A great summary of the media landscape in a Robert Peston blog/speech

Planning a course on Media Relations it would be hard to find a single source which raises so many issues on role and future of journalism and by implication role and future of media relations as Robert Peston's latest blog entry.  This is a reprint of Robert Peston's speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival sponsored by the Media Guardian and reprinted as a blog.  The speech being a blog is of course significantly enhanced by readers' comments underneath (114 two days later) - for a recent Royal Bank of Scotland blog he ended up with over 700 - and this is of course an increasingly interesting and important aspect of media relations in terms of monitoring and judging how a story and discourse is being received and in its future development. 

I also thought it was particularly noteworthy how important the blog is in the development and disseminaton of his ideas; "For me, the blog is at the core of everything I do, it is the bedrock of my output. The discipline of doing it shapes my thoughts. It disseminates to a wider world the stories and themes that I think matter.....Most important of all, the blog allows me and the BBC to own a big story and create a community of interested people around it. Sharing information - some of it hugely important, some of it less so - with a big and interested audience delivers that ownership and creates that committed community."

Text 100 report on PR effectiveness with major brands

Text 100 has produced report on role of PR and in particular relationship between media coverage or media prominence and brand value. According to PR Week a second report is due assessing role of tone of coverage which perhaps highlights one of the areas of the first report open to criticism. Role of media coverage according to research was more marked with more complex products as compared with "low involvement" products.