Unfortunately for PRSA, this vote told me that the association is even more entrenched in its business-as-usual way of doing things than I thought. Further, it told me that a broad cross-section of the association isn’t prepared to embrace the present and future of communications and engagement.

PRSA formally created the “Leadership Assembly” last year as an acknowledgement of the need for broader input into the association’s future role in PR and communications. The Board is supposed to seek advice and counsel from the assembly, as opposed to its prior role of simply doing the legal business of a membership organization. Along those lines, the formal business of the assembly was limited to the first half of the day today, followed by a discussion of the near-term future of the PR industry in the afternoon.

As noted by the advocates of the resolution, the electronic discussion group gives the Board the ability to consult the Leadership Assembly throughout the year, but it didn’t do so. The authors, tech-savvy PR people from Boston and the Bay Area, hoped that the resolution would help move the association in that direction. It didn’t happen.

[2010 PRSA International Conference]

The voted ended a passionate and looong debate this year for and against this change. To summarize, those for the amendment felt that removing the requirement would open board leadership to a much larger pool of candidates, while those against argued that holding an APR demonstrates the necessary commitment to the profession and the society.

I voted for the change, twice actually, as I held a proxy for our chapter’s other vote. I did so at the direction of the PRSA Silicon Valley board, which voted to support the amendment.

What made this debate interesting to me is that it encapsulated many wider issues in the transformation and evolution of the PR industry. From my point of view, those arguing against the amendment (at least those who spoke or wrote publicly) were largely motivated by a desire to slow change, to affirm their support for “the way things are” and to support the APR accreditation as a symbol of PR expertise.

On the other side, those supporting the amendment seemed to be crying out for the organization to modernize, to open its leadership to a wider pool of candidates, and to recognize that “public relations” as a profession and marketing function is rapidly evolving.

In the end, I think the amendment lost because it addressed a narrow issue, the APR requirement, rather than rewriting the entire “minimum requirements” bylaw altogether. In addition to the APR requirement, the minimum requirements still call for potential Board members to have served as a chapter or section board member or, at a minimum, to have been in the profession for 20 years.

As a membership organization, the only *minimum* requirement for board service should be that the person be a PRSA member for a minimum of 2-3 years. Such a low threshold would allow anyone with a demonstrated commitment to the organization to run for office, only barring insurgents seeking for some reason to take over the organization.

Why the bare minimum? Because the nomination and election process is the proper place to vet qualifications for leadership, not the bylaws. The pool should be as wide as possible, thus hopefully turning the election itself into an opportunity to debate and discuss the future of the organization and the profession.

If there’s anyone out there worrying about the business efficacy of this organization, I recommend that you take this vote as a warning sign of a hidebound association that may be too slow to change to meet the needs of tomorrow’s PR and marketing professionals.

[2010 PRSA International Conference]

The assembly is a requirement of PRSA’s bylaws, and past assemblies have been mind-numbing affairs in which delegates from around the country were asked to consider and vote on administrative minutiae regarding the business affairs of the group.

In response to voices like this one, the assembly has been modernized, and the preliminary agenda only calls for us to spend the morning dealing with such issues. The afternoon is turned over to a “Town Hall Meeting” on “Defining the role of the public relations professional of the future.” We were asked to solicit input from our chapter on the questions below.

My plan is to post the questions here, solicit your input on any or all of them, and write up my own thoughts in the next few days. So here they are:

• What role will the public relations professional play in 2015? How is this different from their role today?
• What other knowledge, skills and abilities are necessary for success in the future?
• How will knowledge, skills and abilities be impacted by:
  • Social media?
  • Integrated marketing/communications?
  • Globalization?
  • The disintegration of traditional media?
  • The demand for results — focus on measurement and evaluation?
  • Other?
• How will knowledge, skills and abilities differ by:
  • Career stage?
  • Industry?
  • Organizational setting?

That’s right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It’s certainly simple enough to do — plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.

Makes a lot of sense, too. Video is such an incredibly powerful medium, and now, through the evolution of technology, we can all be fast and cheap video producers.

The key thing here is that a “vitch” can’t just be you reading your boring, stilted press release into the camera. You need to show something — the newsmakers, the location, something, anything tangible. This, by itself, takes PR people out of their jargon-filed comfort zone.

I just picked up on this word so I don’t have any good examples of video pitches and their results, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. I plan to try it this month just to see what happens.

I’ve been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people figure out if they had a story for me, and as a PR person, I’ve worked hard to teach PR people how to do a better job interacting with the media.

I’ve mostly considered it a lost cause to try to educate the media about PR, even though that was one of my original goals. Media people generally split into two camps: those who “get” the role of PR and deal with it, and those who “hate” PR and always bitch about it. Sometimes those in the latter group migrate to the former, but they need to do it in their own time. No use trying to teach them — their ears do not hear.

Despite this persistent divide, some people obviously think it can be overcome. At least, that appears to be the gist of the strategy of a new company, Plato’s Forms, which says is mission is:

developing solutions for companies and journalists that help address some of these challenging aspects of communications in the online media environment.

At this time, they say no more. In Silicon Valley-speak, they are in “stealth” mode, meaning they are developing their offering behind closed doors and plan to make a big splash when they unveil it at a later date. For now, they’ve got a half-mil to work with, partly from the pocket of founder Darryl Siry.

Their name, btw, refers to the philosopher Plato, who, their web site says, “held that we could not comprehend the true form of things, and could only grasp the reflections of their true meaning, as if they were shadows reflected on the wall.” At least one philosophy major disputes this reading, however, judging from the comments about the company on a TechCrunch post.

PRSA is a national membership organization based in New York. A staff and Board run the organization, but as a membership body, we have to have an annual meeting to conduct certain business, such as bylaw revisions.

Here’s my take on the bylaw revisions — just do them and vote yes! Then move on to the truly weighty and important issues facing our profession, and not dwell on bureaucratic minutiae.

Almost all nonprofits need to revise their bylaws periodically, as the organization and the external world change. Bylaw changes are almost always overdue, because they are a pain to push through. That’s the case here.

I’ve reviewed the changes a couple of times, looking for nefarious consolidations of power or simply bad ideas, and I can’t find them. The revisions appear to me to both modernize the association and streamline decision-making, two worthy objectives.

I took a second close look because there is a faction that has gotten itself extremely worked up about these revisions, but I can’t find any cause for alarm.

What does alarm me, however, are the things PRSA’s national meeting OUGHT to be dealing with, namely:

• The lack of enforceable professional standards of practice
• The lack of clear and low-cost ways of measuring the effectiveness of PR
• The revolutionary changes roiling the media, communications and the PR industry brought on by the Internet, and how to position and support current practitioners and train the next generation

With delegates across the country representing the best and brightest of the profession sitting in one convention room in San Diego, it would be a perfect time to address and work on these issues. But they won’t be on the agenda. And that’s the real shame here.

Now that I’m older, wiser, and jaded, this seems like, duh, but back in my younger days, this really seemed like an issue to me. It was certainly evident that we journalists were largely steered to cover “acceptable” stories — city hall scandals, urban violence — while understanding that other stories — such as corporate control of the country, for instance — would not be career-building subjects.

So I left the media, did a half-dozen years of community service type work, then trended over to real corporate communications, figuring — seriously — that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Just so you know, I don’t always sleep well with this deal with the devil, but mostly, I’ve found a way to make a living while doing relatively benign “corporate communications.”

Today’s sermonette is prompted by the item in the Times today about the Los Angeles Kings hockey team hiring “their own reporter” to write stories about the team on the Kings’ web site. The story assures us that “reporter” is being given “complete autonomy to post reporting or commentary.”

However, the story goes on to fret: “how sure can readers be of tough, impartial coverage when image-conscious businesses are paying for it?”

As if the Gray Lady herself, the Times, isn’t image conscious.

First of all, this story isn’t news — Major League Baseball has had the same set up for its teams for several years. Secondly, it’s a damn good idea in today’s world. It’s a world of instant publishing on a global communications platform. Why wouldn’t you post your own fresh content?

And this brings us to “credibility.” Every media outlet has a point of view — you just have to figure it out and deal with it, whether you are a media consumer or a PR person. So this is just one more example of a type of media to deal with. Like I said, it’s all just corporate communications.

In the mainstream, there’s probably no more “prominent” spokesman for white supremacy than Pat Buchanan. I put prominent in quotes because the man is self-appointed, having never won election to anything.

In a recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, where he is a regular contributor, Buchanan once again spouted his white supremacy, non-white inferiority line of “reasoning” during a discussion of Sonya Sotomayor, and as usual, played fast and loose with the facts. While Maddow let him get away with it during the original segment, she took him to task in a follow-up segment, and in the process, gave the most eloquent and forceful endorsement of anti-racism I’ve ever heard on national TV.

This is a big subject, but let me summarize, because this is important to me:

• White supremacy means a world dominated by people who pass as white, and seeing the world through the lens of white peoples’ experiences and standards
• There’s a world of non-white people out there, and they have been systematically discriminated against by white people (don’t believe me — read some of these links)
• People like Pat Buchanan are completely bought into defending white supremacy and white privilege
• There is very little in the mainstream media as yet about combating racism and white supremacy, but I’m happy to say that in my personal/religious life, I’m deep at work on it.

I can’t do Maddow’s takedown justice by quoting her. You just have to watch it for yourself.

BTW, the relevance to PR: This country will be majority non-white in my children’s lifetime. If your comms aren’t changing to reflect this reality, you’re falling behind.

Miller

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter’s Notebook, Batman — stop the digital presses!

Hammerling

Among Miller’s other “findings” in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client
• “In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.”
• “Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers … PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.”
• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK — enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling’s expense. What are my takeaways?

• Yes, social media and the Internet have transformed PR and are making mainstream media relations less important and multi-channel PR more important.
• It’s still about a) who you know, b) who trusts you and c) whether you have a good story.
• Reaching out to other influencers in addition to journalists has been a PR tactic since, as a friend used to say, God got her ears pierced. I recall writing PR plans in the 90s chock full of such tactics, only it didn’t involve using Twitter and Facebook, it involved snail mail and in-person events. Tools change, strategies are more permanent.

This has been a boon for PR — the more business media, the more PR people and resources needed to deal with them and pitch them.

It has never been easy to get coverage from the business media, but this year, it has gotten much tougher. Buyouts and closures are sweeping the media, taking out scores of talented and experienced business journalists.

Talking Biz News, a very good blog that follows the business media, reported today that 250 business media jobs were eliminated just during the first six months of 2009. That included the entire staff of Portfolio, the ill-timed new business mag from Conde Nast, and 100 positions throughout Bloomberg Media, which is heavily dependent on sales of its information to the financial services sector. But there have been scores of other jobs lost at national newspapers, regionals, magazines and business journals.

What does this mean for us in PR? It means we have to work ever harder to get stories placed. It means we can’t waste precious time pitching non-stories to over-worked journalists. It means that when we do pitch a story, we need to be ready to provide facts and figures, human interest, quotable quotes, photos, graphics and other sources for the story.

I know it’s hard to do. But that’s reality. So get back to work, people. Break’s over.