If you follow PR through blogs, you might have run across these three posts in the last few days — What PR people should know about journalists, and this companion piece, and this response. I concur with Thomas Lee, who makes the point in the response post that good PR practitioners know how journalists operate and act accordingly. I also like that Lee points out how it’s a two-way street between journalists and PR people — we depend on each other to a large degree, especially in the current economic climate.

My latest round of befriending some of my favorite media contacts on Facebook reminds me how much I genuinely like the people I’m contacting. I’m certainly not the only PR person to have come through journalism school to get to PR. I’m watching the Seattle P-I’s struggles, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s recently-declared bankruptcy, and the #journchat tweets on Twitter with genuine concern. While I think it’s useful for PR practitioners to be mindful of the climate under which journalists and producers operate, and while I think online dialogues about them can be instructional for new PR practitioners, I find most of my contacts with journalists to be respectful exchanges between colleagues and even, in some instances, friends — all invested in a common goal of telling stories and providing information and insight.

A friend who works in newspapers pointed me to this item in Editor and Publisher — as the economy continues to languish in recession, there’s speculation that some cities may be without daily papers by 2010.

That’s staggering to me. I grew up in a city with two papers (the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer), and I believe the papers pushed each other to greatness and helped define the city. Newspapers are essential to articulating what makes cities so unique. During the Katrina aftermath, I went to the online version of the Times-Picayune to read heartbreaking yet compelling accounts of what was happening. There was great reporting from a variety of sources, to be sure, but getting the New Orleanian perspective was crucial to understanding the magnitude of loss and the possibility of rebirth there.

It’s hard to imagine any city without a paper to capture its essence. We’re in an age where social media can step in and fill the vacuum that a paper closing its doors would leave, but it’s still shocking to conceive of this possibility.