THE ROLE OF MEDIA RELATIONS IN CORPORATE PUBLIC RELATIONS PRACTICE

Introduction

Media relations is the core activity in many public relations jobs (Wilcox, 2015). One of the participants of this study remarked, “Media relations has over the years become an increasingly significant profile and has added value to the business bottom-line”. To understand this strong link between the media and public relations, the researcher examined Grunig and Hunt (1984) view on how public relations originated.

THE USE OF INTERNET IN PUBLIC RELATIONS AND ITS IMPACT ON THE PRACTICE OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Introduction

The Internet began impacting on our ordinary lives only in the late 1990s, with the development of the World Wide Web (Gillies and Cailliau, 2000, Giovannetti, et’al., 2013). Since then, the Internet has been used extensively for accessing instantaneous information and communicating across geographical boundaries. Due to its characteristics of speed, efficiency and economy, the Internet began to be applied increasingly across industries ranging from retail and banking to the media (Giovannetti et al., 2013).

The emergence of social media in the new millennium gave the World Wide Web a new name, ‘Web 2.0’ (Breakenridge, 2018). Though social media has various definitions, in essence, it is a medium for people to collaborate and share content via Internet tools ranging from video-sharing, photo-sharing and blogs to social networking websites, virtual worlds and micro-blogs (Mersham, Theunissen and Peart, 2019).