As the 21st century dawns and the blogosphere takes over, journalists at print newspapers aren’t the only professionals who are worrying.

Public and media relations journalists don’t quite know how to handle the new phenomenon either. Gone are the days when a standard, canned news release sent out to the same e-mail list day and and day out suffices as “public relations”. Because blogging is all about injecting personal opinion and using filters to skip to what you really want to read about, public relations has to be about personalization too. As PR expert and blogger Steve Rubel put it, “For the first time, public relations means relating with the public.”

Unfortunately, anyone who’s been in the PR industry for more than five years probably doesn’t have formal training in blog-speak. They’re used to the standard news-style press release; how do they approach bloggers and customize their response for each and every one of them? How, some might think, is it possible to cultivate a relationship with someone whose face they’ll never see and whose voice they’ll never hear?

PR professionals have to resign themselves to the fact that connecting with people in the blogospohere is simply more difficult than typing up a few paragraphs and hitting the “send” button. They also have to get used to the fact that their role is no more significant than the perhaps thousands of other commentators of a blog, and their carefully-crafted messages might get lost in a sea of comment threads. A white paper released by the PR firm Edelman shows how these new obstacles can actually be used to a PR company’s advantage.

The white paper points out that bloggers don’t want to hear things that don’t obviously interest them, so strategic communicators can’t simply send a them press release that’s “scattershot” because it’s designed to interest everybody at once. Sending the kind of information that might pull a blogger in requires research–reading the blog–and selection–picking the elements of a general release the communicator thinks will be most valuable to the blogger.

Suddenly, with the advent of blogs, strategic communications has just gotten a lot more strategic, and I believe that’s the way it should be. After all, public relations journalists have always striven to connect with their contacts and build a relationship of trust, and what better way than to do it through blogging? Whereas in a traditional PR situation communicators might not know much about the convictions of their clients, in the blogosphere it’s increasingly more possible to intimately get to know your target audience. Companies should take advantage of online buzz by using it to direct the buzz in their favor.

The same applies to communicators of the future, even if they’re not strategic communicators and even if they don’t plan a future in PR. Every journalist should understand not just the power a blogger holds, but the power anyone who comments on a blog can hold. Were I to pick three blogs where I commented on a post and left a link to my blog, I may be able to double my traffic level in a matter of days depending on the popularity and audience of the blogs. (Now that’s power journalism!) I myself am not a strategic communicator, but in blogging, all communicators have to think strategically.