I spend a lot of time with the Internet. I live it, I breathe it, I bet there is an alternate reality where it helps me solve groovy mysteries with the help of an electric van and plucky dog.

But I digress.

I spend a lot of time with the Internet and because of that I hear more than my share of stories about how older paradigms are dying and being replaced by shiny, new web-based ones.

• Print is dying.
• Newspapers are dying.
• The media is dying,
• and yes, PR is dying.

You know, as much as I care about the Internet, I have say that most of those structures aren’t dying, they’re merely shifting.

Since this post was spurred by this article put out by Ragan (which I am quoted in), I’ll use PR as the example.

Let’s begin.

The traditional press release won’t get you very far online.

Bloggers, like journalists, get dozens and dozens of queries everyday and the only way for your product to get above the noise is to make it personal. A good amount of the work I do is research, looking at blogs and building relationships; Taking a pulse of what is happening in the industry and crafting stories that will be of specific interest to the person I am pitching.

The reason I go through all of this work is that I hate pitching. If I am going to blast an email off to anyone, I want to have some idea that whatever I’m selling is something they want to buy or at least something they want to hear about.

With that said, PR isn’t dead.

PR is still an absolutely necessary piece of the marketing mix. There is plenty of good work you can do through advertising and social networks, but it’s these stories, told through PR, that get you real traction. It’s the ability to convince someone that the thing that you care about is worth them caring about it, and giving them the tools to spread that message to others.

The problem is that too many people are still locked in one of two paradigms. They either believe that new media is overhyped and underwhelming, in which case they avoid it entirely or they believe that it is the holy grail of communication — which leads them to avoid courting the more traditional forms of press that can bring your ideas into the mainstream.

To stay relevant, you need to strike a balance between these two ideologies.

PR firms need to continue to embrace Social Media. There needs to be a major shift in thinking where they realize that courting bloggers, and communicating through services like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is a legitimate tool in their belt. Many of them, Edelman comes to mind, are making big moves in that direction, and smaller, boutique firms, Heavy Bag Media among others, are basing a large portion of their campaigns around the web.

On the other side of the coin, new media types need to take lessons from traditional PR. Learn to craft effective releases, learn how to communicate with newspapers, television networks, radio stations and other forms of media. Learn that effective marketing involves shaping your story to meet the needs of many different kinds of audiences. Don’t lock yourself into the idea that the web is the only way and that anyone who says differently has been spending too much time at their telegraph.

Will PR ever cease to exist?

I don’t see anything on the horizon that can step into replace it. There might, however, be a shift in language as the relationship between companies and the press they are courting becomes more transparent. The playfield may become less top-down, with a corporation “releasing” information to the crowd in hopes that they will disseminate it, and could become more level — where a company releases the information publicly through the social channels they have built up, and allows people to pick it up organically.

Do you think PR is on its deathbed? Weigh in.

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