Friday, March 6, 2015

The Golden Age of PR

I usually check out Jonathan Chait's blog once or twice a week and I usually ignore the "Most Viewed Stories" column to the right of the page. Recently, though, one of the items caught my eye.

"Who Was That at the End of the New Avengers Trailer, and Why Should You Be So Excited?"


The link led to a Vulture.com post about the comic book character the Vision, followed by some speculation about what part he might play in the upcoming Avengers movie. Looking over the article, it struck me that this is an amazing time to be a publicist.  We have gone from publications hyping movies to hyping trailers to hyping two-second shots in trailers.

1 comment:

  1. Mark:

    I've thought for awhile that these two stories, The Decline of Journalism and The Rise of Public Relations, go together.

    This is also interesting from a political perspective, as these two fields, while being so similar (writing that tries to grab your attention) have much different norms:

    Journalism: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

    Public relations: Serve the client (who is likely to be comfortable).

    An interesting subfield here is science writing, where so much of journalism actually takes the form of public relations, reporting hype about cancer cures, etc.

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