and media agenda—now represents only a limited picture of the contemporary media manager role. However, nor does the ‘social media’ role alone fulfil most organisational communication and media needs. A more appropriate contemporary approach is that of the ‘media strategist’—a role that captures a broad range of media tasks, processes and respon sibilities, still requiring attention to be given to relationships with the news and entertainment media, but now also with a broader range of stakeholders or publics, with the need for media literacy and know-how across an expanded media landscape. As Turner (2016, p. 130) points out, there is no point in dealing with ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ separately when learning about media; instead, we need to deal with ‘all of them, just as our societies do’. The landscape has shifted in many ways, and so too has the role of media manager.

Consider the following changes:

• the move away from simple news announcements to telling organ-isational stories
• the shift away from text-only news and messaging to visual content
• the necessity to listen to feedback because channels are no longer one-way
• a more scientific approach to making media work for you, using algorithms and metrics
• the rise of the ‘social influencer’ in generating and endorsing interest in an organisation brand message
• a heightened need for media training because organisational members (at every level) are open to scrutiny across all their media platforms
• the rise in job titles such as ‘brand journalism’ and ‘content marketer’, which are emerging as the field broadens and converges
• increasingly complex societies that require professional communicators to translate, facilitate and negotiate meaning.

Each of these changes will be examined in this book. They represent major and crucially important developments for the media strategist, requiring the role to be more flexible and strategic than ever, both pro-actively and reactively, in getting messages to key publics and in managing how others in your organisation do the same. We find support for these ideas from professional network services group PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), whose Global Outlook Entertainment and Media report for 2015–19 suggests that media behaviour can be affected by two principal differentiators: the quality of the available infrastructure for consuming content; and consumers’ common desire for content experiences that are relevant to them personally (PwC, 2015).

While we may have limited capacity for the first of these—that is, affecting infrastructures—we most certainly can lead in the second—the development of relevant, meaningful content. Developing content and creating experiences have always been core parts of the PR and professional communication toolkit. This is important more than ever now, given the sea of media platforms and communication channels from which we can choose. We can also create our own threefold media strategy that simultaneously delivers storytelling expertise, across multiple media platforms, to engage with and connect to diverse stakeholder groups—a strategic media trifecta, as illustrated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Contemporary media strategy.

Shifting media paradigms

A decade before this book was published, one of the authors described the core functions of media relations as developing and maintaining positive and ethical relationships with the news media, while also gaining access to the news agenda to deliver messages and stories. Media relations was defined as: ‘the ongoing facilitation and coordination of communication and relationships between an individual, group or organisation and the news media’ (Johnston, 2007, p. 4). These aspects of PR and professional communication have not changed, but they are no longer sufficient to sum up the total media role. A lot can happen in a decade! Since that time, three key changes have occurred, which have forever altered the

‘It’s increasingly clear that consumers … want … more flexibility, freedom and convenience in when and how they consume their preferred content’

(PwC, 2015)

media landscape and the position of PR/communication within it. First, ‘traditional’ or ‘legacy’ media—newspapers, radio, television, magazines, radio and so on—have altered, and these industries have been forced to change and adapt. Second, ‘non-traditional’ media platforms—blogging, social networks, gaming and others—have expanded and gained unprecedented traction in the media marketplace. Third, mobile technology has dramatically changed the way people consume and create their own media, which are no longer set in place or time, but have become seemingly infinitely flexible. The changes have given rise to a media contradiction: these are at once separate industries—many industries in fact—and part of one single industry. Consider newspapers, television, gaming and app development, for example—all global industries in their own right. Yet they are also so closely connected and interconnected that these and other industries continually impact on and cross over into each other’s space. On the one hand, they represent the development of whole new media industries; on the other, they represent the blurring of the distinction between mass and interpersonal communication (Turner, 2016).

Traditional media’s changing shape

Whichever way you look at it, traditional media are in a state of flux. Over the past decade, traditional modes of operation and business models have become less defined, increasingly technology focused and more disparate, causing the media to ‘reinvent’ themselves, adapting to this changed media environment. The shift to ‘digital media’—a term that is now largely redundant because ‘digital’ is the new normal—marked a massive change for traditional or ‘legacy’ media.

Global shifts have taken place in all traditional media, although the changes have been far from uniform across media platforms. On the one hand, for example, expansion in satellite and cable television, the introduction of narrowcasting and on-demand viewing have seen growth in the TV sector (PwC, 2015). TV and video have experienced a migration to new consumption patterns, characterised by on-demand services, enabling binge viewing and greater convenience for TV and video consumers (PwC, 2015). Newspapers, meanwhile, have experienced what has been described as the ‘ec-tech squeeze’—‘the simultaneous and increasing pressures’ of economic and technological forces (Anderson & Ward, 2007, p. 57). These dual pressures really cut into the newspaper industries following the global financial crisis of 2007–08, characterised as ‘the perfect storm of disruption from digital media coupled with the effects of the global financial crisis’ (Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, 2012, p. 9). In many places—Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States among them—newspapers have given way to internet-only editions; mainstream newspapers have followed their business counterparts (Australian Financial Review and the Wall Street Journal) by introducing ‘paywalls’; Facebook, Go...