The View‘Spin doctors’ and the PR business – an uneasy combination

One of the world’s fastest growing industries is achieving growth through stealth; this is all the more surprising because this industry’s very purpose is communication.

The 2015 World Public Relations Report, covering the industry’s larger companies, shows that the industry grew by 7 per cent last year, following on from 11 per cent growth in 2013. There has been an almost unbroken pattern of growth despite setbacks that inflicted considerable damage on other sectors.

According to the Global Public Relations Agencies Market Report, revenues of international PR companies reached a record US$14 billion last year, but this figure is just the tip of the iceberg because it does not include earnings from the much broader range of non-international companies.

The United States was a pioneer in this industry, although a strong case can be made for the pioneering work of the Christian churches, dating back many centuries. The USA however is where the business of public relations has been endlessly refined.

In Asia, anecdotal evidence plus a clutch of academic studies shows that the industry’s growth is even higher than in Europe and North America. This is partly explained by the relative newness of Asian PR companies; for example, the first public relations agency in China only opened its doors in 1984. Hong Kong and Singapore, as ever, vie for supremacy in the regional industry and, significantly, both places are homes to unusually large government PR operations.

So, there can be little doubt about the growth of the spin doctors’ trade and it is matched by a marked decline in the employment of journalists to the extent, already seen in the United States where there are more than four times the number of people spinning the news than producing it for media outlets.