The UK’s PR industry is worth £12.9bn, a 34% rise over the £9.62bn in 2013, according to the PR Census 2016.* And it now employs 83,000 people.
This employment finding confirms claims that there are now far more PRs than journalists working in Britain.
The Labour Force Survey (LFS) figures for the year up to June 2015 revealed that 64,000 people in the UK described themselves as “journalists, newspaper and periodical editors”.**
I concede that these are not like-for-like statistics, but the gap is so wide that I think the situation is clear.
The PR “industry” is becoming something of a colussus, as Francis Ingham director general of the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) cheerfully admits. He said: “Our industry is surging ahead, becoming bigger and bigger.”
The census also found that the average age of public relations employees is just 28 and that 64% of the total are women. As for diversity, 91% are white.
The pay looks attractive compared to that for the majority of journalists, with the average PR salary being £45,100 (a decrease, incidentally, on 2013 when it was found to be £53,781).
And there is a significant disparity - of more than £9,000 - between the wages of men and women.
Comment: It is tempting to make a point about there being more people employed to tell a story on behalf of their employers than there are people employed to hold those employers to account.
But PRs would surely respond by saying that journalists are employed to tell stories on behalf of their employers too (look at the papers campaigning one way or the other over the EU referendum, for example).
In other words, there is a similarity - a moral equivalence perhaps - between PRs and journalists.
We cannot deny the partiality of the majority of Britain’s national newspapers and that the internal heirarchy ensures that much of the content satisfies the wishes of the editors and publishers.
However, journalism benefits from diversity of ownership (and consequent plurality of voice) along with intense competition and, it should be said, something of a maverick, even anarchic, streak. So, along the way, truths do get revealed.
Of course, if media companies go on cutting back on journalism jobs, then it does imperil the trade’s ability to get behind the PR facade.
As we have seen, and going back several years, an increasing number of newspaper articles rely on PR output and input.
It would be facile to say that PRs lie. But they do narrow the agenda. They do shape the information they provide to ensure it gives a positive spin to their employer.
Questioning those accounts is a journalist’s job. But are they given enough time and space by their publishers to do so? That’s a worrying problem now, and a much more crucial one in future, if the disproportionate ratio between journalists and PRs continues at its current rate.
*The PR Census 2016 is developed by the PRCA in conjunction with PRWeek and YouGov. The fieldwork was undertaken between 17 February and 26 April 2016.
**The Labour Force Survey is based on a quarterly sample of around 100,000 individuals.
