I promised ages ago – among other things – to write a review of the PR trade mag, CorpComms after I posted on the current paucity of PR trade mags. [declaration, after this post Andrew Smith, the publisher of CorpComms, sent me a taster of three back issues to review!]
But, in the interests of fairness and spirit of competition, I decided to give a short review to each of the three main (as far as I know of) players in the PR trade industry: PR Week; PR Business and CorpComms.
First up is the tried and tested – Haymarket’s PR Week. According to its website, PR Week is ”the voice of the UK PR industry and the leading source of news, analysis and opinion on all aspects of public relations and corporate communications”. It has circulation of 16,000 in the UK and sister versions in the US and Germany (why only Germany?).
Being a weekly magazine, PRW has a good round up of news and coverage of current topics. However, working in a small consultancy, one criticism is that the news really only covers the big firms. On one hand this is understandable as they are the big industry players, generating the big accounts and winning the big contracts. But then on the other, I occasionally find that the top firms’ back-stabbing, nepotism and incestuous affairs can be a bit tiresome – or is that just jealousy?
Anyway, PRW’s editorial is generally good and of late has started to be quite a stimulating read (see my post here for instance). PRW has also attempted to start representing the reality of the current industry by introducing a new technology sector focus. As I don’t work in tech PR I will let others comment on this bit…. But I suspect Haymarket has decided to try and start impressing on tech (and other) issues due to perceived competition from the two new(ish) PR mags mentioned above. This also may be combined with stirrings about whether the PR establishment, such as PRW, is accurately reflecting the seismic shifts taking place in the industry. Recently questions have been asked at the heart of the establishment!
Web-wise, PRW has a good online version with pretty much full online content from the hard copy. It also provides differentiated content in the form of breaking stories, although I have rarely used this. One drawback from a new media perspective, however, is that all stories are paywalled. Tsk, tsk.
Overall, PRW is hard to beat on topicality and its wide-ranging debates on core issues. It has also, in my opinion, been a quite early-adopter of the New PR. Yeah, it wasn’t at the cutting edge, but it has come onboard quickly even if some of its contributors haven’t.
But PRW is an established mag nonetheless and may well be facing competition from the new upstarts on the block, such as PR Business and CorpComms. More to come…
Great stuff Simon. Looking forward to the next reviews. You should give them a marks for:
Readability
Coverage
Sectors
Etc etc
S:-D
Nice idea, Stephen. I had thought about giving ratings but couldn’t be bothered thinking up a way of how to do it!
I’ll give tham all a final score using yiur system once the reviews have been posted!
Glad to see you’re not mis-spending your bank holiday!
I agree with your criticism about PR Week’s over reliance on covering big firms. It is not as simple as saying they work on the big accounts, because PR Week will cover small stories from big firms but still ignore big stories from small firms. They also have a distinct London bias.
It was no always so and ten years ago PR Week was much more balanced and much, much better at covering small firms and the regions.
Good points, Stuart.
I hope these short reviews will be able to tease out some of the things PROs like/dislike about PR trade mags… maybe someone at Haymarket will even take note!
With regard focussing on smaller firms and good stories… see the forthcoming PR Business review.