May 12, 2019 - Economy
The ever-rising flack-to-hack ratio
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There are now more than 6 PR professionals for every journalist in the U.S., as Bloomberg notes.
Why it matters: PR jobs have doubled in the past two decades, even as newsrooms shrink, deal with buyouts and sometimes disappear altogether.
- Flacks are more in demand than journalists are, if pay is any indicator. The average PR worker took home about $20,000 more last year than journalists did — a gap in pay that's moderated in the last few years, but is still much bigger than it was in 1997.
The bottom line: Corporations — which often have PR folks within the company while simultaneously being repped by outside PR shops, too — are inevitably telling the crafted stories they want to tell.
Go deeper: Media salaries lean higher for writing than video, photo
