There’s a great discussion going on at Todd Defron’s blog regarding the role of PR professionals in this evolving Internet landscape. The discussion boils down to that always sticky wicket: the relationship between PR professionals and journalists. As journalists in this webbified world increasingly are paid to drive traffic to their websites, are PR professionals going to be in cahoots with journalists to help beef up the journalists’ traffic stats?

As the role of PR changes, along with that of the journalist, we’re going to run into more and more issues like this. While journalists have been governed by ethics set by their news organization, that is going by the boards as journalists hang out their own shingles. Meanwhile, PR professionals have no mandatory ethics code though many operate under standards set by the governing PR association, PRSA.

Meanwhile, of course, anyone can game the system. I’ve been told that some unscrupulous authors, for example, try to buy up enormous quantities of their books to beef up their rankings on Amazon. I have no idea if it works.

I think, however, as we try to envision all the dirty tricks people can play, we lose site of the basic functions of journalism and public relations. Writers at the end of the day don’t exist unless they have readers. Simply getting traffic to a site without someone engaging on the site is about as useful as driving only browsers to a retail store. If, however, the traffic are readers, all the better. PR professionals are paid to get visibility for their clients. Getting traffic to a particular news article by itself is ethically-neutral. It only falls into the slippery slope if a reporter starts favoring a PR person who does so, and vice versa.

But wait a sec. This line of thinking obscures the impact of the social web. Today, of course, people are getting news pushed to them. You might read a news article on Facebook or a snippet on Twitter and LinkedIn or a blog. Now that we’ve all become publishers you don’t need to get to a news site to get the news. One-third of all adults, according to a recent Forrester study (see a discussion of this on Defron’s blog are actively engaged in online communication styles – that is talking to each other. That great hurly-burly wagging group is where PR professionals need to be taking aim. Of course, we’ll still be trying to get journalists (in whatever form) to write about our clients but a brunt of our efforts will be to engage directly our clients’ clients. Where will journalists fit into this equation? Who will the key influencers be? I will be mulling this over this year as we evolve our PR practice.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.