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Just caught a blog post from David Jones which points to a letter that Pat McNamara, President of APEX Public Relations and Chair of the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms sent to marketing magazine and also posted to the CCPF blog in which she slams Marketing Magazine for their lack of support of editorial content and coverage of Canada’s PR industry.

“While your increased attention on social media issues is encouraging, the continued lack of focus on our industry is disappointing.What is even more discouraging is that your “special issue” Public Relations Resource Book provides absolutely no unbiased editorial content, and is ultimately a collection of advertorials funded by the mandatory purchase of an accompanying advertisement. “

I find Pat’s comments interesting because when I think back to my time running AIMS Canada and the various meetings with both Marketing Mag and Strategy they would both talk about the advertising and marketing readers they have, rarely did I hear mention of a “targeted PR readership.” Is PR really considered part of marketing?  With newer areas of focus such as social media, is it time that the industry re-define certain definitions?  One one hand Pat is right if that is who they are also supposed to be targeted, but maybe those publications aren’t trying to actively target public relations professionals and that is why they did not post her letter. Part of what people love about blogs is that the writers or “bloggers” are transparent, they write the good with the bad, much like people such as Robert Scoble did when he worked at Microsoft and commented about the mistakes of Steve Balmer on his blog.  Traditional publications have never really held up to that same standard though and due to being run by large corporations probably never will.   It is fair to say they are in it for the pure monetary gains and that is why both publications are dominated by advertising, but I do agree there needs to be some type of balance.  Personally I find that over the last 2 years the lines between advertising, marketing and publications have become blurred and to be it is all part of one big melting pot, the Connected Community.

Should Marketing and Strategy do more to cover the PR industry in Canada or it this the job of a separate publication?

Categories: Features