Email
“Hello? Is that X from the Bleepy Times? It’s Y here from Bleep PR. How are you?”
“Busy.”
“… Ah yes, sorry. I just wondered if you’d received my press release about the …”
“No. I don’t know. Send it again. *click* …”
This exchange will be wearyingly familiar to PR exec and journalist alike. For the journalist, it demonstrates the niggling annoyance that PRs create in their everyday life. Like tangled headphone cables or slow walkers.
For the PR, it demonstrates a common professional barrier – journalists don’t like you. And they don’t even have to pretend to like you.
I have been hung up on, told to “fuck off till Friday”, heard my colleagues referred to as “PR wankers” and experienced a general glaze of obnoxiousness over my media relations outreach. And all in the space of a scant six months. Before that I was a journalist, you see.
Don’t get me wrong, I like my new job. It is challenging, educational, varied and rewarding. I communicate more efficiently now than I ever did as a journalist, and I’ve found that I have a head for business and human relations that I never knew I possessed. But I absolutely loathe pitching to the press.
Maybe I have a chip on my shoulder from not being in the cool gang any more. Like a kid who’s forced to move schools and has their social standing reset. When pitching to the media, I often feel a gnawing dread such as Willy Loman, or his pop-culture counterpart, Gil Gunderson must feel.
If I’m honest, I’m mostly worried that I will be viewed in the same way that I used to view (some) PRs. As fluff, as an annoyance. As a media graduate not smart enough to break into journalism. As a trust-funder with a nice smile and a card for the bar.
There were times where I might have been “a little off” with the odd PR. So this is clearly career karma biting me on the bum for all the times I was rude, sarcastic or slightly superior to someone simply trying to do their job. Albeit not very well.
As the publishing industry continues to evolve, journalists’ jobs are getting more difficult by the day. They’re faced with the “never-ending demands of a multi-platform brand” coupled with shrinking editorial budgets. Therefore uninformed pitches, spammy emails and haranguing phone calls cast an obvious shadow on their perceptions of the PR industry.
But for every slapdash PR, there’s a journalist who has guzzled so much of their own Kool-Aid they’re metaphorical Augustus Gloops, absorbing the pandering, the flattery, the (oft-misplaced) influence, forgetting that they’re covering an iPhone launch, not reporting from the Gaza strip.
My point, if any, is this. PR and press is, and always has been, a symbiotic relationship. The problem, as Roy Greenslade is always so keen to point out, is that PRs are outnumbering journalists by something like 4–1 these days, which makes the balance a little precarious. But in these times when “influencers” and “audiences” and “content” and journalism itself is undergoing a period of reinvention, as the boundaries continue to blur and reform, smart, creative individuals from both sides of the increasingly elastic fence will continue to seek each other out, casting aside the clichés and utilising the best that each other can offer.
Now all I have to do is convince myself.
To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox, sign up free for Media Network membership.
All Guardian Media Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled ‘Advertisement feature’. Find out more here.
;