Silicon Valley Watcher–Tom Foremski wonders about the shrinking of mainstream media and why PR continues to expand. Tom asks the question, why are PR firms growing while newspapers, magazines and television – the mainstream media – are shrinking?

There are fewer mainstream media outlets, there are fewer journalists to pitch stories to; and there are fewer pages to carry stories because there are fewer ads. And the demand for PR services continues to grow …

Public relations is about relationships and that is fueling the sucesss of PR. And PR has learned to adapt to the various new communication tools.

By the early 1990s it might have been resonable to expect a PR firm to rely on press releases and personal relationships with journalists to pitch stories, but as soon as the World Wide Web opened up new communication tools, then PR firms started expanding into them.

By 1995 my PR pitches involved using email, the Web, listservs and other Internet-based tools to reach out to targeted audiences. I contributed to the advisory committee formed to create Profnet, an Internet-based source list connecting researchers with journalists, which was started at SUNY and later purchased by PRNewswire.

Meanwhile, the state newspapers and television stations were still attempting to decide if they should provide their journalists with email addresses or set up a Web site. They reasoned that they would loose market share, readership and viewers.

Jumping forward 10 years and it comes down to having a professional who can help you communicate your message to the media or to the niche group that reads a blog, and everything in between. Mainstream media is just getting it, while PR has been doing it from the beginning of the WWW revolution. PR moved away from using media relations as the only tool to drive success and established new channels of communication. PR moved from only feeding the news to actually shaping and delivering it.

Today PR looks at how to communicate and reach the intended audience, no matter the delivery. So we use blogs, we use RSS, and we use press releases. We look for the proper channel and the proper place to pitch our news. It’s become about the audience and how to reach them.