Media coverage is a Means, not the End of Media Relations or Public Relations

It’s what’s most closely associated with Public Relations. But, like Public Relations itself, the role and benefits of media coverage are still misunderstood by many people.

Media coverage of your company or organisation can deliver many benefits, including increased brand awareness, better reputation and trust and boost your SEO with search engines.

But there’s a common misperception about media coverage I want to address in this post – that achieving media coverage is the end, or Objective, of media relations or Public Relations overall.

This misperception is fuelled by those, including previously me before I learned about best practice Public Relations on my CIPR Professional PR Certificate course, who see media coverage as a metric of Public Relations success and simply display what’s been gained and use its potential or actual reach to readers as a metric of its success.

Why the myth began

The reason for this is that, before 2010, this was the simplest metric of media relations success available to PR professionals, particularly when the coverage gained was in print – easy to measure the column inches gained – and most easily understood by their clients.

As a result, it was commonly cited as the success metric for media relations and very often measured also with Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) – the cost of buying the coverage space as advertising, usually multiplied by 3 as a proxy for the greater value of media coverage over advertising in being a third-party endorsement by the media outlet concerned. This is what I was taught when I entered Public Relations in 2011.

Why it doesn’t work

The problem with this is that this success metric has no clear link to how this media coverage is helping the company or organisation involved achieve its Business Objectives. So the client, whether internal or external to the PR’s organisation, can very reasonably say, “That’s great, but how is this helping me achieve my targets?”

It was because of that problem, that the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management held the World Public Relations Forum in Stockholm in 2010 to discuss how PR could better demonstrate its value to the people commissioning it.

The result was the Stockholm Accords. One of the key agreements was that for public relations to properly demonstrate its value as a strategic management function it should be focused on helping the organisation achieve its stated Objectives. So, to do so, the Public Relations professional should ask what they are and work out what Public Relations activities should be done to help achieve them.

How to measure success?

Logically, the next question was ‘How do we demonstrate what contribution the Public Relations activities have made to achieving those Objectives?’ AVE and other commonly-used measures such as Key Messages Placed and Sentiment Analysis didn’t do that.

This measurement problem was addressed at the next seminal conference that year in Barcelona. What came out of it were the now broadly-accepted best practice Public Relations measurement standards known as ‘Barcelona Principles’, which have since been updated twice by AMEC (International Association for Measurement & Evaluation of Communication), making Barcelona Principles 3.0 the current gold standard for Public Relations measurement.

At their heart are the simple idea that public relations can demonstrate its contribution to achieving organisation objectives by first setting measurable Business and Communication Objectives which contribute to them and only measuring the things it has done which contribute to the achievement of the organisation objectives, not simply what was done and what came out of that.

What to measure

The principles set up different stages for what could be measured and said that the most important in demonstrating contribution to organisational Objectives are Outcomes – behaviour or belief changes in target audiences as a result of the communication – and Impacts - the results that are caused, in full or in part, by the communication. AMEC’s Taxonomy shows the other stages and example metrics which fall into them.

As a result, best practice Public Relations now involves finding out from the client what their organisation’s target Objectives and goals are, working out which Public Relations activities can help achieve those, setting out as part of the Public Relations Proposal what metrics will be used to measure what level of success has been achieved by them and then doing the activities and measuring and evaluating their success using the metrics agreed.

For some, target Outcomes will be increased sales enquiries, for others it will be getting at least a set number of downloads of some information or so many people attending an event. They should be things which can be measured, can be changed via Public Relations activities and will contribute to the organisation’s overall Objectives.

Other Barcelona Principles stages

The other Barcelona Principles stages typically reported on are Outputs - what you put out that is received by target audiences – and Out-takes - what audiences do with and take out of your communication. Outputs typically include Publicity Volume - how many media articles were gained by a piece of media relations – and Media Reach – how many people were reached.

Out-takes are the next step in the chain of causation leading, hopefully, to achieving organisation Objectives and typically include metrics such as New Unique Visitors to the client’s website as a result of the communication and Response i.e. change in social media followers, extra Likes and Shares.

Means, not End

Which bring us back to Media Coverage. As you can now see, media coverage of a story is an Output, but in itself it doesn’t help you achieve your organisation’s Objectives or goals. So it’s no use as an end in itself.

Instead, media coverage is rightly seen as a means to achieving Out-takes, which in turn hopefully help achieve target Outcomes and Impacts – the things which lead to fulfilment of the desired organisation Objectives.

So, for example, media coverage usually leads to new visitors to an organisation’s website (Out-take), which hopefully leads to Outcomes such as more sales and, in turn, achievement of a profit target (Impact).

So when you see a public relations person or agency proudly sharing the media coverage they’ve achieved for their client, ask what the Outcomes and Impacts were – because they’re what really matters, not the volume or reach of media coverage.

That’s why I now share the Out-takes, Outcomes and Impacts of media coverage achieved for clients as well as the volume and reach.

Getting a proper understanding of the role of media coverage in achieving organisational goals across to leaders and other decision-makers in organisations is important because too many currently place too much emphasis of achieving coverage rather than the larger organisational objectives coverage can contribute to.

That’s a long-term education project for Public Relations professionals who understand its true role and act accordingly.

Alan S. Morrison gained his Master of Business Administration (MBA) postgraduate degree from the Open University Business School in 2003 and is one of the case studies for it.

At that time he was working as a senior Sub-Editor in a Scottish newspaper, following 15 years as a Reporter, Chief Reporter and News Editor.

In 2012, Alan launched his own communications company, ASM Media & PR, after entering Public Relations via agencies and credits the knowledge and skills he gained on his OU MBA as being instrumental in helping him career-change successfully.

His award-winning clients include a rugby charity with a Royal patron, Scotland’s largest independent lift company and a vintage lifestyle brand whose products are seen in scores of Hollywood movies and global TV shows.

The marketing campaign Alan created and helped execute for St Andrews Business Club was a Finalist in the 2019 Fife Business Awards.

Alan’s LinkedIn profile is here. Go here to find out more about his work.

March 2025

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