BY SIBUSISO MNGADI
CEO & CO-FOUNDER, STRATCOM GROUP
We are living through what should be the golden age of public relations.
For the first time in the history of the profession, the gatekeepers are gone. Organisations no longer need a journalist to carry their message. They no longer need to wait for a publication to validate their story. The ability to communicate directly with stakeholders — customers, investors, government, communities — has never been more accessible, more immediate, or more powerful.
And yet I keep meeting PR graduates and practitioners who cannot define public relations, even for themselves.
Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they did not study. But because their education handed them a toolkit for a world that no longer exists. They can write a press release — in most cases, ChatGPT does it for them. But they cannot tell you what PR fundamentally is, what it is for, or why it matters in the organisation they work for. Digital transformation, to them, presents genuine confusion — not curiosity, confusion. The very thing that should excite them has become a source of anxiety.
This concerns me deeply.
At its core, public relations is reputation management. It is the strategic discipline that sits at the intersection of an organisation’s corporate goals and how that organisation is perceived by the world. When PR, marketing, advertising, and events work in alignment — not in silos — they form the most powerful brand-building engine available to any organisation.
That engine must be driven by people who understand the full picture. People who can connect a media statement to a social media strategy, an event to a campaign narrative, a stakeholder brief to a business objective. People who are digitally fluent, analytically capable, and strategically grounded.
PR practitioners need better preparation for that responsibility. And the institutions training them must reckon with the fact that teaching press releases without teaching digital strategy, measurement, and integrated thinking is no longer enough.
PR has never been more relevant. The professionals who master it — fully, not partially — have never been more needed.
The question is whether we are producing them.