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Layoffs throughout the mainstream news media have suddenly snowballed as never before. Major outlets ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post to TIME to Business Insider to Vice Media let go of hundreds of reporters and editors. The Los Angeles Times alone slashed 20 percent of its editorial staff.
The latest bloodbath accelerates a trend begun almost 20 years ago. Jobs for journalists, in newsrooms national and local, dwindled dramatically from 2008 to 2020, plummeting some 26 percent to 31,000, and are expected to keep dropping 3 percent a year until 2032. Readership has declined. Once-successful newspapers and magazines have withered into skeletons or gone out of business.
Meantime, another force is at work, quietly operating beyond public view. A profession that exists largely to maintain a symbiotic rapport with the news media is flourishing. This generally benign entity? Public relations.
PR specialists in the United States currently number an estimated 264,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment opportunities in the sector between 2022 and 2032 are projected to grow by 6 percent a year—"faster than the average for all occupations," according to the bureau. In the U.S. alone, the world's top 250 PR firms grew by 11.4 percent in 2022, reporting fee income of $11.4 billion.
In other words, just as the news media business is shrinking, the less visible PR business is expanding. And here's a key metric: The ratio of PR professionals to journalists, only two to one back in 1980, rose to more than three to one in 2008, and now stands at more than six to one. For every reporter still on the payroll, six PR pros are vying for his attention.
Ongoing layoffs in the news media are destined to render the six-to-one proportion even more lopsided.
Should these opposing trajectories matter to the average American citizen who still avidly follows the news?
Yes. It should matter a lot. There are multiple implications, some obvious, others less so.
The outcome that's likely least expected and most overlooked is this: the public relations profession will grow vastly more powerful and persuasive—inevitably so—and exert more influence over what news is reported and how.
This seismic disruption will bring some benefits, but will also run more than a few risks.
The general public little knows—much less understands or appreciates—a basic fact about public relations: PR people have access to most news before almost anyone else, including the news media itself.
Plus, much of the news that's reported originates from public relations—estimates run from 25 percent to 85 percent—either through an email pitch, a tip over the phone or a press release. Translation: Before reporters and editors get the chance to curate the news, PR, in collaboration with clients and unbeknownst to the general public, curates it first.
This access to inside information comes in handy on both sides. Case in point: PR pros, trained to lend a hand to journalists, deliver exclusives and interviews with otherwise elusive Fortune 500 CEOs. And reporters, now stretched to gather ever-more news and frame it ever-faster, will likely be more grateful than before for these convenient services.
The catch is that fewer journalists are available to dig out real news and do so independently. They feel forced to depend on public relations sources for publishable material. They'll want—and need—to maintain those valuable PR contacts. Reporters assigned to juggernauts such as Meta and Google, for example—or, for that matter, the elite White House press corps—will feel more beholden to stay on what the PR folks regard as the straight and narrow.
PR will thus accrue more leverage over reporters. And that will likely intensify the growing imbalance of power between parties.
The news media cutbacks trigger a chain reaction long since set in motion. Public relations will be better positioned to bargain for media coverage that reflects a party line favorable to clients. Reporters will collide with fresh challenges to maintain a semblance of objectivity and arrive at some approximation of the truth.
And that's just for starters. Given more layoffs, fake news and misinformation will more easily find new homes. Propaganda on behalf of myriad sources will prevail. The PR business will serve more than ever as a shadow media, acting as a puppeteer, a Wizard of Oz masterminding public perception from behind a corporate curtain.
What to do? For starters, journalists should be hyper-vigilant in vetting which PR pitches actually qualify as news. The PR industry should do its utmost—as it typically does, by the way—to uphold the highest ethics and take responsibility for disseminating information closely resembling the facts.
As for the average citizen? Cast a skeptical eye over any news you consume, knowing it may come from a source representing a special interest. You might even sample news outlets across the ideological spectrum, the better to avoid being too tribal and catering only to your own partisan tastes.
Ignore this warning about the news at your peril. Otherwise, you'll never know more than half the story.
Bob Brody, an American public relations consultant now living in Italy, has served as a media strategist at Weber Shandwick, Ogilvy Public Relations and Rubenstein Associates. The author of the memoir "Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age," he contributes personal essays to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
