Defining Publics in Public Relations: The Case of a Suburban Hospital

I f one takes the term public relations literally he would quickly deduce that the two most important questions which a public relations practitioner must answer are "Who are my publics?" and "What kind of relations d o I have with those publics?" Yet public-relations practitioners and communication researchers have spent much more time trying to answer the second question than the first. Public-relations practitioners and textbooks d o not ignore the question of who the public is. Typically, they list a standard set of "publics" based either on demographic categories (such as young people, minorities, women), media use (such as users of specialized media vs. mass media-"specialized publics" vs. the "general public"), or on categories of people in conflict with the organization or with which the organization wants to secure cooperation (such as employees, communities, stockholders). I f one assumes that a public is a group of people who behave similarly, then it should be clear that the social categories used by public relations people are gross