In the ’60s the press officer, as they were then mostly called, was a facilitator.

For this reporter, who turned out to be the last full-time shipping cadet on The Sydney Morning Herald, the press officer organised the celebrity-of-the-voyage for interview by the maritime media, who was trapped on board pending arrival at the wharf and the subsequently lengthy Customs clearance process.

We boarded, sometimes by Jacob’s ladders, off the Customs launch outside the heads, perusing the list of ‘candidates’ provided by the press officer as we approached, under cover of pre-dawn darkness, the ocean liners, where in due course, the chosen would be wheeled out, to be done, or done over.

But as ‘Granny’ purged or ‘cleansed’ its rounds, so the relationship between press officers as facilitators or ‘servants’ of the media began to evolve.

In the later ’60s and into the ’70s and early ’80s an airline PR was the person the aviation reporter had to ring up to ensure the editor was upgraded. They had gained the upper hand over aviation reporters in that failure meant going back to the Flemington markets to report fruit and vegetable prices. Or picture editing.

By the ’80s the process of PR was much more sophisticated than today. PR was not aimed at getting stories about the client into the media at all. It was about getting stories critical of the client’s competitor into the media. No one ever wrote a story about TAA that wasn’t from a tip off from Ansett-ANA and vice versa. Qantas PR wasn’t about lovely seats and Royal Barge experiences for the rich, it was about  lobbying, through the media, to influence Canberra concerning the evils of deregulation, and Asian carriers.

Well, that was until James Strong came along at TAA and turned it into Australian, and who understood the changes that would shape the future of airlines.

Strong routinely and persuasively bypassed his PR machines to preach directly to the media about airline competition, privatisation and globalisation knowing full well he would end up being the captain of change at Qantas, but as Chris Mitchell has generously explained in Crikey this week, continuous disclosure rules were to end the widespread PR bypass involved in one-on-one briefings by senior managements. (Today’s strategy is all about middle management leaks, but that is another story.)

However, in the cosier corporate world that existed before the competitive tensions that accompanied the reformist agendas of the late ’80s and ’90s, the PR function had become that of  reinforcing the image, status and social or political profile of iconic companies at the top. I worked for a while as the ABC Stock Exchange and business reporter in Melbourne, where the power of in-house media lobbying by BHP and WMC was so all-pervasive that the day the West Gate Bridge collapsed the news editor, John Allen, apologised for “dragging you away” from pursuing an important, that is mining company driven story, in my diary.

This was a world in which neither the PR powers nor the major newspapers thought in terms of mass audiences. This was a time when the editor-in-chief of The Sydney Morning Herald thought of his audience as numbering the top 1000 people of influence, residing on the upper North Shore or within two blocks of the shore line from Double Bay to Watson’s Bay. For The Age, the only readers that mattered where those in state government, or Toorak.

The notion of a popular constituency for print was essentially indulged by the proprietors in their afternoon and Sunday tabloids. The broadsheets were about advertising, and influence at the very top, and the discussion at editorial planning conferences was always about making points to the powerful few rather than to the many. The role of celebrity or shallow end social PRs that manage soapie actors or fad diets today was barely known back then.

The PR sector recognised the major papers as being read in Collins or Macquarie Street, and in and around Barton. It did not see them as relevant to the great “unwashed” of suburbia.

However, this situation began to unwind rapidly in the ’90s. Competitive reforms saw the rise of corporate PR aimed more at placing the message sought by the actual employer of the PR (or stopping “rogue” messages from unauthorised sources) than lobbying or profile raising per se. The distinction between a corporate investment in marketing, and the media relations persons came into clearer focus.

Qantas fixed the media power side of things once and for all by reinventing the Chairman’s Lounge, which is to this day, the only place where commercial competitors and senior judges and senior counsel can accidentally bump into each other for light conversation without seeking prior permission from the ACCC or risking an investigation by ICAC.

By the noughties the role of PR had to a noticeable extent been dumbed down to that of alternative content providers for newspapers that have to transfer as much writing to volunteers or self-interested media spin agents in order to stave off collapse. PR had overwhelmingly switched its attention to the mass-circulation constituencies, meaning the pushing of popular and direct messages. Buy this. Drink this. Fly this. Butter/meat/fairy floss is good for you, according to studies by, let’s guess, compromised scientists working for the dairy, meat and sugar industries. Few reporters ask the obvious questions.

The topping and tailing of media handouts was potential grounds for dismissal in The SMH even 20 years ago. Today it is a prerequisite for keeping a job where the prime metric is content provision.

Reporters and proprietors increasingly present themselves as providing media solutions to government, public administration and business, beginning a process that deals them out of the loop.

The PR person is increasingly the reporter.

All that really remains to be done is to give them the passwords or protocols that will allow them to directly file copy that conforms to the style rules of the AFR, SMH or The Age to the clerks that will replace what is left of sub-editing.