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Introduction
Although the Internet is no longer considered a “new technology” to most people,
public relations practitioners continue to invent ways to apply the medium for their
organizations’ best interests. In public relations the changing uses of the Internet have
become innovative, even as the technology becomes part of the practitioners’ accepted
repertoire of media. Recently Hiebert (2005) wrote that the development of the Internet
has lead to a battle between those who want to use the medium for public dialogue and
those who seek to control it.
This study seeks to identify and understand how corporate media relations
practitioners, individuals who perhaps are seen as attempting to control communication,
are creating dialogue with journalists through the Internet. It examines the use of what the
researchers have termed “online media rooms,” or that part of a corporate Website that
contains its news releases, background information about the company and other
supplemental material used by public relations practitioners in their ongoing attempt to
communicate with journalists. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods
to determine the level of dialogic communication occurring between the corporations and
the media through the corporate Website.
Review of the Literature
The importance of dialogue has long been a topic within communication.
Dialogue, Martin Buber (1970) suggested, is an attempt to recognize the value of the
other, the value of reciprocity, of mutuality and of involvement. In other words, dialogue
allows for feedback; and continuous dialogue, as indicated by Bakhtin (1985), has the
power of unification within relationships.
This concept of the relationship, as well as of its creation, development and
maintenance, is of paramount importance to the public relations practitioner (Kelly,
1998), and especially to the practitioner who uses media relations (Howard & Mathews,
2000). Lattimore, Baskin, Heiman, Toth & Van Leuven (2004) state that “public
relations work is all about developing effective relationships between organizations and
groups who are important to them, including the media…” (p.6)
a belief that has at its
core effective two-way communication or dialogue.
Lattimore et al, (2004) further write that “media relations work, more than other
practice areas, has benefited from Internet technology… because journalists and other
Convention