The Changing Face of The Media Communications

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Yujie Chen 陳玉劼

Hometown: Shaanxi Province

Time in Beijing: 14 years

Company: PR Newswire China-PR Newswire

Position: Director, PRC

Job Duties: Manage sales, marketing, media relations and daily operations of Xinhua PR Newswire in its Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen offices
Famous person I've met: Rupert Murdoch

Enduring memory from 2008: Sadly it was the heart-wrenching, and at the same time heart-warming, experience in the aftermath of the earthquakes in Sichuan and other parts of China in May. To watch so many people die or suffer extraordinary pains from severe trauma once again reminded us in an acutely painful way of the fragility and preciousness of life. Meanwhile, it was moving to see the heroes who risked their own safety to rescue and aid people in need. There was a man from Guangzhou traveling to Wenchuan who lost all his family members in the quake but still worked for nine days continuously in the rescue efforts. He will forever remain a hero to me.

Last book I read: The Future of Management

The Changing Face of Media Communications

In the mid-to late 1990s the public relations industry was still only beginning to establish itself in China. At the time I was a television Journalist. Life then was pretty simple for us and also for PR professionals. When there was a press conference, PR firms sent out an invitation, we showed up, they handed us a press release, we did some Interviews and back to the office we went to produce a TV segment. We all seemed to be happy. A well orchestrated press conference seemed to be what both the companies and the media needed.

Much has changed over the past decade. The media community in China is becoming increasingly sophisticated and makes greater demands on public relations professionals than ever before. For most of the past two decades, media have come to rely on PR people as the major source of information. It used to be that companies would issue short statements about particular subjects. But now, competition is more intense among the media and the level of professionalism is greater. The media are looking for more in depth information from companies to write edgier and more comprehensive stories. As a result, journalists are taking a much more aggressive and critical approach and doing a lot more independent research and investigative reporting.

This obviously makes the job of the PR people a lot more challenging-but also more important-as they face a more skeptical media audience. In addition, the emergence of online media and blogs has created a much larger and more diverse audience far company news, and created a challenge for PR people to reach all of their audiences. In the last five years, almost all major public relations crises experienced by domestic and international corporations started in the blogs.

All this means public relations professionals must constantly monitor and study the new developments in the traditional, online and mobile media to keep abreast of industry news and events in their daily work. They also need to learn and utilize the latest technological tools to effectively communicate with the increasingly fragmented audience in media, customers, industry community and other stakeholders. It has been a tremendous experience living through these changes at PR Newswire China.