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By: Emily Friedman I want to say something that sounds a little crazy: PR practitioners have to be the most agile people in the communications industry. The more time I spend studying public relations, the more it feels true. PR has always required practitioners to move quickly. Crisis communications, reputation management, cultural shifts, and breaking news. The job has never been static. But now, on top of that baseline pressure, the entire communications landscape is changing at once. Media outlets are consolidating. Newsrooms are shrinking. Executives are becoming their own broadcasters. AI is reshaping how information is discovered, summarized, and trusted. The turnaround time is faster than ever, and PR is the function expected to both predict what’s coming and react in real time. That realization also explains something else I’ve been struggling to put into words. Have you ever tried to explain public relations to someone outside the industry and realized halfway through that, it sounds kind of…abstract? Public relations starts to feel almost philosophical when you try to define it. There are so many moving parts that it’s difficult to put into a single sentence. Trust. Credibility. Reach. Relationships. These aren’t concrete deliverables. They’re outcomes. And that makes PR especially hard to explain to people in more traditionally defined careers, or to older generations who expect clear titles and obvious outputs. When I try to explain PR to friends or family, the definition almost always gets flattened. It becomes press releases. Or “PR packages,” where influencers get free products and film unboxings. Or it gets lumped into marketing, social media, or communications. Eventually, you stop correcting people, not because you don’t know what PR is, but because it’s hard to explain something that doesn’t sit still. That tension clicked for me while listening to The Spin Sucks Podcast, hosted by Gini Dietrich, the creator of the PESO model. In the episode Publicity Is Dead. PR Is Not., Dietrich responds to a statement from Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP, one of the largest advertising and communications holding companies in the world, who declared that PR no longer exists. Dietrich frames this not as a hot take, but as a tell. Not proof that PR is irrelevant, but evidence that the industry has a definition problem and a broader lack of understanding. What’s interesting is that PR’s goals haven’t actually changed. At its core, public relations still comes down to the same measures of success: trust, credibility, reach, and relationships. What has changed is the way those outcomes are achieved. The tools, platforms, media dynamics, and expectations are constantly shifting, which makes the discipline harder to pin down and easier to misunderstand. For students, this creates a unique kind of whiplash. We’re learning the foundations of PR while also adapting to an industry that’s actively evolving. We’re trying to understand how PR works at the same time we’re watching it change in real time because of AI, media consolidation, and a broader communications revolution. We’re being asked to explain what PR is while the definition itself is still being rewritten. That doesn’t mean PR is broken. It means PR is responsive by design. And suddenly, that opening thought doesn’t feel so out there. PR practitioners have to be the most agile people in the communications space because agility is the job. The destination stays the same, but the path keeps changing. PR professionals are expected to anticipate shifts, respond to disruption, and protect trust no matter what the landscape looks like that day. One moment it’s a breaking news cycle. The next it’s a platform algorithm change. Then it’s a crisis unfolding in real time, a cultural moment brands have to navigate carefully, or a new technology reshaping how information is discovered and believed. The turnaround is fast, and the margin for error is small. So maybe PR feels abstract, not because it lacks structure, but because it’s built to move. It’s designed to adapt to the world as it changes, not after the fact. That constant motion is what makes PR hard to define, but it’s also what makes it powerful. For students, that can feel unsettling. We’re learning the foundations of PR while also being asked to think ahead, stay flexible, and prepare for tools and platforms that may not even exist yet. We’re learning how to explain an industry while it’s still evolving in real time. What does it mean to learn in an industry that refuses to sit still? Maybe it means learning how to stay agile before anything else.
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