The May 15 edition of PR Week featured its annual New York Regional Forum, where leading communications professionals from a variety of agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and other organizations in the nation’s top media market took part in an extensive roundtable discussion about major issues facing the industry.

Trylon SMR president Lloyd Trufelman was one of the participants who responded to a number of questions, ranging from the death of “the exclusive” to the rise of viral marketing.

Taking a stab at how the value and definition of granting a reporter exclusivity to a story has changed – given that many cities have gone from several newspapers to one or two – Trufelman noted how media relations practitioners must adapt to the current landscape while adhering to proven techniques. Furthermore, media consolidation in many ways makes the PR agency’s ability to position a story even more essential.

“I don’t think any of us were practicing PR in the heyday of the New York press, when you had nine or 11 dailies,” he said. “If you are running a PR firm in Minneapolis, where there are two radio stations and one newspaper, you call a reporter at the paper and he declines the story, there is nothing that you can do.

“But media is one of the pillars that run this town. We’ve got this tremendous, messy, argumentative thing,” Trufelman continued. “This rapidly accelerating, violent, cutthroat cloud, which for us is great because all of our clients are saying, ‘Help, I can’t see anything.’ On one hand, it’s unnerving, but I’d rather be doing it and taking the punches here than being confined to practice PR in a sort of typical, unfortunate American- monopoly media marketplace where there is no competition, no dynamics.”