Diana Fernandes is the Founder & Group CEO, Bloomingdale PR
When everyone can write everything, judgment becomes the only product
I started in PR when getting a single story published felt like winning. We fought for scarce space. Few outlets, fewer pages, limited airtime. Scarcity made our work valuable.
That scarcity is gone. Today any company can generate flawless content in seconds. Press notes, posts, videos, replies. Endless, polished, instant.
This should terrify my profession. When everyone can produce everything, production is worthless. The market does not pay for what is abundant.
So where does our value go? It moves to the things machines cannot fake. Judgment. Taste. Nerve. Knowing what not to say.
I have watched a different shift over 22 years, and it scares me more than any tool. People have stopped trusting institutions. They trust other people.
A founder’s honest post now beats a corporate statement. A nurse on video beats a hospital’s press release. An employee beats the brand. Trust has moved from logos to faces.
This rewrites our job. For decades we protected the institution and hid the humans. Now we must do the reverse. Find the real people inside a company and help them speak like people.
That is harder than it sounds. Most leaders were trained to sound safe. Safe now reads as fake. The market punishes fake.
The Indian audience has changed too. They are younger, sharper, and quicker to smell spin. They grew up online. They detect a manufactured message instantly. You cannot manage them. You can only earn them.
This is why I worry about my own industry’s future talent.
We are hiring people to do what machines already do better. Write the release. Build the list. Format the report. We are training juniors for jobs that are vanishing.
The skill we are not teaching is the one that will matter most. Judgment. Reading a room. Sensing a crisis before it forms. Telling a CEO a truth she does not want to hear. Knowing when silence beats a statement.
These come from experience, not software. Yet our industry still treats young people as content factories. We will wake up with a generation that can operate every tool and read no situation.
Education must change with us. A PR degree that teaches press release writing is teaching a dead skill. It should teach psychology, ethics, history, and how power actually moves.
Here is what I believe the future PR professional sells. Not words. Anyone has words now. We sell wisdom about people. What they fear. What they will forgive. What earns belief.
The companies that win will not be the loudest. They will be the most believed. And belief is built by humans who understand humans.
So my advice to anyone entering this field is blunt. Do not compete with the machine on output. You will lose.
Compete on the things it has no access to. Conscience. Courage. The instinct to do the right thing when no one is watching.
That has no substitute. It never will.