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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 Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired.”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.