The Wall Street Journal today features an extraordinary page one story on the mammoth PR campaign Edelman has conducted on behalf of Wal-Mart.
I use the word extraordinary for two reasons. First, it is unusual to see a newspaper cover the PR industry at all. I have always assumed this is because reporters really don’t want to acknowledge that some story ideas actually come from PR folks.
More interesting, however, is this nugget about just how Edelman won the account:
In its pitch for the account, Edelman had warned Wal-Mart that Google results for a “Wal-Mart” search yielded mostly unflattering material, potentially overshadowing the company’s own sites.
Now, clearly there was a bigger need than simply combating negative Google search results. Yet, the fact that this received mention in the story suggests that online search results have grown so important that they are now, at least in part, driving multimillion-dollar communications efforts. That used to be reserved for the coverage of key newspapers.
Remember when The New York Times was consider the “paper of record?” I think we’ve anointed a new king.
Google is the new paper of record.