Traditionally, the debate on communication value and the contribution of communication professionals to organisational decision-making has been linked to diverging roles (managers, technicians). This chapter introduces an alternative view, based on an exploratory, qualitative study of communication professionals in Finland. It focuses on the diverse ways in which these professionals contribute to organisational decisionmaking. The results show a rich, constantly developing picture of communication practices, which challenges the traditional dichotomy of manager and technician roles.

This study examines how the media and journalists are used in lobbying processes. To explore the topic a systematic review of the literature in peer-reviewed journals published between January 2000 to June 2018 was undertaken. The findings of this paper indicate that lobbyists and interest groups engage with a plethora of various strategies and systematic methods when influencing or trying to advocate the work of journalists and media organisations. The findings shed the mystery of lobbyists and interest group’s communicative attempts. This study increases the knowledge of the relationships between journalists and lobbyists in lobbying processes. Based on the literature review, the paper presents a categorised model of media influencing strategies in lobbying process.

People are increasingly turning to social media for their news and for sharing and discussing news with others. Simultaneously, media organizations are becoming platform-dependent and posting short forms of their news on their social media sites in the hope that audiences will not only consume this news but also comment on and share it. This article joins other media and journalism studies exploring this phenomenon through a relational approach to media audiences to better understand how media organizations, particularly newspapers, are cultivating relationships with audiences via social media. Drawing on public relations theory about organization–public relationships, the article examines how news organizations nurture relationships with audiences via social media, such as through engagement and dialogic communication strategies. This article empirically examines organization–public relationships strategies (disclosure, access, information dissemination, and engagement) of nine newspapers with the largest reach in Australia, the US, and the UK. A content analysis is conducted of these newspapers’ posts (total 1807) published in March 2021 on their Twitter and Facebook sites to identify and examine these strategies. Findings show that their social media accounts are predominantly used for news dissemination rather than audience engagement. The implications are that although media professionals are frequently distributing news content among their audiences via their social media sites, they are not adequately engaging with them.

Public relations professionals' work to contribute to organizational decision making can be considered as a strategic action. Verhoeven, Zerfass and Tench (2011) defined strategic communication as a form of strategic action and public relations professionals take the actors inside and outside the organization as the starting point of communication. They emphasize that public relations roles in decision making enable them to act strategically and link communication to organizational objectives. Verhoeven et al. (2011, p. 100) pointed out that "it is important that strategic communication professionals help to define business strategies of the organization and support business goals by planning and executing communication activities." They also emphasized that evaluating and controlling the effectiveness of communication are also part of this strategic orientation of public relations. The added value of communication to decision making, as Van Lier (2013) argued, is the understanding of communication and the informative value of the content. He emphasized that systems, e.g. organizations, benefit internally from new information when meanings are assigned to information through sensemaking. The problem organizations face is that too much information is available. Van Lier (2013) concluded that the selectivity of information is part of the communication process of systems.

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