Gainesville, FL, January 2010 - The Institute's Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation publishes new paper highlighting recent studies showing that using the cost of media space and time provides a very useful evaluation of the news medium itself in which a story resides, similar to the way the cost of real estate impacts the overall value of a house.

By Angela Jeffrey, APR, Bruce Jeffries-Fox, and Brad L. Rawlins, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT: Over the past two decades, Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) has been correctly denounced as a measurement technique. The many shortcomings of this old methodology will be described at length within this paper. However, recent studies yield evidence that using the cost of media space and time provides a very useful evaluation of the news medium itself in which a story resides, similar to the way the cost of real estate impacts the overall value of a house. The cost of media space and time appears to improve correlations between media coverage and business outcomes demonstrably over other popular quantitative methods, such as story counts and audience impressions. This paper provides four case studies exploring this concept; calls for a new name for this valuable data, "Weighted Media Cost," and provides a completely new paradigm for its proper and effective use.

Download full paper at the Institute for Public Relations Website HERE.