A PR Business columnist has criticised the magazine as too
old-fashioned to survive in a multimedia environment after it made its launch team redundant following a decision to go monthly.
Antony Mayfield
said: "I think [PR Business's] strategy was more suited to the 1980s or
'90s than this decade. The investment in its design and online came too
late."
The publication's website only became
operational three months after the print publication debuted.
Mayfield said that an
online publication supported by a print edition would still be possible.
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Mayfield added: "There is a growing crowd of professionals
online: blogging, reading and discussing their profession with one
another. They are leaving their trade publications behind them in some
sectors— a trend which will continue."
Editor Eirwen Oxley Green, reporter Ana Santi and up to six office
staff were made redundant this week after the five-month-old
weekly magazine went monthly.
In her final editor's letter, Oxley Green had
criticised Colin Farrington, director general of the Chartered Institute of
Public Relations, for his attitude to
blogs.
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But
Farrington rejected claims that the CIPR had pulled its support for the
magazine and said the institute originally lent its support to the
weekly proposition on a three-month trial basis and that a decision was made to continue that support before the magazine announced Oxley Green's departure.
He said: "Editorially we don't need to agree on everything — it was a sufficiently quality weekly to make our database available."
At its launch in March, PR Business was heralded as a serious contender to Haymarket's PR Week, which Lace set up in 1984.
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