Long post alert.

I don't normally do this but it had to be done today - A PR Blogger has put up an article about why journalists should be more considerate, and it needs a response from someone on my side of the fence. Unfortunately there is no space for a response (major social media howler no. 1: it's all about engaging and this is a communications company we're talking about here).

OK, a few parameters. First, I'm going to engage with this in the narrow terms the original article lays out, in other words for public relations you can read 'press relations' in here. There is a huge amount of PR work outside of that - I was judge on the Nectar Business Awards just recently and the whole thing was organised faultlessly by their PR company - but the article focuses only on press work so that's where I'll look.

I should start by stating that I hold no brief for inaccurate journalism - I've been guilty of errors myself of course, but always try to get them corrected and never hide behind the subs. I'm human, I've screwed up and I'll do so again sometime. Nor do I approve of rudeness for the sake of it. Yes, if people give me plain wrong or daft advice I'm human and will snap under pressure but I'm not like the personal finance journalist I know of who'd answer 'F*** off' when people checked his name on the grounds that if they didn't know who was on his extension, they could go hang. That's inexcusable.

Nevertheless, one of the correspondents in the piece who complains about journalists asking 'do you know how many press releases I get' as a major gripe when she approaches them would do well to consider how she frames the question so that such an answer is possible. At a guess I wonder whether it's 'Did you get that release I sent' in which case 'I get 60 a day, how should I know' is an accurate if unhelpful answer. I do understand, as I often say on my media training sessions, that some clients wll demand you phone journalists, but how about coming up with something extra like 'we now have a client you can talk to' or 'there are some more research figures available'? We'd be almost obliged to listen to that.

Likewise, asking us to put detailed synopses on the Web for our competitors to read and publish spoilers is just crazy and we're not going to do it just for you. Expecting people to whom you're effectively selling and marketing to adjust their practices to accommodate you isn't a reasonable request. We work for our clients or employers, and they're the ones for whom we set our working patterns, same as you. This can sometimes mean we get a request for an article at very short notice and no, we don't like it either; complaining that you need more notice is something we're more likely to share in common than something we're doing to you deliberately. Again, it's a job rather than a hobby, nobody's saying we have to love every individual bit of it.

There are some specific, numbered things we do 'wrong' in the article, which it's worth running through.

1. Vagueness, not noting who we've spoken to in a PR organisation. I agree that's unprofessional and disorganised but would anyone like to know how many times I have to stop a PRO in mid-flow pitching a release and remind them they haven't told me their name? It cuts both ways. The point, though, conflates two issues: phoning a PR organisation without being certain who it was that called me unsolicited when I was on the way out is different from not taking correct notes of a full interview intended for quoting. The point seems to try to address both of these things in one.

2. Lack of realism about a particular media to an organisation - when we ask for an interview at short notice without understanding where we fit into the client's job: Sorry, this just isn't my job. I'll be calling round to get as many comments and insights for a piece as I can. I fully accept that not everyone is going to want to speak to me, have time to speak to me or want to appear in the journal for which I'm working. It is simply not my job to say 'no' on your behalf or that of your client and guess what, I'm going to continue asking because that's my job. If I go to an editor and say I didn't put a call in because I didn't expect the person to be available I don't expect to be working for that editor for long.

3. Lack of accuracy while reproducing figures I fully agree is inexcusable as long as the figures were correctly presented in the first place. The US model does have more rigour but it has stacks more money. Many of us would welcome similar fact-checking facilities over here but we're not going to get them.

4. Again, agreed - journalists who go into anything with a fixed agenda will almost certainly miss good stories and print inaccurate ones. This is simple bad practice.

5. Passing the buck/blaming the subs: Up to a point. The PR who raises the issue that the subs would have been fired ages ago if they'd put inconsistencies and inaccuracies in has no idea whether a particular sub had been fired or not. When I worked for the then VNU Business Publications as a freelance there was one production editor in particular who'd constantly change the spelling of 'Johnnie' to 'Johnny'. I once interviewed a Johnnie, his photo had him with a name badge spelled Johnnie and she still insisted on altering my copy and calling him Johnny in the caption; she also put a headline on an article about a company called ATS Technirent calling the company AST, which was a major computer manufacturer at the time. She didn't get sacked, she'd just spend a lot of time telling me she didn't rate me as a journalist.

6. Point 6 - that journalists shouldn't ask whether anything else is going on outside the (possibly rather narrow) world of our questions - is the most stupid, ill-informed pile of twaddle I have ever read. I'm genuinely stunned that a PRO would be dim enough not to recognise a golden chance to get another story in, make another point, for the opportunity it represents. No journalist, however good they are, will ever assume they have the whole story and that there's nothing else to say; asking what else is going on is the way you start to find out. But from the PR point of view this is the open goal question - tell us about increased sales figures, tell us about a new release, tell us about a training initiative, don't whine that we've asked another question. On the other hand if you're afraid your client is going to tell us something more interesting than the story you want to push (and yes, that has happened to me on more than one occasion) it's not my job to keep them under control - brief them, don't blame me for asking.

Eve more fatally, the logic on which the article is based is flawed. In the first paragraph it says journalists and PRs need each other. In the second it says it might be useful if journalists and PROs spent a week doing each other's jobs to prove the point. I disagree. In the first instance, the press was around long before public relations became an industry. Only yesterday a family member spent a lot of time with a journalist covering her working area, without the benefit of any sort of PR input. This journalist is going to be able to do her job simply by going out and talking to people. On the job swap idea, rather than suggesting people with mis-matched skills try to do each other's tasks for a week, which would be crazy as there'd be too much to learn, how about if journalists tried to do without PRs for a week? A lot, particularly the spoonfed variety, would founder, but the people who actually attend the events, the ones who get the book deals signed, would be able to continue. Thanks to Twitter, email, Facebook pages etc. it's very easy to contact people without middle persons.

Then it's the PR industry's turn. Tell your clients that there's going to be a week's amnesty in which PRs won't talk to the press. Now seriously, who's going to die first?

None of this is any excuse for rudeness or unprofessionalism. Journalists who use the PR industry as a scratching post for their egos are a pain; the PR industry is full of professional people who are courteous and willing to help wherever they can. Blaggers who insist on freebies, people who're just in it for a free lunch, sloppy professionals on either side are undesirable in the extreme. But please, don't overstate your case - and particularly don't expect me to do your job for you.

Tags: journalism, public relations

It's interesting and in no small way reassuring to see that the US is going to have a stab at regulating bloggers - specifically they'll have to disclose payments, says an article in the Press Gazette. I suppose I should declare my own interest; I don't get paid to write this blog at all but I'm hoping it will encourage people to buy my book, preferably through a link I put up so I get not only royalties but a kickback from being an Amazon Associate. Most authors with a blog do the same.

I'm a little concerned about two things, though. First, how are they going to police this? Everybody knows you can start a blog really easily (it must be true, I say it in my book) so how do we police every little thing that might crop up? Many blogs including this one originate outside the US, and it's difficult to imagine even President Obama himself being able to regulate them.

Second, lots of stuff isn't directly paid for as such but it's subsidised by freebies. Loads of bloggers - I'm afraid I'm talking about the amateur variety more than people like me who're used to getting paid for their words - are happy to review (say) computer games because the companies that send them will allow the blogger to keep the game. The blogger therefore hasn't paid for the game, and is therefore getting some sort of benefit (anyone wanting a Rolex watch reviewed on the same basis, just let me know).

Many journalists don't even notice these little benefits are happening. In my book I talk about Christopher Ward Watches, for example, as an example of an organisation that's used forums to engage with customers very effectively indeed. I stand by that, and would add that they've never pitched to go into any book on which I've been working; however, when I first met the team they were launching their then new range, and every journalist who turned up went away with a complimentary watch. This is just good PR of course - but is it a payment of sorts?

To my mind, the new American rules have opened a proverbial can of worms that certainly needs inspection; I suspect that insisting everyone declares any direct payments is only a start.

Tags: blog, blogging