While everyone was stuffing themselves with barbecue and watching fireworks this weekend, The New York Times published an article that’s a must-read for all PR folks. The piece examines how the profession of public relations is changing in the digital age — it’s becoming more about bloggers and online influencers and less about just traditional print and broadcast journalists. Yet publicists are still necessary, because someone needs to know who these people are and how best to reach them.

The article also briefly touches upon the need for a new system of PR metrics, which is a topic we are constantly exploring here at M Booth:

Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, [Brian] Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.

Many people don’t realize that the PR profession is about much more than straight-up media relations, but it is — and it’s continuing to change before our eyes.

—Alyssa