Media convergence

 Using PR Targeting Techniques to Navigate Media Convergence

The way that information is distributed and consumed in today's digital world has changed due to the blurring of traditional channel boundaries brought by media convergence. Knowing this convergence is essential for PR pros to create campaigns that successfully reach their target audiences.

what is media convergence?

The merging of various mass media platforms, such as digital media, with highly interactive, portable technology, together with traditional, print, broadcast, new, and internet media is known as media convergence, according to Team Leverage Edu (2023). Consequently, due to their technological interdependence, the three Cs—communication, computing, and content—combine. The most relevant example of media convergence is found in smartphones, which integrate print media (e-books, news apps), broadcast media (streaming websites, radio, music apps), and new media (the internet) into one device that can do various tasks like calling, texting, taking pictures, playing games, and much more.

What make media convergence important?

Are you curious about significance of media convergence? Blending content, communication technologies, and computer networks together causes many established industries, services, and work methods to instantly change. New types of content are created as a result, which make it significant.

The significance of media convergence:

• It changes the way that journalism, news reporting, and communication are done. Take media journalism, as an example.
• The advent of portable gadgets has made a vast amount of content accessible, which has given rise to cross-media-for example, news organisation no longer only uses broadcast television or print media.
• A number of new media formats are being introduced, including blogs, podcasts, news feeds, websites, mobile applications, and news portals.

The Triple Cs of Convergence in Media

The triples Cs of media convergence are computation, communications, and content. internet promotion an=d digitization directly led to media convergence, which combines the tree Cs of computation, communications, and content. To put it even more simply, media convergence is a result of contents convergence with Communication Technologies and Computer network.

The effects of media convergence on public relations

Changing land scape

• The distinctions between new and conventional media are muddled by media convergence.  Nowadays, social media, digital platforms, and traditional channels all interact in the working world of public relations specialist.
• New opportunities and difficulties for public relations practitioners arise from the collaboration of several media industries and the dissemination of material across multiple channels.

Challenges for public relations

• Adaptation: Public relation professionals need to change with the times. They must learn new techniques in digital tactics, multimedia communication, and desktop publishing.
• Communication management: A major component of PR plans and tactics is the media. PR professionals now have to deal with the difficulty of managing communication across several channels due to, convergence.
• Boundaries Blurring: As media formats convergence, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between them, which calls for PR pros to handle with skill.

Opportunities for PR  

• PR activity is made more possible by the convergence of the digital creative economy. It makes inventive strategies, campaigns, and compelling narrative possible.
• Maximising convergence: Mcquali(2010) public relations professionals in Nigeria, for example, out to welcome developments in the media industry. Their communication efforts can be improved by taking use of the opportunities that convergence presents.

Advantages of media convergence

• News and moment-based material are readily available, which is one of the main advantages of the convergence of traditional and new media.
• Content producers can more accurately target as specific audience or demographic by producing customised content. 
• Because of the convergence of media, audiences have become more creative. Memes and social media posts have benefited from media convergence, which has helped audiences around the world integrate.
• Another noteworthy benefit of media convergence is that it has allowed traditional media to become more inclusive by combining it with new media, providing global access to instantaneous and current material.
• The approach is advantageous and reasonably priced because of the decreasing cost of digital marketing due to the confluence of old and new media.