Curating conversations in times of transformation: Convergence in how public relations and journalism are “Doing” communication

Abstract

Purpose: In an era of networked production of the public sphere and with the arrival of new communicator roles such as citizen journalists, influencers and bloggers, the “old” roles and professions of “the journalist” and “public relations professional” are challenged. In this paper, avoiding the familiar debate about antagonisms between journalism and public relations, we provide empirical insights that identify specific characteristics of a convergence in the “doing” of public relations and journalism. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper presents recent data from a series of comparative interviews, conducted in Central Europe (Austria, n = 10, Germany, n = 25), New Zealand (n = 7), Australia (n = 25), and the Pacific Islands (n = 5). The conversational narrative interviews bring in self-reflections on skillsets, professions, normative frameworks and the doing of professional communication from a range of communicators, primarily public relations practitioners and journalists, but also activist campaigners, science communicators, bloggers, and social influencers. Findings: The findings show that while interviewees were likely to represent their roles as related to a singular, across those roles they presented what they did – the “doing” – as akin to that of an authorial “curator” of communication in the context of societal transformations and constantly changing and converging media environments. Across different communicator roles professional communication is increasingly perceived as a co-creational process of entering, initiating, sometimes managing, and, thus, driving public discourses and conversations. Originality/Value: The paper complements the debate around skills and professionalization in public relations and adds to broader discussions about role responsibility, agency, and authorship related to public conversations in an age of digital transformation and social change by bringing in the concept of curating as the co-operative ‘management of stories’ between, and across, professional roles.

Keywords

Public relations journalism convergence professionalization storytelling public conversations discourse responsibility curator curating social change

Introduction

A prominent research topic among of public relations, media, communication, and journalism scholars has been professional roles, including the societal functions, norms, performance and required skillsets of those roles. In public relations (Bourne, 2019; Gillin, 2008; Lattimore et al., 2012) and journalism (Mellado et al., 2017) the definition of a profession often includes the demarcation from “the other” (Macnamara, 2014; Sallot and Johnson, 2006).

Cheney and Ashcraft (2007) highlight that the terms professionalization and professionalism remain ambiguous and multidimensional. Ganesh and McAllum (2012: 153) state that “The two constructs are obviously highly connected yet differ inasmuch as professionalization emphasizes structure and process and professionalism highlights practice and identity.” At least four domains of professionalism can be found in organizational communication scholarship. Firstly, there is a stream of research concentrating on the formal aspects of organizations with an emphasis on professional bureaucratization and rationalization. Secondly, research examines the impact of professionalization on organizational strategy and core values. A third stream understands professionalism as “a kind of occupational identity position produced in conditions of late capitalist modernity (…) that is negotiated and resisted in myriad ways by a range of occupations” (Ganesh and McAllum, 2012: 153). Finally, professionalism is associated with “the construction of specific discursive work norms such as impersonality, fairness, or promptness that split public and private codes of conduct” (Ganesh and McAllum, 2012: 153). Only rarely is the interpretation of a profession related to a specific culture, habitus, practice (Edwards, 2018) and performance (Weder and Weaver, 2023).

Despite different professional identities, role understandings and norms, all professional communicators enact communication. How communication is enacted is mostly related to the professional education training and expectations of the specific field - such as advertising, marketing, sales, public relations or journalism, as well as certain organizational and, therefore, ‘communication facilitating’ structures, like a media corporation, public relations agency, corporate, government or non-government organization (Andersson and Rademacher, 2021; Dozier, 1992; Dozier and Broom, 1995; Hagelstein et al., 2021 Sievert et al., 2016; Verhoeven et al., 2012; Weder, 2010). Much of the research in this area draws on role theory and talks about conceptual (functional) or operational (institutionalized) roles, or role-related expectations and responsibilities associated with journalism and public relations ethics. Ethical problems and intra-role conflicts have also been researched and debated in this scholarship (Macnamara, 2014, 2019). Yang et al. (2016) examined whether public relations and journalism may be converging in their normative values and ethics. Yet little attention has been paid to role modifications, intra-role conflicts and new emerging communicator roles in a constantly changing media environment.

In this paper we fill this gap by drawing on constructivist approaches (Burr, 2015) which view roles as context dependent and fluid rather than typologically fixed, and communication as a transformative practice - a “doing” - which involves constructing and engaging in public discourses and negotiations, sense- and meaning-making processes (Dewey, 1916/2004; L’Etang, 2005; L’Etang et al., 2016; Motion and Weaver, 2005). Such perspectives have provided increasingly complex understandings of developments in the media and communication industries, changed communication practices, and the novel normative frameworks that are emerging alongside new communicator roles (see, e.g. Adi, 2019; Ihlen and Fredriksson, 2018; L’Etang et al., 2016).

Constructivist perspectives allow for the examination of social behaviors and patterns, leading to certain identities that are communicatively constructed - often in relation to others (Biddle, 1986). This demarcation process usually refers to certain norms and “cultures of doing” and is often described as boundary work (Belair-Gagnon and Holton, 2018; Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013). Thus, through this study, we seek to learn about role-modifications, conflicts, and factors that direct self-identification with a certain profession. Furthermore, instead of focusing on particular tasks or skills, we are looking for a better understanding of the doing of the work – and possible overlaps across professions. That is, we aim to explore specific social practices of communication which will allow us to identify certain clusters or sets of “doing”; to detect dynamics of convergence or divergence; and re (de)fine related communicator roles.

In the next section we review literature specifically focused on the relationship between public relations and journalism and new (less established) communicator roles.

Communication roles, professions, and their boundary work

Communicator roles and communication professions are talked about in a broad range of literature which variously looks at, for example, public relations from occupational (e.g. Beurer-Züllug et al., 2009) and organizational perspectives (Dozier, 1992). Research similarly conceptualizes journalism predominantly from occupational and functional perspectives (Hanitzsch et al., 2011; Weaver et al., 2007). The differences between those two professions are often described in terms of their demarcation of certain norms and professional processes; their “culture” of doing communication (Eldridge, 2018; Tandoc and Thomas, 2015); and/or in terms of their professional boundary work and boundary maintenance, for example, as “insiders” and “outsiders” (Lewis and Usher, 2013).

Supported by the literature on distinctive career identities (Gao, 2015; Qiu et al., 2017), a transmission and linear model of communication largely dominates research that claims dichotomies between public relations and journalism, with the former working in the interests of organizations, and the later performing a watchdog role in the interest of the public. These professional relational dichotomies have been described as representing “two sides of the same coin” (Evans, 2010); a “strained bedfellowship” (DeLorme and Fedler, 2003; Wilson and Supa, 2013); or even as an antagonistic “love/hate relationship” (Davies, 2009; Hallahan, 1994; Sallot and Johnson, 2006; White and Park, 2010; Yang et al., 2016). Other researchers have used a “binary” metaphor to describe the relationship between public relations and journalism (Gandy, 1982; Sterne, 2010).

The concept of boundary work continues to be of significance in journalism research (see, e.g. Belair-Gagnon and Holton, 2018), and has informed several decades of scholarship that explores the evolving relationship between public relations and journalism (Bourne, 2019). In the last two decades a blurring of boundaries between the two has been identified. Research has pointed to the influence that strategic communication now has on the media – often described as the “PR-ization” of the media (Macnamara, 2016; Moloney and McGrath, 2020; Sissons, 2012), as well as the increasing (inter) dependencies between and intertwining of the professions (Bentele, 2002; Gottwald, 2006; Lewis et al., 2008; Sallot and Johnson, 2006). Indeed, in the contexts of digital transformation the boundaries between public relations and journalism continue to diffuse.

Technological and economic changes and related “conceptual shifts” (Allan, 2009) have led to significant modifications in the production, dissemination, allocation, and consumption of communication. For example, Belair-Gagnon and Holton (2018) illustrate how web analytics companies (profit orientated businesses) play a significant role in news production and distribution. “News organizations can now use analytics to determine what content should be published, where it should be placed, how long it should remain in one place, and when it should be followed up on” (Belair-Gagnon and Holton, 2018: 494). This impacts on what information is available to be engaged with and debated in the public sphere (Bruns and Burgess, 2012; Lewis, 2012).

Jenkins (2006) describes the new logic of communication as “convergence culture”, with power shifts favoring technology-giants like Facebook and Google (see Zuboff, 2019), and, as Davies (2009) and others (Lewis et al., 2008; Sissons, 2012) have convincingly argued, a shift toward strategic communication interests. At the same time, the new media ecology is described as increasingly participatory, incorporating a plurality of opinions and voices (Spyridou et al., 2013), a rise of “self-media” (Chen, 2019), and an environment in which individuals and organizations are connected in new ways at the intersections of newswork (Eldridge and Scott, 2018). Consequently, we have seen changes in how the relationship between journalism and public relations is considered in terms of cooperative models, win-win, and antagonistic partnerships (Ruß-Mohl, 2017).

The fields of professional public relations and journalism have also been challenged in the context of calls for transformation in society, related to, for examples, the COVID-19 health crisis and the need to emphasize communicating scientific facts to protect the environment, reduce emissions and reverse climate change. Public relations and journalism have been questioned in terms of how they might be contributing to - and even leading - societal change towards sustainability. This in turn triggers calls for increasing diversification in communicator roles. For example, we see a movement towards a constructive advocacy role of journalism that assists in bringing about societal transformation (Brüggemann et al., 2021; Fromm and Nørgaard Kristensen, 2018; Hermans and Drok, 2018). Such solution-oriented publishing draws from findings in positive psychology as well as the long experience of the behavioral sciences and their impact on environmental journalism. Public relations research has not yet substantially focused on these matters. Kruckeberg and Starck (1988) did call for public relations to abandon its transmission model driven emphasis on persuasion and advocacy and adopt a community building focus. However, as van Ruler (2016: 20) asserted, “they did not explain how this communication role is rooted in communication theory”. More recently, critically informed theorists such and Munshi and Kurian (2016: 405) have argued that public relations “needs to situate itself in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it, and the attitudes and behaviours that characterize it”. Yet, here the focus is on re-imagining public relations for different types of publics, rather than on placing the act and “doing” of communication center stage as Van Ruler (2016) urges, and as is our aim here.

We acknowledge that the relevance and importance of communicators in shaping the world views of the audiences has been investigated (Nothhaft and Wehmeier, 2013; Rolke, 1999), but this is without attention being placed on the self-efficacy and perceived role of, for example, public relations practitioners. Only recently have scholars (Pleil et al., 2021; Rademacher and Stürmer, 2020) concentrated on questions of the potential public relations and other professional communicators have to promote transformational social change within and beyond organizational structures (Weder, 2021). Yet, with this comes the need to understand shifts in professional communication cultures which challenge established structural, institutional, or “professional” level expectations of practice. With this in mind, we seek to introduce a new approach to communication which examines it as a potentially reproductive and transformative process (Ciszek, 2018; Falkheimer, 2007; Fessmann, 2017; Pleil et al., 2021; Weder and Weaver, 2023), and which allows us to better understand changes in “doing communication”. We elaborate on this in the next section.

Communication as social practice of transformation

From a constructivist approach (Burr, 2015), public relations and journalism are two of an increasing number of communicator roles (others include, e.g. bloggers, influencers, science communicators and activist campaigners) which actively participate in creating the social world. Here, “doing communication” includes language activity, constructing social realities about matters of social, cultural, and political importance, and helping audiences to make sense of those realities through meaning making processes (Dorer, 2005: 184; Rolke, 1999). In these terms, public relations and journalism are described as “working together to set, frame and build the public agenda” (Sallot and Johnson, 2006: 151), and both participate in shaping and transforming public discourses (Milner, 2018; Motion and Weaver, 2005). Describing public relations and journalism in this way suggests a theoretical and practical collapsing of the boundary work, demarcation, and practice of the two roles, and, indeed, between the types of new emergent communicators mentioned above who have not generally been included within the existing frameworks of analysis in the relationship between public relations and journalism. This research was designed to investigate whether this collapsing is indeed occurring. We tackle this investigation by exploring three research questions:

RQ1

How do professional communicators describe themselves, and each other, as communicators?

RQ2

How can we understand the professional dynamic between journalism and public relations, and how (much, if at all) is it challenged in disrupted times (for example, during a pandemic or in light of climate change)?

RQ3

In the context of changing industries, can a combined or converged professional communication be imagined?

In the next section we outline how we undertook the research to explore these questions.

Methodology

Ethics approval for this research was granted by the universities where the first and second authors were based at the time of undertaking the research (Austria and Australia, and New Zealand, respectively). After ethics approval was granted, a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Lindlof and Taylor, 2002; Savin-Baden and Major, 2013; Silverman, 2011) was conducted through a dialogue format with 72 individuals about their existing professional conceptual and ideological frameworks (DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree, 2006: 314; Warren and Karner, 2005). This series included interviews with public relations and journalism practitioners, as well as those who self-identified as citizen journalists, influencers, bloggers, activist campaigners, and science communicators. Since our aim was to critically evaluate potential changes in role perceptions and the relationship with “other” professional communicators, the sampling followed a convenience snowballing process. That is, we identified and recruited specific individuals to interview through our networks, and then asked these individuals to refer us to other professional communicators. Snowball sampling has been criticized on the grounds that, while it offers convenient, fast, and cost-effective means of recruiting research participants, it can produce a bias in the sample because the researcher might only be able to reach out to a specific and small group of people (Noy, 2008). However, snowball sampling is considered a particularly valuable method when researchers are wanting to explore relationships between groups and social systems, such as we did, because it relies on and partakes in the “dynamics of natural and organic social networks” (Noy, 2008: 329).

We also acknowledge the limitations presented by qualitative research and open, narrative interviews in particular. Such interviews can be criticized for not necessarily being representative of the larger population under examination, and for producing results that are hard to replicate and which are lacking in external validity and generalizability (Malterud, 2001). However, with some adaptation, qualitative research can be assessed through reference to the same criteria applied to quantitative research. For example, credibility of the data can correspond with the quantitative criteria of ‘internal validity’, confirmability with the criteria of ‘objectivity’, and transferability with the criteria of ‘generalizability’ (Bryman, 2016; Malterud, 2001). We worked to meet these criteria through a clear detailing of the methods of data collection and analysis, researcher reflexivity, and attention to the contexts in which the research was conducted and our participants operating.

The interviews were conducted between October 2020 and March 2021 in Central Europe (Austria, n = 10, Germany, n = 25), New Zealand (n = 7), Australia (n = 25), and the Pacific Islands (n = 5). Except for the interviews conducted in the Pacific Islands (which were predominantly with activist campaigners), each country sample consisted of 1/3 individuals who self-identified as public relations professionals, 1/3 individuals who described themselves as journalists (including freelance and citizen journalists), and 1/3 “others”, including science and activist communicators. The sample was compiled considering heterogeneity and variance in terms of gender, age (between 20 and 70 years old) and experience.

In line with our research questions, we invited the interviewees to talk about their educational backgrounds and which, if any, specific communication profession and activities they self-identified with and why. We asked about their perceptions of the skillsets, normative frameworks and ideologies needed for “doing communication”, and about their relationships with and perceptions of other professional communicator roles and their ways of “doing communication”. We also asked interviewees about how they saw their roles evolving, if at all, considering transformations in the communication industries and wider social disruptions and crises.

All interviews were conducted via Zoom due to Covid-19 and the restrictions on travel and the social distancing requirements that the pandemic brought. In Austria and Germany, the interviews were conducted in German; in all other contexts they were conducted in English. The interviews were then transcribed. Those conducted in German were transcribed in German and then translated and transcribed into English by a professional translator.

The interview transcripts were analyzed using qualitative thematic content analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006; Mayring, 2014; Rubin and Rubin, 2005) to explore and categorize the interviewees’ self-narrated identities and reflections on the doing and profession of their work. Categories were inductively developed based on the interview material and the guiding research questions. In accordance with the required content analytical rules for inductive category formation (Mayring, 2014), we performed the text analysis in the online tool www.QCAmap.org (Mayring and Fenzl, 2019).

It should be noted that in presenting the research findings we do not talk in great depth about differences between the cultural backgrounds of the interviewees, nor are differences related to the different media systems explored. This is because, interestingly, the interview data revealed a large degree of consistency of experience across the different and predominantly Western national and systems contexts included in the research. However, in documenting our findings and drawing on the interview data to illustrate these findings, we are careful to identify where the interviewees were from, what professional roles they were in, and how these factored in their responses.

Findings: Role divergence but convergence of doing communication

In what follows we detail the major findings of this research along the themes of professional boundary work, the convergence of the doing of communication and new emerging roles. In terms of the latter, we specifically focus on the role of the curator of public conversations which reflects the co-creative and co-operative process of managing and creating narrative stories as described by various interviewees.

Boundary work and fluidity in roles

One of the most significant insights from the interviews was that professional roles are, contrary to some of the literature discussed above, not converging in terms of how our interviewees talked about their professional identities. In this changing landscape of communication professions, interviewees tended to construct their own professional identities through a strong differentiation, or divergence, from “the other”. For example, a journalist from Australia mentioned the uniqueness – especially from a public service perspective – of journalism: “journalism is needed in our democracy, similarly to free health care and education – there is nothing that can replace it” (Journalist, Australia). It is notable how this Australian journalist was able to draw on references to government funded and nationally appreciated services - like that of health and education – to make the case for the social importance of journalism. Another journalist stated: “Journalism is about the idea, is about the facts, that you want to present – we don’t make an issue out of something. Instead, we report on issues that are of societal relevance” (Journalist, Germany). In contrast, public relations professionals describe their role more as “creating communicative connectivities” (Public Relations Practitioner, Australia) between an issue and a specific stakeholder, or an issue and an organization.

Some interviewees stated that the differentiation of communicator roles is important because it serves a purpose in collaboration across roles. For example, an Austrian public relations practitioner stated: “We need to work together, I need ‘my’ journalists” (Public Relations Practitioner, Austria); while an Australian Science Communicator said: “There are parts of public communication where I am much better than a journalist. And then there are other parts, where a journalist is needed” (Science Communicator, Australia). However, while the professional identities that interviewees described themselves as affiliating with remained distinct, the boundaries between professional roles were often described as more fluid.

The problems and challenges that the journalism industry faces in terms of downsizing and the pressures to achieve greater economies of scale have been widely discussed (see, e.g. Franklin, 2010; Mancini, 2013; Wirtz, 2020). Long hours, the lack of job security, the increasing employment of freelancers and the pressure to produce more content with less resources have led many journalists to leave the news industry for public relations jobs (see also Fröhlich et al., 2013; Koch et al., 2012). This ‘crisis in journalism’ has seen journalists and public relations practitioners working as freelancers and taking on secondary employment in the other field and finding themselves involved in (intra-) role conflicts (Obermaier and Koch, 2015; Viererbl and Koch, 2021). However, our interviewees spoke little of role conflict and more of an ease with which they could shift across professions. Interviewees in all countries in this study talked about their moving between professional identities. For example, one from New Zealand where, due to the population size, there are relatively few national and local media outlets, said:

I’ve only been in PR for a year, but it seems like there are a lot more avenues you can explore and there’s a lot more freedom. ... You can do kind of like positioning your organization, or you can do straight media liaison stuff, which is what I have been doing to date. ... There’s more area to grow professionally and pay wise [more] than there is in journalism where, you know, very low pay, very little thanks, long hours. It’s a logical step to take those skills and go somewhere where there’s a nicer working environment.” (Ex-journalist, now Public Relations Practitioner, New Zealand)

A public relations professional in Australia, who previously worked in journalism stated that the clients he works for “love my journalistic skills – and pay nicely for it” (Public Relations Practitioner, Australia).

The fluidity across traditionally distinct communicator roles apparently also influenced the way networks and personal relationships are positively perceived. Underlining the importance of interpersonal networks, interviewees, even in quite different cultural contexts made comments such as:

It’s all about negotiating the communication process with your counterpart… it’s all about your personal relationships. (Public Relations Practitioner, Pacific Islands)

We need networks, we can’t do everything! … Today we work in communication circuits; they are open for different people with different skills, but the interpersonal connectedness is everything … It’s a constructive and constitutive relationship with scientists, activists, NGO people and those bloggers. (Journalist, Austria)

In these responses there is no evidence of an antagonistic relationship between journalists and public relations professionals as has been found in previous research. Rather, the co-dependency in the relationship is positively understood and valued, as was a diversification and even divergence of roles in the context of new emerging professional communicators. For example, one interviewee explained that “the more diverse the networks, the better! ... We need different and new professional roles for an efficient communication. (Public Relations Practitioner, Austria).

These findings demonstrate that the “othering” of those working in a different professional role was less strong than was anticipated in our first research question and has been previously identified in the literature. This is influenced by the positively regarded collaborative dependency of the roles, but also, as we discuss in the next section, the amalgamation of the “doing communication” across these different roles.

Convergence of “the doing”

In crisis situations and disrupted times, the daily routines and practices of all communicators are challenged. In this context, a journalist from Australia stated that: “Currently we are all wearing a lot of different hats”. Those who already have experience working across a range of roles - for example, those who studied journalism and who are now working in public relations, or who studied public relations and are now working as science communicators - seem especially revered as able to adapt to changing environments. For example, one journalist declared: “the superpowers are going to be in the future in the intersections” (Journalist, Austria, emphasis added); while another working in public relations said:

My role as a PR practitioner is like I am, in some sense, a journalist. So, I do what a journalist would do, I would like research, speak with the client, interview talent, find case studies, find that media angle, and I do it for them. And then we pretty much like act as ...it’s like a journalist in reverse way. (Public Relations Practitioner, Austria)

Here, the public relations professional does the job of a journalist, and the professional processes - the production and creation as well as management of media content and how issues are treated - converge.

In the dynamic of a convergence of communication practices, we also found that interviewees regarded having storytelling abilities as particularly important. This had not been anticipated in how we approached the interviews - storytelling was not something we specifically asked about or mentioned. However, it was raised by interviewees either as a communication tool that helped them to reach certain target audiences, or, as a process that creates a specific narrative and which can facilitate better public understanding of issues.

Storytelling is increasingly debated in journalism research (Dunham, 2019) as well as in strategic and corporate communication (Gill, 2011; Seiffert-Brockmann and Einwiller, 2020). From a functional perspective it implies the process of framing an often-complex issue in a simple way and attaching emotions to sometimes banal facts to increase target group awareness of the issue. Interviewees talked about this in terms such as: “I think all of that has driven us to look at it from a broader perspective. We’ve gone from the era of mass communication to micro communication” (Journalist, Germany); and “I think, you know, for a long time, eyeballs was the battleground. And now it’s engagement, engagement through stories.” (Journalist, New Zealand).

However, some of the interviews went beyond talking about storytelling from functional and instrumental perspectives. While a German journalist criticized the “inflation of storytelling in marketing and public relations” (Journalist, Germany), an Australian public relations professional pointed to the relevance and significance of storytelling especially while talking about science and social transformation: “with storytelling you do not only spark interest and make a pandemic for example more relatable, but you can bring in emotions and introduce ambassadors of change as identification figures” (Public Relations Practitioner, Australia). Another interviewee described storytelling as “adding a deeper dimension to the actual communication … [going] far beyond the idea of ‘this is a piece of information that has to be sent to an audience’” (Journalist and now Podcaster, Australia). The trend of placing storytelling at the core of professional communication processes goes hand in hand with the idea of a new networked individualism in the digital age, or ‘mass self-communication’ (Dwyer, 2010: 120), or the ‘romance of conversation’ (Jensen, 2010: 5), where stories are told and further communicated in social media formats. Yet, also of significance is how our interview data indicated that, with less expectation placed on a strict divergence of roles, it seems to become increasingly irrelevant who is creating the narratives and doing the communication. Instead, the focus is on stimulating and contributing to public conversations – something which Milner (2018) has previously identified though specifically in relation to memes. We explore how our interviewees positioned themselves in relation to public conversations in the next section.

Curators of communication - entering and driving public conversations

Related to our third research question and our aim to generate insights into potential combined or converged forms of professional communication, the research data shows that the co-ordination and negotiation of issues, in the sense of co-organizing and curating communication, was a common theme across the interviews in all national contexts. While public relations interviewees tended to describe their work as the management of communication and issues, - for example - “we do a lot of issue and crisis management” (Public Relations Practitioner, Australia), journalists were more likely to see their responsibility as one of “making an issue out of something that no one else would make an issue out” (Journalist, Australia). Here we see the public relations practitioner entering the public conversation from a reactive position, compared to the journalist’s active initiation and facilitation of the public conversation.

Bloggers and influencers, however, did not describe their work in these curational terms. Instead, they were more likely to position themselves as a “medium” (Blogger, Australia). Unlike journalists and public relations practitioners, bloggers and influencers are not embedded in organizational structures, normative frameworks, guidelines, and expectations. This lack of rules and routines was described as creating a lack of job security for these workers – which one described as an increasingly “cloudy feeling” (Influencer, Germany).

In terms of how our public relations and journalist interviewees represented their practice – their “doing” communication, they described an approach that went beyond news-making and towards a curation of stories in public conversations. This includes the process of entering those conversations. Two interviewees, from two different continents, described this as follows:

People are talking. They are constantly sharing their stuff on social media and feel that they have to say something about everything that’s out there. This needs to be sorted. This needs strong narratives that give people an orientation (Public Relations Practitioner, Australia)

We need to co-operate with bloggers and users that are apparently pretty strong in their opinion. Without a collaboration with them … and of course we need to collaborate with those who you might rather call an “influencer”, because they use a different type of storytelling (Journalist, Austria)

In these explanations of co-organization and co-creation, professional communication transforms into something that can conceptually described as curation of communication. The converging dynamic of the “doing” of communication as social practice, as the practice of entering, initiating, and curating and authoring public conversations, of creating stories, gaining acceptance for a narrative, and creating connectivity and contingency of communication, challenges not only existing public relations research. It indicates that we need to learn more about the new roles and new responsibilities that emerge between changing societal structures (at the macro level) and new ways of the doing communication (at the micro level).

Concluding remarks

The findings of this research suggest the need for less focus on the functional role and scope of action of professional communicators, and much more on their social role, which is in turn linked to the degree of influence, impact, and morality of the authorial “curator of conversations” – either at a broad public level, or within organizations and/or across their stakeholder relationships. Moreover, communicators act – in representation of their respective organizations, but also go beyond this professional role – as active discourse participants. This is important from at least two perspectives – a narrow organizational, and a wider societal one. First, organizations need to enter public discourse whenever management decisions are debated publicly and there is a need for argumentation related to possible actions, the means by which those actions are taken, and potential alternatives to such action (Skerlep, 2001). Second, the notion of entering public conversations with a specific narrative at hand – for example, the fulfillment of global sustainability goals or the active role in reducing inequality in business and society (to name just two prospective fields) – is a growing requirement and marks a transformation of the communicator role as such.

How the ‘doing’ of communication practice was described by our interviewees as they reflected on their social role – especially in societal transformation processes – we conceptualize as a curator role. While curation at a basic level means ‘taking care of’ (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2011) it is more thoroughly defined as the action or process of selecting, organizing, and looking after something or someone (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2022). Rarely is curation conceptualized in communication scholarship as involving ‘content specialists’ (Snyder, 2015), and related to the dynamics of role creativity and freedom on the one hand, and, on the other hand, control, governance, and responsibility. Thus, a curator is less a ‘carer’, but much more a ‘manager’.

In the context of this research and its examination of how professional communicators – and particularly public relations practitioners and journalists – describe and define themselves, processes of knowledge co-production (Sixto-García et al., 2022), networking, and sharing are core to new role understanding. This can be supported by existing literature around processes and structures of ‘curating’, where curating is described as sharing, particularly in relation to social media communication. For example, in journalism and mass communication research curating is often described as replacing a gatekeeping role (see Bruns, 2011, 2018), while curating in public relations has been described as managing a constant flow of web content (Bivins, 2008). Similarly, from a marketing perspective, curating has been conceptualized as the management of communication processes related to content management (Kilgour et al., 2015).

Our research shows, that - for the interviewees we talked to - curation not only involves the production and curation of content, or sources of information, that is then placed in the public communication environment where it can, in turn, stimulate social media user generated content. Rather, curation of communication describes the ‘management’ and organizing component that adds to all communicator’s doing work in a digitalized communication environment.

Those who describe themselves as curators, who see their work as entering and/or initiating and facilitating public conversations, are all participating in transforming existing rules, dynamics, norms, and resources of professional communication. Whichever professional role the communicator relates to, he or she has the conscious ability to create new possibilities for their own action and the actions of others (Burr, 2015: 22). It is in these terms that we conceptualize the agency of the professional communicator as “authorship” that comes with storytelling as an organizing process of curating public conversations beyond the level of narrative creation. Yet, contemporary authorship also goes beyond agency; it includes the creative act of producing, writing, and editing a story. We therefore conceptualize strengthened authorship as a sign of curatorship, involving responsibility and agency, and requiring a heightened consciousness and reflective awareness about one’s own practices (Weder, 2021). Authorship refers to the concept of “authority” in the sense that an author decides upon the frame, the perspective, the structure of thoughts and discourses (Rademacher, 2005). This author is more than a mere author – the author uses his or her authority and creates “Auktorialität” (Städtke, 2003), a kind of “author-authority”.

Based on these preliminary research and conceptual findings, we recommend further qualitative and explorative empirical work be undertaken into professional public communication practices in different cultural settings, and especially beyond the largely Western contexts explored in this research. We also encourage scholars to examine potential differences in local, national, and international communication processes. Yet, more than this, we want to stimulate theoretical reflections and considerations of storytelling, organizing and curating public conversations being part of a wide spectrum of communication in a changed media economy, driven by the increasing dominance of freelancing and precarious contracting.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Franzisca Weder

Author biographies

Habil Franzisca Weder, Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Brisbane (Australia), is researching, writing and teaching in the areas of Organizational Communication and Public Relations with a specific focus on Sustainability Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility.She worked as Guest Professor at University of Alabama (USA), University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (GER), University of Waikato (NZ), RMIT (Melbourne, AUS) and University of Ilmenau (GER). Franzisca Weder is Chair of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA).

Kay Weaver, PhD, is Chair and a Professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2021. Her research explores how public communication leverages political, social and/or cultural identities, subjectivities interests, discourses, and actions. She is co-editor or co-author of the Routledge Companion to Public Relations (2022) or Public Relations in Global Contexts (2011) and has published in, among other journals,Public Relations Review, Journal of Public Relations Research, Media Culture & Society, New Media and Society, Information, Communication & Society and the Journal of Applied Communication Research.

Lars Rademacher, MA, PhD, is a professor for Corporate and Sustainability Communication at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and chair of the PhD Center “Sustainability Sciences”. He serves as director at the Institute of Communication and Media. Before joining academia, Lars spent more than 15 years as communication consultant, account executive, media relations manager and executive coach working for a number of national and multinational companies including BASF and Volkswagen. His research interests cover public legitimacy, PR ethics, digital leadership, CSR and compliance communication.

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