Conceptualizing the Co-evolution of Journalism and Public Relations: Toward a Theory of Branded News Content’s Hybrid Forms

Abstract

Journalism and public relations (PR) have a long history of reciprocal influence evident in their co-evolution toward hybrid forms at the nexus of news media and marketing. Through critical analysis historicizing key stages in the co-evolution of journalism and PR, this theoretical intervention provides a conceptual model for understanding the origins and nature of brand journalism. Contemporary brand journalism extends from four distinct stages in this co-evolution, beginning with the convergence of editorial and promotional practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth century press. The second stage consists of Progressive Era customer magazines marking PR’s affective and narrative turn, prompted in part as a defensive reaction to Progressive Era muckraking journalism. The third appears in the construction of New Journalism as an invention of capitalist competition. The fourth is represented in current native advertising and content marketing, practices inhering elements of their predecessors that reveal editorial autonomy as a cultural construct.