Media

Items about the impact of online communications on traditional media.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

A blinding flash of the obvious: Reporters rely on PR pros for news

The folks at Crikey are shocked—shocked—to find that 55% of the articles published in 10 hard-copy newspapers were sourced one way or another by public relations.

The author of the article in Crikey—an Australian digital-only news source—believes this to be a dubious statistic, a view supported by the headline that reads, “Over half your news is spin.” The author (whoever that may be, since there’s no byline on the story) also seems to think that it’s a source of shame to practicing journalists. When called about it, “many journalists and editors were defensive,” he (or she) writes. “Who’d blame them? They’re busier than ever, under resourced, on deadline and under pressure. Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired.”

The study was conducted by 40 studnets from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the university of Technology Sydney, and is available at a Crikey site (free registration required) with the provocative title, “Spinning the Media.” There, the ACIJ’s Wendy Bacon and UTS student Sasha Pavey conclude:

Our investigation strongly confirms that journalism in Australia today is heavily influenced by commercial interests selling a product, and constrained and blocked by politicians, police and others who control the media message.

The bar charts show the percentage of content across those 10 publications that was driven by media releases and by “other forms of public relations or promotions” and how many were published with “no significant journalism work.”

What strikes me most about this “Joint Crikey-ACIJ Investigation” is the notion that it’s something new. I attended a conference in the 1980s in which a speaker noted that an equally high percentage of the stories appearing in the mainstream press begin with some kind of PR contact. The same point was made in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series on PR, “Spin Cycles,” produced back in 2007. And the Pew Research Project’s Excellence in Journalism unit found, during a week of reviewing Baltimore media, that more “more commonly than in the past…press releases from politicians, governmente agencies and companies were rewritten quickly by multiple outlets and posted on the Web with no additional reporting.”

Crikey and the ACIJ may have done a deep dive into the 10 newspapers they studied, but evidently they didn’t research much beyond that or they might have determined that the situation hardly warrants the sensationalist treatment it was given.

There are two separate issues here. The first is simple: Journalists get a lot of their news from PR people. Does this mean the news readers get from purportedly objective journalists is tainted by PR spin?

Let’s be realistic. Business and government represent a huge part of what journalists cover. And just how do the folks at Crikey think reporters learn about much of the news coming out of government and business? Are investigative reporters hanging around bars and diners hoping to hear snippets of conversation? Are they on the phones all day calling contacts, asking “Hey, mate, anything going on at Acme I should be reporting?” Does all news come from whistle-blowers and tipsters?

The role of media relations professionals is to inform journalists of their organization’s news. That’s how journalists find out that a new CEO has been hired, that a new product is launching, that a smaller company has been acquired, that quarterly earnings have been released. These are legitimate news stories. It is the newspaper’s responsibility to report them. And journalists rely on PR representatives to let them know when these events occur.

Once a reporter has been informed, he generally asks questions, does research, and produces a story. He does not accept the company’s spin. In fact, as former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski put it, “In most news stories, the spin or angle, is set by the journalist” (the emphasis is mine).

There is a vast difference between spinning the news and providing relevant information about your company to the media. This is a relationship that most journalists take for granted.

Of course, newspapers don’t report on every press release or phone pitch they receive—just the ones about which theyr readers should know. God knows PR agencies shovel a lot of self-serving garbage to the press in the form of media releases and pitches, but that doesn’t mean those releases ever make it into print.

But what about that nasty second issue, that much of the newspaper content originating with PR was reprinted “with no significant journalism work?” Remember Foremski, who said the journalist, not the PR people, are the ones who spin the story? That happens, he says, in the first few paragraphs.

Much of the rest of the story is factual: what the CEO said, when the company was founded, where it is based, the stock price, the specs of a product, the price, etc, etc, etc. There is no need for journalists to rewrite this stuff…It is wasted effort because it duplicates work already done. The journalists should focus on their spin on the story, then assemble the news story from…the press release package.

So on the one hand, there’s Crikey, sounding the alarm that organizations are infiltrating the press and scamming the public with a flood of fluff and spin. On the other hand, there is reality: PR professionals advising the media of their organizations’ news, followed by informed judgments by journalists about which stories warrant coverage. Sometimes these stories are written afresh, sometimes the reporter rewrites the first few graphs to infuse the article with her own perspective, then reporting the facts from the press release pretty much as-is. (And that doesn’t mean the facts haven’t been verified by the reporter, mind you. The appearance of press releases in those 10 Australian newspapers mostly as they appeared in the release does not mean that nobody checked those facts.)

Ultimately, the Crikey-ACIJ “investigation” is just a lot of hot air that doesn’t reveal a damn thing beyond a pathetic ignorance of the wholly ethical process by which the media-PR relationship works at its best.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Social Media News Release aligns nicely with Digital Media Pyramid

There hasn’t been much talk about the Social Media News Release (SMNR) lately. It must be time to stimulate some discussion.

When I was in journalism school (California State University Northridge, 1972-1976), the inverted pyramid was a staple of newswriting classes. The way it was taught to me made perfect sense: If somebody reads only the lede paragraph, they should walk away knowing the most important information in the story, the typical assembly of the who-what-when-where-why information. If she reads through the second graph, she’s now consumed content that is almost as important for the understanding of the story. As she reads more of the article, the information gets increasingly detailed. Wherever she chooses to stop, she’ll have absorbed the most critical information and left less important content unread.

The inverted pyramid is ideal for a linear print world. As the practice of public relations became more common, press releases adopted the inverted pyramid so editors could drop the release unchanged into their publications, chopping off as much of the end of the article as necessary to accommodate the space available.

As publications concentrate on web platforms, however, the linear approach doesn’t work, although it makes more sense than ever to lead with the five Ws. Adding link curation to the mix, being cognizant of ads appearing alongside stories that create unintended context, the use of other web-based content in pursuit of a balanced story and a host of other factors all need to be stirred into the mix.

It turns out that the journalism department at Rutgers has been teaching a new pyramid for the last seven years, an approach that could easily find its way into other journalism schools. Benjamin Davis—a new media news professor who was part of the MSNBC.com launch team—explained the pyramid in a piece he wrote for the Online Journalism Review.

Johnson calls the Digital Media Pyramid an enhancement rather than a replacement of the inverted pyramid:

It provides for the traditional brief introduction of facts (the five Ws) which are boldly separated from all supporting details. Yet the Digital Media Pyramid also addresses the need to surf the Internet for additional supporting information by permitting and explaining cut-and-pasting rules.

The pyramid covers the use of multimedia, interactivity and other non-text elements of a news story and creates awareness of ads that could be inappropriate beside the article. It also “encourages the self-eductaion of ‘users’ or readers, enabling them to quickly seek out balanced information on a news story through the use of embedded links, social neetworks and other resources.”

The Digital Media Pyramid should, Johnson argues, “find a place in the newsrooms and journalism classrooms around the globe.”

If it does, PR practitioners employing the Social Media News Release will be in good shape. The elements of the SMNR lend themselves nicely to this news-production model, with tags and links designed to assist a report conducting research, digital assets available to incorporate into a story and news facts ready to be turned into a solid 5W lede. One more compelling reason to start using the SMNR as the population of employed journalists begins to skew younger.

Does the Digital Media Pyramid work for you?

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Are budget cuts to blame for Vancouver Sun’s (inaccurate) report of Gordon Lightfoot’s death?

UPDATE: It turns out that the original prank wasn’t a tweet, but rather a phone call to a friend of the singer, who believed the report and passed it along. But Twitter got the blame anyway. GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram posted a detailed account today.

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When tweets began flooding Twitter with reports that Michael Jackson had died, I resisted what I’ll admit was a very strong temptation to retweet the news. It was only when TMZ published confirmation that I felt comfortable broadcasting the sad news to my own followers.

I know TMZ may not be The New York Times, but it’s run by Harvey Levin, an attorney and former legal correspondent for the news operation at KNBC, the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. TMZ may be filled with sleaze, but it doesn’t report unconfirmed stories as fact.

Mainstream media confirmation tends to be my benchmark. Far too many death rumors have circulated on Twitter (Jeff Goldblum, for instance, and Johnny Depp), only to be revealed as hoaxes that well-meaning people were all too ready to amplify through the retweeting process.

Professional journalists, on the other hand, verify information—usually from multiple authoritative sources—before publishing it.

After today, however, I’m rethinking my policy. Not that I’ll retweet reports of celebrity deaths the instant I receive one. No, I’m rethinking my reliance on traditional mainstream media for validation of the report’s accuracy.

As I watch Tweetdeck update, I see Twitter teeming with reports that iconic Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot is not dead. There’s radio audio available of the singer himself confirming his continued presence among the living, along with stories in publications like The Globe and Mail noting that earlier reports of Lightfoot’s death was a hoax.

I did retweet the first message I saw, which came from a trusted friend. I retweeted it because of my friend’s source. It wasn’t Twitter. It was The Vancouver Sun, where the story appeared along with a Canwest News Service copyright notice. The story has since been removed.

It’s too easy to accuse the Sun of rushing the story in order to get a scoop. I suspect budget cuts have more to do with it. As newspaper budgets decline, fact checkers are among the first to be let go. Reporters are being laid off, too, creating a burden on the staff that remains, especially given the demand they already faced to produce more copy to accommodate the online world. Some reporters are expected to crank out three or four articles a day.

Or it could be that most of the Sun’s reporters are too busy covering the Olympics to verify information like this, which Lightfoot’s manager says began with a tweet originating in Ottawa.

The Sun isn’t the only media outlet to repeat the story. Evidently (according to Lightfoot himself in the audio interview referenced above), he was getting calls from people who heard it on the radio. (The radio stations were citing reports from “out west,” which may well have been the Sun.)

Comments left to the Sun’s report before it was taken down were savage. Here’s a sampling:

Gordon now task of phoning his family members to tell them he is not dead before they read a garbage story like this. Gord heard he was dead driving in his car.

Canwest is probably sending Kevin Newman over there to whack Gordon right now, to maintain the journalistic integrity of the story.

Unbelievable! If I did my job as poorly, I’d have been fired long ago.

Nice to know you guys are such a reliable source. Someone needs their arse kicked over there and then send an apology or at least flowers of condolences to Mr. Lightfoot.

There is one silver lining to the story: Lightfoot’s music is suddenly in rotation; he’s getting more airplay, he says, than he has in years.

But that’s little comfort to me. If I can’t trust the mainstream media to get this stuff right—and the wrong information is originating in The Crowd—who can I trust?

Monday, February 15, 2010

Death Watch: Marketing and advertising have an important place in the complex media ecosystem

We have a tendency to assume that a law of physics applies equally to the media world. In physics, according to Newton’s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

This odd assumption crossed my mind to me as I was reading last night. In the he book I was reading, the author argued that, thanks to the Internet, geography doesn’t matter any more. Under Newton’s law, this makes sense:

Action: The Internet has given us access to everybody everywhere all the time.
Reaction: Geography is no longer a factor in our interactions.

In truth, though, our complex and messy world does not abide by such clear-cut rules. Without question, the Net has certainly broken down geographic barriers beyond the extent to which the telephone (and the telegraph before it) did. But on the other hand, the geography has everything to do with the relationships I have established with people who belong to the same synagogue I do. My wife and I are still friends with parents of kids who went to school with our daughter. And I have strong ties to some of the people who work in stores where I shop (notably the local computer repair business).

It’s not likely I ever would have met any of these people online. And if I hear someone breaking into my house at 2 a.m., I expect I’ll get much better results calling the local police than I will jumping into an online law enforcement community.

The exaggerated death of marketing and advertising

The same book also argued that traditional marketing doesn’t work any more now that people are able to engage one another on the scales afforded by Facebook and Twitter. Yet many of the same people who decry the ineffectiveness of traditional marketing can’t wait to see the next “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercial. (Super Bowl Sunday represents the height of the “reverse-TiVo” phoenomenon, when people record the game so they can fast-forward through the football and watch just the commercials.) Denny’s drew 2 million people to its restaurants for their free Grand Slam breakfasts on the strength of its Super Bowl commercial. And who hasn’t heard of Las Vegas’ marketing campaign, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”?

Give it a few minutes and you can probably come up with a dozen advertising or marketing campaigns that captured your imagination—or at least your attention.

Good marketing and advertising are still good. The fact that they’re not as effective as they once were is not a sign that they don’t matter any more. Rather, the increased number of channels available means consumers have more options. A marketing campaign is no longer the sole source of information about a brand, product, service or company. Because we tend to simplify things, viewing them as black and white, many social media purists fail to see complexities and intricacies of the media landscape in which each piece plays its role and supports the others. In this environment, the role of marketing and advertising has changed more than it has diminished.

Multiple relevancies and the media ecosystem

Communicators and marketers have to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world of multiple relevancies. It’s not a zero-sum game. The rise of the Net doesn’t automatically signal a decline in the value of traditional channels.

This represents more than just an additive situation in which new media get piled onto old media. The media ecosystem that has evolved. In an ecosystem, the organisms within the environment interact with and are dependent on all the other habitat’s occupants. In the business-consumer ecosystem, advertising and marketing often create the awareness that fuels the conversation within the social media space.

That’s not to say organizations shouldn’t engage with customers and other stakeholders at an organic level. Companies need to already have a trusted presence, such as the one Dell has established with its cadre of tweeting communicators or the Comcast customer service team that finds and responds to online complaints. No marketing is required to initiate these conversations. But the organic presence of company representatives engaged in conversation with customers kicks into higher gear when an advertising or marketing campaign creates broad, simultaneous awareness of an issue about which customers want to talk.

Domino’s Pizza provides an excellent example of this ecosystem. The pizza chain’s decision to put its vulnerability on display by discussing consumer criticism in a series of television commercials gained widespread attention. Table Group founder and president Patrick Lencioni discusses the power of these ads in the current issue of BusinessWeek:

...the most fascinating application of volunterability is in marketing and advertising. It’s so rare that it packs a strong punch, as long as companies mean it. Go ahead and try to think of other corporate examples of humility and naked honesty. There aren’t many to choose from.

But advertising and marketing campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum and Domino’s—a company that learned the harsh reality of social media the hard way—was prepared for the conversation that ensued. On its Facebook page and on Twitter, the company engaged in conversation prompted by the advertising and marketing. The company added a four-minute video to YouTube that went into greater detail about its turnaround and invited comments.

Of course, Domino’s could have tackled the issue one customer at a time, but kick-starting the conversation with commercials and other ads makes far more sense. Domino’s—utterly clueless when it came to social media a short time ago—has come to understand the media ecosystem far better than many of the pundits who insist there is no longer room for traditional advertising and marketing.

BestBuy is another useful example. The consumer electronics retailer used traditional marekting and advertising techniques to build awareness of its Twelpforce, the thousands of employee volunteers responding to customer queries via Twitter. It would have been a much longer process to create that awareness at the organic level. (To date, the Twelpforce has sent nearly 23,000 tweets, virtually all of them responding to mostly technical questions about the consumer electronics products it sells.)

John January, senior vice president and executive creative director at Kansas City-based ad agency Sullivan Higdon & Sink (and co-host of the all-too-infrequent podcast, “American Copywriter”), told me a couple years ago that advertising is evolving into a gateway to social media activities. Based on this understanding of multiple relevancies, I would argue that Pepsi made a mistake reallocating every nickel of its Super Bowl ad budget to social media. How many more people would have participated in Pepsi’s social campaigns if they had learned about them on Super Bowl Sunday?

Smart marketers will figure out how to take advantage of the interdpendencies that exist in the media ecosystem. Figuring out how multiple relevancies can improve the outcomes of your social media efforts will take a lot more work than simply shrugging off traditional marketing and advertising as outdated techniques displaced by social media.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Undercover Boss makes for good television—and bad management

Once the Super Bowl—the most-viewed television program of all time—ended, 38.6 million people (about 36% of the Super Bowl audience) stuck around for the premiere of CBS’s new “reality” show, “Undercover Boss.”

In case you’ve just emerged from a coma and aren’t aware of the show, the premise is simple: Company leaders go undercover on the front lines of their companies to discover what it’s really like to do the heavy lifting. Surprised at what they see—from abuses to the horrific consequences of their own policies—their humanity bubbles to the surface and they initiate changes to improve the lives of front-line workers.

(As of right now, you can watch the full episode on the CBS website.

The concept isn’t particularly revolutionary. Hertz used to require its senior staff to spend time working rental counters in order to stay in touch with the customer and remind themselves of the challenges faced by employees who are the human face of the company. JetBlue’s former chairman Dave Neeleman used to work as a flight attendant from time to time for pretty much the same reason.

The wrinkle in “Undercover Boss” is that the employees with whom the executives work are in the dark as to their new colleagues’ identity.

It makes for entertaining television, and the number of tweets I saw from communicators I follow on Twitter proclaiming “Undercover Boss” their new favorite indicates that the show resonated with people who work for a living.

Of course, it “Undercover Boss” is a network reality program, which means it’s superficial and contrived. The footage CBS requires for an hourlong show isn’t going to result in a comprehensive overview of the company’s operations and it won’t reveal most of the significant issues affecting the organization’s performance. But that’s okay. It’s just entertainment. If the executive hitting the road with a camera crew really wanted to uncover the conditions that are holding the company back, this isn’t the approach he’d take.

Ultimately, though, the program could do the company more harm than good.

Organizations need committed, engaged employees. Unlike loyalty, we know a lot about what leads employees to be committed and engaged. One driver of commitment, according to research, is the certainty that pay and benefits are handled fairly and equitably throughout the organization. This belief in fairness and equity is far more important to employees than the actual size of their own paycheck when it comes to inspiring employees to deliver their best work and to put in discretionary effort on behalf of their employer.

I once worked for an organization facing a dilemma. One of their rising stars, already a member of the management team, was pregnant and had decided to resign so she could be a full-time mom. To convince her to stay, the company made arrangements to make room for a crib and a rocking chair in her office and told her she could bring her baby to work and take all the time she needed to care for the child. The executives who concoted this scheme were proud of what they viewed as their forward-thinking solution.

Of course, the news got out to hundreds and hundreds of women at lower levels who struggled with child care but didn’t have the resources that would have allowed them to quit. Their thoroughly understandable reaction: Pay and benefits at this company is unfair. We who work our asses off get no help while the company pulls out all the stops for a highly compensated director-level executive. Morale plummeted.

Waste Management, the company featured in the premiere episode of “Undercover Boss,” could suffer the same backlash. One employee, Jaclyn, is supporting an extended family in the home she’s about to lose while she does the work of three or four people at the landfill where she works. The undercover boss, Waste Management President and COO Larry O’Donnell, risks breaking cover to tell Jaclyn’s boss that something needs to be done to help. At the end of the show, when O’Donnell reveals his true identity, he sees to it that Jaclyn gets promoted from an hourly to a salaried position that pays better; the company also hires a couple people to fill the vacant positions to relieve Jaclyn’s workload.

Then there’s Walter, O’Donnell’s supervisor at a landfill. Walter has been on dialysis for years but still works hard and has a positive attitude. At the show’s conclusion, we learn that O’Donnell has made Walter a health mentor for the company.

Yes, it’s emotional and satisfying television. But Waste Management employs tens of thousands of people. Jaclyn and Walter are not the only employees struggling to pay the bills, coping with a “do more with less” mentality, or overcoming health issues just to be able to get a paycheck. But they are the only ones O’Donnell spent time with on camera and they are the only ones whose issues were addressed by the company.

And make no mistake: There are very few Waste Management employees who didn’t watch “Undercover Boss.” Every admin doing the work of three people, every employee who isn’t making enough to save their house from the current mortgage meltdown, every employee with health issues who still needs to work or lose their health insurance watched the show and wondered, “What the hell? What about me?”

And their levels of commitment and engagement went right down the portable toilets Waste Management manages at outdoor events.

Even the resolution of a time-clock issue at a recycling facility could cause bad feelings if the problem (or similar problems) aren’t addressed at other company locations.

I’m hardly alone in recognizing the problem. Time magazine’s review notes:

Sure, he handed out promotions and raises to the few people whose stories we saw. It was moving to see a woman with overwhelming family and job responsibilities get a bump up that kept her from losing her house. But is there anything reason to believe anything is better company-wide?

The time review also notes that the policies that led to some of the situations O’Donnell encountered were the result of shareholder demands for higher ROI. Should O’Donnell alter those policies to the extent that ROI suffers, it wouldn’t be the first time a company found itself a new president. (Just ask shareholders at SAP.)

I have to admit, I’m not a fan of reality shows. I’ve never watched a single episode of Survivor or American Idol. There is one reality show I do watch: chef Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares.” One of this show’s regular features is an update. The crew revisits a restaurant where Ramsay worked his magic to see if the initial success wrought by the changes stuck. It would be nice if “Undercover Boss” went back to Waste Management in a year to see if anything changed company-wide.

But don’t hold your breath. It wouldn’t be good television to show a company with lower morale as a result of the undercover experience.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

The news industry’s turmoil increases the complexity of PR

There has been a lot of news about news lately and on the surface, none of it bodes well for the traditional newspaper business, regardless of whether you’re talking about paper newspapers or their online cousins. It does, however, reveal opportunities for people working in PR.

It should come as no surprise that readership of newspapers—both print and online—continues to decline. A Harris poll released just yesterday finds that only two out of five Americans read a newspaper every day, while 72% read a newspaper at least weekly. Ten percent never read a newspaper.

I’m not convinced that last number is all that different than it was, say, 30 years ago. I remember the number of people I encountered when I was in journalism school who didn’t read newspapers—and this was back in the days of the manual typewriter. But the size of the traditional news audience is shrinking. In a presentation delivered at Yale, Pew Internet and American Life Project Director Lee Rainie pointed out that 19% of Americans get no daily news at all, up from about 14% a decade ago. What’s more, Rainie pointed out, the people who do consume news daily spend eight fewer minutes with the news than they used to.

If this isn’t dire enough, the population of newspaper reader is aging; the younger you are, the less likely you are to read a newspaper every day. Nearly two-thirds of those 55 and over make daily newspaper reading a habit. (That might explain my own morning routine.)

All of this—and a host of other statistics that seem to predict the ultimate demise of the traditional news business—leads a lot of communicators to wonder if there’s any value in maintaining a traditional media relations function.

But shrinkage isn’t the same as death. There’s no indication that the trend will continue until there are no newspaper readers.

Remaining newspaper readers still matter

Consider this: While less than a quarter of people 18 to 34 read a daily newspaper, that’s not a number to be trifled with. The 18-24-year-old demographic accounts for about 25% of the U.S. population, or about 77 million people. When you have 19 million young people reading newspapers every day, you’d be foolish to ignore the channel when trying to reach that market, especially when you consider that many of them are likely influencers.

Remember, most of the content reported via social media is not original reporting. Bloggers, Twitterers and others are repurposing content that comes primarily from newspapers. The news that so many people get through these other channels originates in newspapers and is reported through social media by people who read newspapers. Having your story told in a newspaper increases the likelihood that it will be seen by people who rely on alternative sources for their news. Just today, PostRank reported that 80% of all audience engagement is offsite. That means even bloggers’ content is being read on Facebook, Digg, and other venues other than the blog where it was originally produced. It isn’t just newspapers that are in this boat.

In a study that focused on the news delivered over a weeklong period in one major city—Baltimore—the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that, far and away, newspapers were responsible for reporting new information. Examining six key story lines, Pew determined that 95% of new information came from a combination of traditional media (newspapers, television and niche media, with newspapers leading the pack) while “new media”—including social media—reported the least new information.

The Pew study also found that the press was responsible for triggering only 15% of the news they covered. The rest came from other sources. If you’ve been thinking the downturn in the news business has signaled the end of any need for traditional media relations, think again. Yes, 10% of people who have social networking profiles get news through those sites. But those sites didn’t originate the news. By and large newspapers did.

This means the the role of the newspaper is shifting. They remain the primary source of first reporting, but now serve as the inadvertent distributor of news to secondary channels through which an increasing number of people get their news.

A study I’d like to see would determine if social media content creators are among the remaining newspaper readers. I’d be willing to bet real money that they are.

Authoritative sources still matter

It’s equally important to have channels that let you get your organization’s news directly to its audiences. While media relations will be important for the foreseeable future, you’re competing for a shrinking amount of news space. The Baltimore Sun, for example, produced 32% fewer news stories in the period of the Pew study than it did 10 years earlier and 73% fewer than it did in 1991.

Some smug new-media pundits may be basking in the warmth of the certain knowledge that blogs and other social channels have taken up the slack. But that’s not so. According to the Pew study—as I suggested above—social media has served mostly to notify readers of the mainstream article’s existence. Social media has a greater impact on the speed with which news breaks than on the overall number of new stories. Citizen journalism has its place to be sure (just look at the iReports CNN is including in its coverage of the Haitian earthquake), it’s not panning out as a replacement for professional journalism. Social media is finding a more comfortable niche in areas such as fundraising (again, look at the Haiti situation, where social media is responsible for raising awareness of the U.S. State Department and Red Cross relief efforts, generating millions of dollars in giving.)

The repetition of news items by social media content producers—from blog posts to tweets—satisfies the growing preference for news grazing, consuming bits of news all the time instead of all at once (whether that’s sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper for half an hour or watching the nightly news). Fewer people get their news at all one regular time than get it from time to time, according to numbers Rainie cited during his Yale talk.

But this repurposing of news creates confusion. As the Project for Excellence in Journalism put it, “As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”

Blogger Adam Sherk beat me to the punch with the observation that the long-abused press release still has legs: “Companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype,” he writes. Press releases bearing the company’s official imprint can be authoritative statements of record in the absence of other sources people can trust.

Press releases still matter

That’s a significant change in the press release’s former role as a pitch to mainstream media. That role is dead, but as a channel for getting information directly to people—information they can cite—the press release has new life. (They also do a bang-up job of search engine optimization, when done right.)

You should also read Shannon Cherry’s post extolling the virtues of making your press releases available for subscription via an RSS feed, which contradicts the growing popular belief that RSS has outlived its usefulness. “Many reporters are using RSS feeds to get their releases, because they can customize what they are receiving for their target market,” Cherry writes. “Many of the press release posting sites only have one feed, so journalists avoid them due to all the clutter of releases not pertinent to them. They would certainly rather subscribe to news feeds, like your press release feed, that’s targeted.”

In other words, if you want your company’s or client’s story told, you need to make sure it’s everywhere. To get social media content creators to report it, you need to do your damnedest to get it into the papers. To get it in the papers, you need to maintain a solid media relations effort that accommodates reporters’ preferences (like RSS). You also need to go directly to influencers (through blogger outreach) and directly to the public (through a variety of techniques ranging from a strategic social media presence to tried-and-true SEO practices).

The news space has grown more complex. The sophistication of your efforts to earn coverage need to grow with it.

Monday, December 07, 2009

The marginalization of Rolodex PR

I was interviewing for a job about 15 years ago, a PR position with a high-tech startup. It only took the person interviewing me—he was the president or the CEO, if memory serves—to ask about my Rolodex.

For the uninitiated, I wasn’t being asked about the rotary card index loaded with removable cards where I kept contact information. (I still have a paper Rolodex which, in addition to my digital contact lists, I use frequently.) I was being asked specifically about how many industry media contacts I had. Truth be told, I didn’t have too many contacts, and the interview ended shortly afterward. No matter how much I tried to explain that good PR isn’t about quantity of contacts, this company wasn’t interested in anything but.

They’re hardly alone. In another job, I was constantly asked to “get out your Rolodex” and had to remind the boss that I didn’t practice Rolodex PR.

Good PR is not, in fact, about the number of relationships you have developed with media contacts. It never has been and, as we navigate our way through the shifting media seas, it is less important than it ever was. Getting people to tell your story is not about the relationships you have with reporters. It’s about the quality of the story and how well it aligns with the reporter’s beat and interests.

I tried explaining this to the startup exec: If I have a great story to tell, I can get it placed without having ever spoken to any given reporter. On the other hand, if the story sucks no amount of time invested in building a close relationship will get a reporter to cover it.

Getting a great story placed also requires finding the reporters who have reported on similar subjects in the past. Fifteen or 20 years ago, Lexis-Nexis was an ideal tool for finding reporters who have shown interest in your topic. (It was also a great way to check the work of reporters calling you to find out to learn how they have covered companies like the ones you represent.)

Media relations-focused PR professionals who practiced Rolodex PR are finding even less value in their connections today. The composition of a publication’s editorial staff has always been fluid—particularly on smaller papers and trade publications—but the shakeout in the journalism business means a lot of those well-established contactds aren’t working in the business at all any more.

The changing nature of journalism, including the rise of blogging and citizen journalism, has even further marginalized the value of the Rolodex. In a post on Rebooting the News, Dave Winer suggests that journalism training could become part of everybody’s education, not just those who enroll in journalism school:

In the future everyone can be a journalist, and the people who will be most valuable are those who are experts in areas outside journalism. That means, to me, that everyone should get a basic journalism education, in the same way it’s a good idea for us to take a semester of math, English lit, chemistry or physics.

My own recent experience speaking with a journalism department faculty proved (to me, at least) that the future of journalism is up in the air. Hundreds of models are being proposed and experimented with. But Dave’s view (that everyone can be a journalist, not necessarily that universities will embrace journalism-as-core-curriculum) should serve as a shake-up call for PR practitioners who have relied on the Rolodex.

First of all, I have experience with journalists who become experts in other fields. A good friend with whom I attended journalism school decided he wanted to cover law, so he went to law school in order to improve his depth of knowledge. He grew so close to the field that he could no longer report effectively to people who didn’t have his own level of understanding. (He eventually gave up journalism and has been a public defender for the better part of 30 years.)

One of the goals of journalism training is helping reporters learn to translate complex topics so lay readers can understand them. As experts in their field become journalists in an everyone-can-publish world, PR can help them make their messages understandable to outsiders…that is, we can help them tell their stories.

But more important is finding those journalists—professional or citizen—who would be genuinely interested in telling our companies’ or clients’ stories. And when everyone is conceivably a reporter, you’d either need the world’s biggest Rolodex, and more relationships than any one person can possibly maintain, or a different approach to getting your story out.

Practitioners who have always found the right outlet and pitched a great story have a leg up in this environment over those who build relationships with a diminishing pool of professional journalists. And assuming Dave’s vision is accurate, we’ll also help our clients—the experts in their fields—be their own journalists.

As with all things, this isn’t an either/or proposition. Some solid relationships with important journalists will always be important. (Having that relationship with Walt Mossberg or David Pogue, for example, would be invaluable when representing tech clients.) That is, I’m not about to fall into the trap of proclaiming Rolodex PR dead. In general, though, Rolodex PR is fast becoming a niche activity rather than a core PR practice.