Lively Westminister debate finds PR not guilty of threatening press integrity On Wednesday night, a couple of the team from Rainier PR attended a University of Westminster debate on whether ‘The growth of PR is threatening the integrity of the press’. And before we get complaints of bias, we would like to point out that of the two of us that attended the debate, one is currently moonlighting as a hack and the other is a former IT Week journo - so we can see from both sides of the fence.

There was an impressive line up of speakers at the event: Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News and Roy Greenslade, former editor of the Daily Mirror and Professor of Journalism at City University, argued for the motion that the growth of PR is threatening the integrity of the press. Lord Tim Bell, Chairman of Chime Communications, and Phil Hall of Phil Hall Associates and former editor News of the World were both against the motion.

Both Davies and Greenslade didn’t pull any punches and heavily criticised the PR industry for taking advantage of the vulnerability of the press. Journalists do not have the time to research stories properly due to time constraints and decreasing budgets. Apparently a Fleet Street journalist now writes three times more copy than a decade ago.

Davies claimed that journalists had become “a passive process for other outlets”. The PR industry feeds false stories to the press and the Iraq war was cited as a perfect example of how the trust between PR and journalists has become abused, alleged Davies. Greenslade continued the criticisms of the PR industry describing those that work in it as “people who earn money by being between us [journalists] and the truth”.

Lord Tim Bell argued that it was questionable whether journalists had integrity in the first place – the reporting of the McCann’s was highlighted – and admitted freely that his work had his clients’ interests front of mind. Both Lord Bell and Hall believed that it was not the responsibility of the PR if the integrity of journalist was undermined – most of the problems of the press could be blamed on low prices and the pithy investment by those that own the press. Their clients are also entitled to be protected from the press and information withheld, said Lord Bell – why should they have to air their dirty laundry just because the media thinks it would make a good story?

The debate was very lively and all speakers came off well, particularly the stoical Phil Hall. The one thing both sides agreed on was that the media was broken, but disagreed on whose fault or responsibility it was.

When the votes were counted 59 were for the motion compared to 164 against. Is the growth of PR threatening the integrity of the press? It was quite clear that those who attended the event didn’t think so.

Labels: after work, journalist, media, PR

  Permalink | 2 comments | Stephen Waddington @ 9:29 AM

  Bring back the news release; forget about social media releases Richard Millington debates the issue of drafting the perfect press release only for it to be mauled by a client.

You've just written a press release. You send it to the client for their approval. They come back with a lot of changes, most of which are awful. The quote has clearly been written by a machine, they've inserted lots of acronyms, even more plenty of hyperbole and it just doesn't read well. In short, it's been butchered and no journalist in their right mind would touch it.

Andy Smith bemoans some of the piss poor press releases that agencies tart via Sourcewire.

You can get a feel for the kind of press release hitting journalist in-boxes by looking at Daryl Willcox’s Sourcewire or Response Source. For example, would you put out a press release to “pay tribute” to someone holding down the same job for 5 years? You might if you were the Prime Minister - but a call centre manager?

Three issues here:

(1) We’re taught to write from age five. Consequently anyone can reasonably voice an opinion on the content of a press release.

(2) The client will always win. Once a press release has done the rounds of a corporate organisation it takes a very astute PR exec to tell a client that their modifications are off the mark.

(3) Press releases have morphed into Medusa-like documents that are ultimately often little more than web fodder that massage the ego of third parties such as customers, channel partners and investors. Very rarely are they news releases.

Forget about the social media release for now. As Sally Whittle says we need to get to remember the purpose of a press releases and get back to the basics of writing decent news copy.

Labels: journalist, PR, social media

  Permalink | 10 comments | Stephen Waddington @ 9:58 AM