Today’s look at the PR-Media relationship comes to us from our very own Jake Ward.

During Monday’s round up, the motley crew at the PR Breakfast Club posed an interesting question to the community of professional flacks out there – what happens when PR people don’t answer the phone? Or more accurately, PR people that don’t answer the phone, return calls or email and generally mimic the illusive media targets we are aim for every day. The answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing happens. No information is exchanged, no relationships are built, nothing happens and no one wins.

PR pros know all too well the lengths we must go to build relationships with editors, reporters, bookers and producers. We pitch stories, we pitch ideas and angles, and when push comes to shove – we buy the coffee and the drinks. It is the nature of the engage and influence business. Building relationships is about give and take and those relationships ultimately buy you time. Five minutes here and 45 seconds there to pitch your angle or your client, and that is often the difference between getting heard or getting shut out.

A lot has been made in recent years about the erosion of media relations work in the PR field. Magazines and blogs have dedicated columns to identifying the “worst pitches” in the industry and targeted flacks as the reason for a decline quality pitches. To be fair, email, digital channels and user generated content has changed the way we interact with the 4th estate, but it is inaccurate to blame PR pros in general. The truth is, more outlets with smaller audiences and more products aimed at more discerning consumers, has made quality public relations more difficult than ever. That said – some things are as easy as they have ever been – like answering the phone.

John Wilke died last Friday. You may remember him as one of the best investigative business journalists of the past two decades – a Wall Street Journal veteran and, as the heartfelt tributes of his colleagues show, a true character. I remember him as all of that, but also the blonde-maned, post-hippie guy I grew up with in White Plains, New York.

They must have been putting something in the water in those days, because our little city nurtured some truly great newspapermen in a remarkably short period of time: John; David Sanger of The New York Times; Keith Schneider, a former Times environmental reporter and current blogger and environmental activist. Indeed, Keith’s heartfelt tribute to Wilke, as he was universally known, has made me think a lot about words, the reporters who love them, and the troubled industry in which they persevere.

I realize that John, Keith and others came of age in a golden age that, in retrospect, was perhaps traditional journalism’s last gasp. They were Watergate boys, who believed that, even if you didn’t look like Robert Redford, you might use the power of words for no less a purpose than to bring down a corrupt presidency. John remained a newspaperman his entire career, but how ironic that he died just as it appeared that the Boston Globe (of which he was also an alum) might go under – the latest in a string of spectacularly tragic newspaper closings.

The romance of the word, even amidst channel chaos, digital diversity and citizen scoops, also came home to me as I read the Sunday Times, and a triumphant ode to the unlikely victory of Mine That Bird in the Kentucky Derby. There’s nothing that says you can’t write this in a blog, but is there anything quite like reading it in newsprint?

“Sometimes this game brings you to tears. Sometimes it feels right to be wrong. And always it is better than O.K. when the tears streaming down your face are caused by a man in a black cowboy hat and an almost handlebar mustache, a Cajun jockey with more horse than book sense and a scrawny $9,500 gelding.”

Please don’t think I’m a Luddite. I’m a huge fan of the new journalism, and the role of social media in transforming both how we get our news and how we change the world. But, just as I’ve had to come to terms with an old friend dying too young, I find myself having to come to terms with what increasingly looks like the end of an era.