The role of public relations practitioners within organisations is also important. Crucially, if the public relations staff is regarded as having responsibility for understanding publics, and is given the task of ensuring that they are informed about audiences, then consideration of the characteristics of the audience will be given. This two-way communication perspective sees the role of public relations practitioners as boundary-spanners (Grunig and Hunt, 1984). This has practitioners "spanning the boundaries" of the organisation and the publics with which it communicates. It fits the definition of public relations as being the management of communications between an organisation and its publics and between the publics and the organisation.

One could go so far as to say practitioners using this approach have "one foot in the organisation and one foot outside" (Grunig and Hunt, 1984:9).

Following on, if this role is recognised within an organisation, it will lead to this consideration in the planning process. "The planners must balance what they need to communicate to the organisation's environment with attention to the information coming from the environment" (Windahl et al., 1997:87).

This positioning of the public relations function is important, as it must permit the effective straddling of the boundaries while keeping the trust of the organisation and the audience, according to Grunig and Hunt (1984). The author feels that for most practitioners, keeping the trust of the organisation is most important, as the idea of keeping the trust of the audience presupposes more contact with that audience then most practitioners probably have. As well, current thinking is that the ideal position for the practitioner must be near the top of the relevant organisation or organisational unit so that the necessary flexibility is provided (Grunig and Hunt, 1984).

Models

The author believes that the model that best describes this balance is the two-way asymmetric. This model, while maintaining that communication attempts to persuade and influence an organisation's publics, also accounts for feedback from those publics. As one can ascertain from the title of the model, however, the amount of information flowing to the publics and back from the publics is not equal, it is asymmetric, with more flowing from the organisation than back to it. Additionally, the perceived weight or importance of the information is biased in favour of the organisation.