How I really feel about public relations

I was reading through some of my past postings and I realized that I sound like I have a negative view of public relations. Let me clearly state that I absolutely love public relations! It's a field I kind of stumbled on to, but I'm glad I did. I really am passionate about PR and hope to spend the rest of my professional career in this exciting field.

That said, there are some current trends in PR that are frightening to me. I really hope the entire profession does not morph into media relations alone. If an organization fails to build relationships with all of its publics and concentrates solely on media relations, public relations, I fear will slowly fade into the background. There is so much more to PR than just media relations: employee communications, crisis communications, advising management, etc. Let's learn to think outside of the press release and work to become strategic communicators for our clients or organizations.