1 Presented to the 9 th annual conference of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association, Bled, Slovenia, 6 July 2002 Relationships between media organizations and their commercial content providers in a society in transition: a discussion of a South African experience François Pierre Nel 1 Department of Journalism University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK / FPNel@uclan.ac.uk ABSTRACT Societies in transition require new processes and new relationships for their visions to be effected. While it is acknowledged that the barriers to change are significant and that the levers for change are varied, there is usually an appreciation that the news media have an important role to play. Therefore, it is not surprising that the mainstream news media – newspapers, television and radio -- in particular, are typically under pressure to both help drive social change, and to demonstrate that they had been affected by the social change. An investigation of the debate on the South African media‟s transformation following the country‟s first democratic elections on April 27, 1994, shows that the role of news information sources – and particular the relationships between commercial media organizations and public relations practitioners – has largely escaped the public scrutiny to which other elements of media influence have been subjected. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with editors and senior public relations practitioners, this paper explores the state of the relationships between the daily newspapers in the legislative capital city, Cape Town, and their commercial content providers, with reference to Huang‟s (2001) cross-cultural, multi-item scale for measuring organization-public relations (called Organization-Public Relations Assessment [OPRA]). The paper also investigates to what extent these organization-public relationships (OPRs) have been impacted by the national transformation agenda. Amongst the key findings are that the decline in skills amongst journalists and the corresponding increase in capacity of publicists have resulted a change in the power dynamic between the two parties. This discussion paper aims to contribute to a further study in which it will be argued that alterations in the media environment have eroded the gate-keeping function of the news media and subsequently its power in a democratic society. 1 Francois Pierre Nel is course leader for the Master‟s Programme in Strategic Communication, www.stratcom.org, offered by the Lancashire Business School at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK, which was developed in partnership with the Cape Technikon in Cape Town, South Africa.