UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Post

Hopefully a useful little introduction to communications planning for early career researchers that find themselves with the challenge of needing to reach people with something they need to communicate, should that be to help study recruitment, promoting an event or themselves, or the outcomes of their research. https://lnkd.in/efwKQRvP

Do you need a degree to have a job in PR? I think most people will agree there are many routes you can take for any career nowadays, but our editor, Daney Parker recently asked PR recruiters which degree subjects are most useful for a career in PR, and to what extent a degree is necessary. Out of curiosity, she also asked Chat GPT, which decided the top 10 degrees for getting into PR were: 1. Public Relations 2. Communications 3. Journalism 4. Marketing 5. Advertising 6. Media Studies 7. English or English Literature 8. Business Administration 9. Digital Marketing 10. Psychology What route did you take when you were starting out in PR? 

📅 It’s almost a year since the PR Education, Training and Accreditation report that Richard Bailey Hon FCIPR and I wrote was published by PR Academy Ltd. One of the key findings was the steady demise of the single honours public relations degree in the UK. This situation was corroborated in a journal article titled ‘Undergraduate public relations education in the United Kingdom: Quo Vadis?’ written by Michal Chmiel and Raluca Moise and published in Public Relations Inquiry. The topic was also discussed in a recent EUPRERA webinar. After reading the paper and watching the webinar, it’s clear that there is no obvious solution to the issue. However, there is some evidence that broader communication management undergraduate degrees that include public relations as a module are recruiting well. ❓ So how far is the decline of the single honours public relations degree an issue? Perhaps it simply reflects the interests that Gen Z students have in a broader approach to communication management that includes marketing, advertising and journalism. From this perspective, it makes sense for public relations to be studied as a specialist subject at masters level. However, there are also signs that the recent increase in enrolments in masters-level public relations degrees (or strategic communication as they are often called) is going into reverse. The Higher Education sector in general is now struggling with a combination of frozen undergraduate fees, declining international student numbers and inflation. Departments will close, jobs will be lost and universities may have to merge and this will undoubtedly impact public relations degrees. 🆕 Richard and I are currently researching an update on our report. This will include a review of the topics that are being published in leading public relations journals. Our working hypothesis is that some great research is being done that could help practitioners in tackling some of the thorny communication challenges that they encounter every day. But the findings are largely inaccessible as the articles often sit behind paywalls and rarely get discussed in practitioner forums. Whilst the decline of the single honours public relations degree is clearly a major disappointment, weak transfer of academic knowledge to practice is, I believe, a greater issue. If you have any thoughts on this and/or you would like to be involved in our research, please do message myself or Richard. We hope to publish the report in the summer.

There are few things that anger me as much as misrepresentation of public relations. The reasons for the firing of the vp for communications at New College of Florida gave me pause-- and motivated me to write about how the profession's roles may be portrayed and why we need to stick with ethics and truth. https://lnkd.in/g4VWRaFS