PR Before the Internet: When Fax Was King and Face Time Was Real

#PRbeforetheinternet

A little over 25 years ago, Google was born. Amazon was still just a river, Facebook didn’t exist, and floppy disks were cutting-edge tech. Today, we scroll, click and chat with AI — and for many, there’s no memory of a world without the internet. But what was it like working in PR before email, Google, or social media?

Slow. Very slow. And very manual.

Press releases were typed out on noisy typewriters — or, if your office was ahead of the curve, a WordStar word processor. Once printed, each one had to be stuffed into envelopes, labelled with typed stickers, and matched with captioned photographs or colour transparencies. The final flourish? Licking stamps. Lots of them.

Fax machines brought some relief, albeit with that familiar screech echoing through the office. Still, you could only feed in one page at a time.

Media lists weren’t downloaded — they were built by hand.

You read newspapers and magazines cover to cover to find the names of journalists. Media monitoring meant flipping through piles of press, scissors in hand, hoping to spot your client’s name. If you had a cuttings agency, your clippings would arrive days later, glued to A4 paper. And “digital” meant saving files to an eight-inch floppy disk with a whopping 98.5 KB of memory.

But what we lacked in speed, we made up for in relationships.

Back then, PRs spent more time on the phone or face to face with journalists. Story ideas were pitched in real conversations, often sparking unexpected coverage angles. Journalists had time to talk. And that human connection led to better stories.

Today, everything’s faster — but not always richer.

Virtual press rooms, shared drives, email blasts, and now AI — they’ve streamlined the process, cut costs, and opened new frontiers. Generative tools can help draft content, research angles, and automate outreach. But they can’t replace instinct, connection, or trust.

Because no matter how advanced the tech becomes, PR still relies on people — the ones who build relationships, spot the angle, and bring heart to the story. So if the pace feels dizzying in this AI era, remember: good PR isn’t just about keeping up. It’s about staying human.