Five years as a journalist, 30 years in PR and this article is, at the broad brush strokes, spot on. At the strategy and budget levels, PR is being eaten by ma

Five years as a journalist, 30 years in PR and this article is, at the broad brush strokes, spot on. At the strategy and budget levels, PR is being eaten by marketing. We also have a quality problem -- there's virtually no barrier to market entry and many clients don't know what they need. The combination means there's a lot of relatively ineffective work being done. Practitioners, particularly on the agency side, are too invested in doing leading-edge, breakthrough work when most clients, most of the time, need consistently good-enough work that is repeatable and measurable against KPIs. It's our equivalent (well, one of our equivalents) of chasing shiny objects. The ice floe is melting. We used to be the gatekeepers to the media gatekeepers. Then earned media lost a lot of its power, and we became content strategists and producers. Now content is becoming largely commoditized so our production of it gets edged out in favor of paying influencers and their audiences for a slice of attention. You can build a business out of that (many, many have) but it's not PR. And that makes it harder to defend as a separate need/discipline.