PR stands for public relations. Like, it literally is about controlling what the public does with releases. It's not total absolute control, but PR firms can work wonders. The university press office can take a paper and exaggerate the claims to try to make the university look better, or at least, not highlight that testing was done in mice,
for example.
That is technically true, though in practice the definition I believe has expanded to include "general news and press coverage of XYZ", which is how I'm phrasing it here.
Having had some work get incredible attention, and other work not at all, I've experienced a small slice of the volatility of the web. My most popular, for example, tweet chain was a semi-technical vent I wrote over the course of 30 minutes after stewing about some semi-useless technical hype that no one seemed to be addressing the flaws in. I wrote it in a way that was more attention-grabbing somewhat than my more technical posts, put it out there, and shared it in a few places. It was pretty shallow, technically, I think, but I feel like it really had to be stated, since it sorta felt...really pretty obvious?
Two days later or so, my number of Twitter followers had over quadrupled.
I think humanity can be quite finicky sometimes (a more general statement, I don't think one could conclude that from the previous anecdote alone).
PR is a euphemism for propaganda, popularized by Edward Bernays as propaganda to promote the perception of American exceptionalism (propaganda is something the enemies of America do, here in America we do public relations instead!)
