Las Salas de Prensa Virtual como herramientas de Relaciones Públicas para la comunicación con los medios en Cuba. Un estado de la cuestión / Virtual Press Room as Public Relations tool for communication with media in Cuba. A state of affairs

Abstract

Public Relations have found in digital platforms an ideal device to build contact and interactivity with corporation's audiences. Within the field, new possibilities emerge to address the issue of generating interactivity with communication media, which has always been a core activity of Public Relations offices. Over the last decade, the Cuban institutional and communicative scenario has witnessed an upsurge of Press Cabinets and Communication Offices, which are expanding their traditional functions mainly due to digitization and hypermedia convergence. Thus, new resources like Virtual Press Rooms aim to assist corporations in their quest to build interactive channels for contact with media and citizenship, to manage information flows with journalists and to promote the dialogue with the stakeholders. These tools are considered a natural evolvement of the traditional routines of communication offices to enhance interactive channels and nurtured relationships with press officers. Many researchers have pointed out the relevant role of Virtual Press Rooms as substitutes for common PR strategies like press kit and mailing. This research analyzes the integration of Virtual Press Rooms within the main organism of Cuban state’s central administration. This research has been carried out using a quantitative content analysis, based on a categorical system validated by the Bitartez Group of the Basque University System for developing similar researches in the field. The study assesses the common features of Virtual Press Rooms in Cuban corporations and its adaptation to Cuban journalistic and communicative landscape. The results of the study show that Cuban Online Press Rooms perform as a container for files and corporate content, while exalting a documentary function. In many cases, the informative role is prioritized, while the contents designed for media are relegated to less visible spaces within the website. Even though they improve the access to relevant and quality information that facilitates journalistic practices, they still lack of a better approach to nurture the interactions between journalists and corporate sources. The whole analysis shows that Cuban corporations do not take full advantage of digital capabilities to nurture the information flows and the interactions between the organization and their stakeholders. Whether it is suitable to assess that Cuban communication`s practices are, indeed, in a process of transition to the digital landscape, it is still relevant to find out if the limitations exposed in the previous paragraphs obey to some strategical and political-ideological conditioning factors.