6 ways PR was different two decades ago

The author reflects on his 18 years of experience in the public relations field—a career that included fax machines and physical press kids. Remember those?

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Eighteen years ago, I was an intern at Dorf & Stanton Communications in New York. That firm hired me as an account coordinator, and I’ve been a PR guy ever since. In my career I’ve held only PR or marketing positions, although I once “double dipped” and sold digital cameras to some big retailers.

I’ve worked on both sides of the agency relationship and never looked back. While I deliberately stayed the course over the years, the PR category changed dramatically over the same period of time. Here are a few of the many ways being a PR guy is different now than it was 18 years ago when I first punched in:

The Internet was, say, rudimentary at best. If you were lucky enough to have Internet access, you needed the patience of a saint for times when web pages would stall when loading. Also, it was crazy heavy with text. There were minimal images and graphics—primarily because website templates were eight or 10 years from commonality—but there was lots and lots of text to read.

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