PR Students Worry About Reinvention of Industry

Perhaps no other economic downturn in the last 20 years is causing the same level of reverberations through the nation's economy as the recession we're now in the midst of. While everyone's concerned about their future in one degree or another, perhaps no group is as concerned as recent college graduates or those about to enter the work force.

Students about to enter the work force or recent graduates are most certainly encountering a challenging environment. While the current economic turmoil has a lot to do with it, the situation is complicated by the fact that the overall marketing and media landscape, with which PR will be forever linked, is literally in the profess of reinventing itself.

This reinvention is due chiefly to the emergence of blogs and other social media, as well as the decline of conventional media. Hardly a day goes by that a story predicting the newspaper industry's imminent death isn't published. In fact, several stories have made the rounds recently predicting that The New York Times may end the printed version of its flagship publication as early as May.

Certainly the business model around both publishing and advertising is going through a turmoil like never seen before. That said, anyone who claims to be able to chart exactly how any replacement vehicle(s) and their accompanying business model will be structured doesn't really know what they're talking about because the business model behind the replacements is still very much a work in progress.

I'm certainly not criticizing social media here; in fact, I'm in the midst of launching a social media practice at Astoria Communications. Yet, in contrast to many who have "pie in the sky" notions of what it will do, I believe we should have a much more concrete approach that focuses on knowing how to use social-media tools for business development. Even as new schools of thought are emerging that say expanding one's view of what a social circle is when it comes to social-networking platforms, it's still as important as ever to realize that these are communication platforms and capitalizing on them will require individuals to know how to do that successfully.

While I certainly won't slam a journalism or PR degree, I'd counsel current students and recent graduates to try and broaden their educational experience as much as possible. The classes you think are boring in school, such as economics or other business-oriented classes, will be what sets you apart from a hungry pack in the future.