Report: There are three PR pros for every one journalist

On Monday, ProPublica and the Columbia Journalism Review co-published an article about PR’s role in filling the void left by shrinking newsrooms. Did you catch it?

On Monday, they co-published an article titled “PR Industry Fills Vacuum Left by Shrinking Newsrooms.” In it, writer John Sullivan bemoans the decline of journalism in numbers, and posits the following:

“As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it.”

Sullivan takes an exhaustive look at public relations’ infusion into the mainstream media—from its roots to the digital age. At the heart of the story is the simple truth that with far fewer journalists being asked to produce roughly the same amount of work, there’s opportunity like never before for PR pros to push their message through.

He cited data data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows the number of journalists is falling, while the ranks of PR pros has increased drastically. According to Sullivan:

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