Where are the PR jobs?

PRBlogNews is in transition (see new blog template - more on that later as we tweak through it) and on the move.  I am heading to Richmond, Virginia next week. 

Where are the jobs and what skills do you need to land them? - that’s what I will discuss as the Keynote Speaker next Saturday, April 18, 10:30 AM, at Virginia Commonwealth University Public Relations Student Society of America in Richmond.  

Special thanks to Carol Kyber, PRSSA planning committee member, for scouting me out on the web and making it easy for me to come down to Virginia. Also thanks to Leah Rullman, VCU PRSSA President, for pulling this together and making speakers and panelists feel welcome. No matter how much we move to ‘wireless’ mass communication, PR is is still about person-to-person relations. I look forward to meeting Carol, Leah, and everybody else at VCU. 

• The conference is PRomoting Success: Finding your place in the big world of public relations
• The official title of my talk is Media and Mass Communication in the Post-Digital Age.

VCU is embracing twitter and social media . Virginia Commonwealth University is the largest university in Virginia and ranks among the top universities in the country in sponsored research. Located on two downtown campuses in Richmond, VCU enrolls more than 32,000 students in 208 certificate and degree programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-five of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU’s 15 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University compose the VCU Medical Center, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers.

Media and Mass Communication in a Post-Digital Age - The equation for marketing, advertising and public relations has shifted so dramatically that the old rules of communication no longer apply. Today’s communicators need an entirely new skill set and a broader focus. As more personalized mass media (video, blogs, social media, etc) demands our time and involvement, communicators must adapt with ‘post-digital’ strategies and tactics in order to be effective. Public relations should play the lead role in the communications mix. PR is best positioned to be flexible, creative, efficient, and penetrating - if we ‘get’ digital. The PR professional of the future (say, six months from now), like the journalist of today, will need to be adept at news creation and distribution.