Just over two decades ago, Google was introduced to the world. Amazon was still just a river and Facebook was not even an idea yet. Today, we can hardly remember a time before the internet and some of us haven’t lived in a world without it.
So, what was it like working in a PR office before emails, Google and social media?
Slow – extremely slow and very time consuming! There were lots of phone calls and long hours of feeding press releases at the fax machine. With its slow manual process and constant screeches that could be heard across the office all day long, you could be forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief when email arrived in the early 1990's.
Up until the arrival of email in the early 1990's, press releases had to be typed on an old-fashioned typewriter (either manual or electronic) or if you were lucky enough to afford the dazzling WordStar word processor, then you were at the cutting-edge of office automation.
Packaging the press release meant inserting them into envelopes that had to labelled with a typed sticker. Each photograph had a sticker on the back with the photo caption and the colour transparencies and/or B&W negatives had to be labelled in the same way as well. Once everything was placed in the envelope, the not-so-fun task of sticking on the postage stamps began. The courier would then collect and deliver to the daily newspapers and the rest was sent through the Post Office.
Assembling a press kit was an expensive exercise. It required a lot of printing for the folders, press release and support documentation as well as the photographs and negatives. Today flash drives, file link uploads through apps such as Google Drive or Dropbox and virtual press rooms, have not only saved on time and cost but are also positive step towards embracing a greener environmentally alternative.
As the world edged towards the digital era, the first forms of supplying ‘digital’ meant downloading your press release to an eight-inch floppy disk, which had the memory capacity of only 98.5 KB at its inception and gradually increased to a high-density format of 1.2MB.
Media databases were not readily available for easy download from a subscription. This was another time-consuming task for PRs, which required daily reading of all newspapers, trade and consumer magazines in order to collate the names of featured journalists. And media monitoring meant tackling a pile of magazines and newspapers to search for any coverage related to your company or clients if you were any agency, competitors and the industry. If you were lucky enough to have a ‘cuttings agency’, then you had to wait for them to mail the articles, which arrived cut and pasted to an A4 sheet of white paper.
Undoubtedly, the internet has forever changed the face of PR. While it has introduced a more efficient way of doing PR today, there is one aspect from yesteryear that is missed.
Back in the ‘old days’ PRs spent less time behind the keyboard and more time on the phone or meeting with journalists to actually speak to one another. Journalists also had more time to meet with PRs and to attend events and launches. Story pitches were thrashed out ‘in person’ conversations that often led to other publicity angles and opportunities while chatting.
If we reflect on where PR has come from and where it is headed, one thing stands out. The people who work in the PR industry are more important than the digital devices and channels because it’s their role that makes the technological advances work at a human level. So, if you sometimes feel that the train seems to go a bit too fast at times – take heart that PRs will continue to shape the future of the industry, even when the robots come.
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