When I started out in PR, the media landscape was relatively contained. You had print, broadcast, and a handful of digital outlets that were just beginning to find their footing. The gatekeepers were clear: editors, bureau chiefs, producers. If you got past them, you got coverage. That world no longer exists.
Today, the most powerful piece of media about your brand might be written by a 22-year-old with a smartphone and 400,000 Instagram followers who just had a bad experience with your customer service. Or it might be a LinkedIn post from a disgruntled former employee that gets reshared by industry leaders. Or a Reddit thread that goes viral before your monitoring tool even picks it up.
User-generated content has not just disrupted media relations — it has democratised it completely. And most PR strategies have not caught up.
The implications are profound. Brand monitoring can no longer be a weekly activity — it must be real-time. Influencer relations is no longer a nice-to-have sub-function; it is a core competency. Community management is not a social media manager’s job description; it is a reputation management imperative.
More importantly, the old model of ‘one message for media, another for social’ is dead. Journalists follow influencers. Influencers pitch editors. A customer’s TikTok review will be embedded in a newspaper feature story within forty-eight hours. The walls between earned, owned, and influencer-driven content have completely dissolved.
The PR professionals who thrive in this environment are the ones who stopped thinking about ‘the media’ as a single category and started thinking about ‘the conversation’ as the unit of strategy. Who is driving the conversation? What are they saying? What context are they missing? How do we add value to that conversation, not just try to control it?
Control is an illusion in the age of the accidental journalist. Relevance is the only currency that matters.
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