The tip of a 12 months is at all times a time of reflection nevertheless it feels much more so this 12 months as we strategy the second anniversary of a worldwide well being pandemic that has upended everybody’s lives.

The strains outdoors COVID-19 testing facilities are winding their manner down the blocks of American cities once more. Whereas the Omicron variant of the virus might not be as lethal as earlier strains, particularly as many individuals at the moment are vaccinated and have booster pictures, it’s nonetheless beginning to infect folks at scale and has unfold to 36 states.

That’s a miserable prospect with which to enter a brand new 12 months and has led to full hospitals once more, important adjustments in journey plans and canceled vacation events.

Yesterday, JPMorgan canceled its large healthcare convention in San Francisco and moved it digital. It’s tough to see CES following go well with and going by the wayside – it’s in Vegas in any case – however something is feasible.

In addition to infecting 50 million People and killing greater than 800,000, COVID has upended everybody’s lives in lots of different methods, inflicting them to be separated from family and friends, unable to mourn departed family members correctly, shattering companies and communities, and resulting in issues with isolation and psychological well being.

At PRWeek, we misplaced our former reporter Thomas Moore, who died in June after leaving us in February to go and work for The Hill. Canadian-born and a longtime Las Vegas resident Thomas joined us in April 2018 and, like many PRWeekers previous and current, was a little bit of a personality.

He previously labored in PR with utility firms in Nevada and would wax lyrical about that life given half an opportunity. He liked music and DJed his personal radio present on Monday nights. I do know he made many mates within the PR business and saved in contact with them when he went to The Hill. He was a great man.

One in every of my greatest mates, Simon Kelly, who many within the business will know as CEO of content material advertising and marketing company Story Worldwide, died of an aggressive type of mind most cancers in Could after a – mercifully – brief battle with that horrible illness.

Simon would have had a giggle about his image showing beneath a headline about PR and influence – he was all in regards to the “post-advertising age” and had been a groundbreaking content material marketer since 2005 when the idea barely existed. However I do not assume we have been far off the identical web page on this and most different issues.

Thomas interviewed Simon in June 2020 for our Across the ‘Workplace’ phase. Now they’re gone. RIP each.

Personally, it’s been nearly two years since I’ve been capable of journey again to my hometown of London to see household and mates, and in that point I missed the funerals of three different mates who have been additionally taken by most cancers. Possibly it’s simply my age, however these unhappy occasions have taken on a lot extra significance in these restricted occasions.

I’m positive just about everybody has been affected in related methods and has their very own tales of loss and absence amongst households and mates, all of which have been magnified on this hyper-concentrated atmosphere across the pandemic.

That’s a part of the reason for COVID tendencies such because the Nice Resignation – or as Korn Ferry dubbed it, the Nice Reshuffle – folks typically reassessing their priorities in life and chopping out the elements that simply weren’t working for them.

With all that being mentioned, individuals are extremely resilient.

And, amid these tough occasions, the PR business particularly has confirmed particularly resilient.

It regrouped after the preliminary shock of lockdown within the U.S. in March 2020 and instantly began proving its worth throughout totally different parts of the career together with disaster communication, worker engagement, healthcare PR, company and model status, purposeful enterprise, administration consulting, storytelling and communications know-how.

I’ve mentioned this quite a few occasions this 12 months already nevertheless it bears repeating, now not do we have to wistfully discuss gaining that “seat on the desk.” The PR perform has that seat and now must show it might probably ship on the elevated expectations that include it.

Each day, PRWeek tracks the methods during which totally different in-house PR departments and the exterior businesses that help them are stepping up their recreation.

Simply immediately, Weber Shandwick introduced a rebranding that places additional concentrate on its vastly profitable United Minds division, which presents the counsel to senior C-suite executives that’s in such demand at that famed “desk.”  

Yesterday, McDonald’s introduced it has centralized its U.S. and company communications groups beneath the management of Michael Gonda, reporting to McDonald’s chief world influence officer Katie Fallon.

Fallon’s influence job title and its alignment with PR is important. The comms perform is now not relegated to a help function that arrives on the finish of enterprise course of to use somewhat burnish.

“A prime precedence is making certain that we herald a pacesetter to supply the U.S. management staff with a holistic view of the dangers and alternatives forward, and who can proceed to harness the nice work of the complete influence perform,” she famous in a memo to employees about bringing in a VP of comms to help Gonda.

All this leads me to my 2022 New 12 months’s decision, which is to do the whole lot to vary the outdated and disingenuous narrative in regards to the PR career at any time when it comes up in mainstream media.

What number of occasions have you ever sighed when one more Instances, Journal or New Yorker piece characterizes PR as spin, darkish arts or obfuscation and its main practitioners as masters of manipulation, toxicity and disingenuousness?

Certain, there are unhealthy actors in any business and there are debates available inside PR about ethics and the rights and wrongs of working with industries akin to fossil fuels, rogue nations and opioids.

Enterprise is hard and generally it will get tough. That’s why firms want recommendation in steering themselves by means of it. However these days there’s no purpose why PR needs to be held in any decrease standing than the authorized career, accountancy or finance.

It’s time for my journalistic mates in standard media to shed their lazy generalizations and biases and sensible as much as the brand new actuality.

So, as we attain the top of 2021, let’s cherish our mates, households and family members throughout this vacation season. Keep in mind those that are now not with us. And proceed to present mad respect to important employees throughout healthcare and all the opposite companies we got here to understand and depend on greater than ever throughout lockdown.

From the entire PRWeek staff: thanks to all our readers and stakeholders in your continued help and good vibes throughout these tough occasions.

Let’s reconvene with renewed vigor in 2022 and proceed to show there’s far more to the PR business than the mainstream media provides it credit score for.