In an age of disinformation, misinformation, deep fakes and content marketing, we PR professionals tell our clients and users that Earned is gold as it gives you the credibility you’d not be able to get elsewhere. And with Earned you can increase your influence as you are able to flip it into Shared, Owned and even Paid media.

The value of Earned, however, presupposes a credible media that sticks by journalistic principles that are not for sale. If the media is no longer credible, then we would have to rethink the value of Earned and its still prominent place in our communication strategies.

I am sure this happens everywhere to one extent for another but in Indonesia, where I work, and in neighboring Malaysia, media coverage is now on sale, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. 

Some journalists you meet will soft sell by telling you that their media outlet needs money because of dwindling advertising revenues. It would help make their job of giving your clients coverage easier if you cooperated with their sales staff, who accompany them on their news assignments, in purchasing advertisements, sponsored coverage, partner content or some permutation of pay as you go.

Journalists in Malaysia, my PR agency friends tell me, are more in-your-face. Whenever pitched a story, they’ll ask if their clients were advertisers. If the answer is ‘no’, then sorry they can’t write a story on the client’s activities. News value be damned.

These practices are prevalent not only to the lesser media outlets but even to the hitherto most respected news institutions in these countries. Who can you trust?

A cottage industry of press agents

This condition has spurned a cottage industry of press agents. These days, hardly a month goes by without marketing pitches from these largely unknown companies arriving in my email inbox, offering guaranteed coverage even in the most respected news outlets.

One of them sent me their rate card where they guarantee that they’d write, distribute and secure coverage for a press release at Indonesia’s largest and one of the most influential news portals for Rp2.5 million (about US $150). But if you pay Rp5.5 million (US $335) more they can even secure two backlinks to your client’s website URL and for another similar amount they can make sure that the story is not interrupted by any pop-up ads. They made a point of saying that coverage is guaranteed.

This state of affairs has many PR professionals wondering what it all means to an important stock of our trade, media relations, and by implication the role of Earned media in communication strategies.

Media relations is about cultivating professional relationships with journalists so that you are attuned to what narratives they would find newsworthy, giving you an entrée to pitch to them, find out about what’s happening and even to call in a favor or two.

It is a time-honored craft, but one that is fast losing ground to money. However, because perceptions always lag behind reality, it will be some time before the general public realizes that Earned media cannot be trusted any more.

This raises a whole host of questions, namely:

• Why bust your chops on media relations and coming up with creative news angles when they lose out to a simple payment?

• What is the value of Earned when even the largest and most influential news outlets are playing the money game?

• Do PR professionals throw in the towel and buy such coverage, or do they stick by their ethics and refuse to pay? What conversations would they then have with clients who view media coverage as important?

If we cannot rely on Earned to provide credibility anymore, what can we rely on? 

What still matters?

There are no simple answers to these questions but what might be useful to explore is what still matters when Earned is compromised.

What would still be in the control of corporations, brands and PR professionals, especially with the ability of social media to reach out to all their stakeholders, is what they have to say, the actions they need to take, as well as the tone and manner of how they communicate.

What they say and do is dependent on their purpose, which is akin to a character in a human being. Someone devoid of character would not come across as trusted, inspiring or even interesting.

This is the reason that the Page Society calls for companies to define their corporate character. It includes taking into consideration their vision, mission and values but goes beyond that as it is virtually the soul of a company, that informs whatever it says or does.

If this can be done then the corporation has a chance of going out into the world with its communications, through social media channels and events, that sound authentic and credible. Anything less than that and you fall back on Earned that no longer has credibility, and marketing tricks that may harness lots of impressions but impress no one.

It is scary to think that Earned may no longer hold much value as for years we have been preaching to all and sundry that this is what PR does best: securing Earned so we can leverage its credibility on behalf of our clients or corporations. One large multinational PR network even promotes Earned-first thinking as its core offering.

But we live in an age of disruption where much of what we hold dear may be worthless sooner than we think. The best course of action for PR professionals would be to acknowledge what’s going on in Earned and figure a workaround.

I hope this article will spur debate on what should be done as I too am struggling for answers.