One of the biggest changes in publicity in 2020, from my vantage point, was brought on by Covid.
Before this year, TV news and feature interviews from home via Zoom and Skype would have been unthinkable. Poor video quality, less than studio-standard lighting, out-of-sync sound and video, and unreliable connectivity made Zoom and Skype unacceptable for local TV news, not to mention network and cable TV.
The pandemic changed that. Now we are accustomed to seeing interviews from laptops at home, with poor lighting, sound lag and dropouts, frozen images and distractions you'd never see in a studio setting... kids and dogs in the background and sometimes even in the foreground.
We took advantage of these changes on behalf of clients by setting up virtual media tours...a series of interviews done from home with TV stations nationwide. Normally, these interviews would have required our client to be in a studio for very costly satellite links to TV stations, or we would have had to spend days traveling city by city for live and taped interviews at each station. Instead, our client did dozens of interviews without leaving home.
Virtual tours will continue into 2021 until the pandemic subsides. The question is... what will happen once life returns to "normal" and we can travel and be close to others without having our faces covered by masks? Will virtual interviews fall by the wayside?
My guess is virtual interviews will remain a tool in the publicist's and news producer's toolkit, even as the preferred in-person or satellite feed returns. Viewers have become accustomed to the lower-quality picture and sound and news producers have come to rely on the expanded flexibility of having interview guests and news sources available to them anywhere and anytime.
One big change we'll eventually see in 2021 will be fewer disruptions to the news cycle due to presidential tweets. Our new president may use tweets to stay in touch, but I'd guess that he'll use the traditional (and more professional) methods of communication... news conferences, news releases and interviews. The news cycle will again become more predictable, which will be good for marketers and communicators and also better for the stomachs of most Americans.