Public radio
frequently drawing the media in its wake. See
blogosphere; demotic turn; information
commons; mediasphere.
Public radio Term used in Australia to refer to
community radio.
Public relations news (PRN) See news:
public relations news (pr).
Public relations (PR) According to the Char-
tered Institute of Public Relations website
(2005), ‘Public Relations is about reputation- the result of what you do, what you say and
what others say about you ... Public Relations is
the discipline which looks after reputation, with
the aim of earning understanding and support
and infl uencing opinion and behaviour. It is the
planned and sustained eff ort to establish and
maintain goodwill and mutual understanding
between an organization and its publics.’
Many companies and institutions in both the
public and private sector have PR departments
dedicated to creating and sustaining their
good image and reputation with a variety of
publics: for example, shareholders, taxpayers,
clients, customers and employees. Public rela-
tions personnel may work alongside those in
advertising and marketing but their role is
essentially focused on building relationships and
fostering the two-way communication channels
required to achieve this aim.
Shirley Harrison in Public Relations: An Intro-
duction (Routledge, 1995) writes that ‘the most
common public relations activities undertaken
by practitioners are media relations, publicity
and publications, corporate public relations
and provision of information’. See bernstein’s
wheel; epistle; grunig and hunt model,
1984; johnson and scholes: stakeholder
mapping; lobbying; opinion leader; pest;
pie chart; public affairs; publics; stake-
holders; swot; professionalization (of
political communication); propaganda.
▶David Miller and William Dinan, A Century of Spin:
How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of
Corporate Power (Pluto Press, 2008); Sandra Cain,
Key Concepts in Public Relations (Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2009); Bob Franklin, Mike Hogan, Quentin
Langley, Nick Mosdell and Eliot Pill, Key Concepts in
Public Relations (Sage, 2009); Ralph Tench and Liz
Yeomans, Exploring Public Relations (Pearson Educa-
tion Limited, 2009).
Publics A term used within public relations
(pr) practice to refer to specific groups that
are or might become an intended audience for
communication activities: pressure groups,
customers, competitors, local communities, and
opinion leaders. As Paul Baines, John Egan and
and both provide means for elite management of
those opinions’.
They identify three historical phases in the
evolution of public opinion infrastructures. Th e
fi rst was located in the salons of mid-eighteenth-
century France (see salon discourse). Here
the political and intellectual elite gathered
socially to discuss all matters from art to philoso-
phy, not least the aff airs of state and the nature of
government. Th is elite model of public opinion
found a modestly downmarket parallel in the
coff ee houses of London, presided over by such
‘agorans’ as Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84). Th ese
‘spaces’ for discourse were only one aspect of
the infrastructure; what formed an extension of
them were the writings of those novelists, poets,
scientists and philosophers who attended the
salons or met in the coff ee houses.
Towards the middle of the nineteenth century
the press became the dominant residence
of public opinion, but the newspapers were
increasingly refl ecting, both in the UK and the
US, the development of political parties. Herbst
and Beniger believe that ‘in concert with the
newspapers that shared their ideologies, politi-
cal parties were a critical component of the late-
19th century American infrastructure of public
opinion expression and assessment’. In fact
pressure groups of all kinds, including trade
unions, contributed to the group-based model of
public opinion.
New media technology such as radio and
more effi cient measurement practices contrib-
uted to what Herbst and Beniger term ‘a shift
from publics to audiences’. What had, until the
emergence of audience-measurement tech-
niques (such as the Audimeter-based nielsen
ratings in the States), been an aggregate of
opinions was now a profi le of diff erences, leading
to what in advertising terms was to become
segmentation. The ability to discriminate
between shades of opinion as far as this audi-
ence model is concerned indicates advancing
degrees of rationalization, and this, state Herbst
and Beniger, ‘works best for those at the top of a
given system’.
With the advent of internet communica-
tion, and particularly social networking (see
networking: social networking), opinion
is varyingly to be found on platforms such as
facebook, where public issues are not only
aired but campaigns launched free of initiation
by the power elite. In this sense, the Net
has become the most interactive of public
spaces, the agora of the twenty-first century,
often challenging traditional media but just as