It's Public Relationships

Terrific post by Dave Weinberger on Joho saying it's not public relations, it's public relationships.

PR needs to get out of the intermediation business. It means that more voices have to be allowed to speak from within the corporation, since relationships based on a committee-produced controlled voice will fail. It explains why blogs are such a useful tool: They are public relationships. It assumes there's persistence to the relationship, not merely press releases thrown in our faces whenever the company has some new crap to flog. It assumes mutuality. It relies on the relationships being based on frankness and transparency.
Building public relationships seems to me to be a useful rubric for all that PR agencies do, including the traditional services they will continue to provide.
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For example, PR agencies are going to continue to scan editorial calendars looking for opportunities to get coverage for their clients, and they'll continue to monitor and measure what's being said. But if they do that within the context of building public relationships, perhaps they can help their clients get past their obsession with column inches. It's not about that and it never was. It's about building long-term, continuing, honest, mutual public relationships