From Journalist to PR - Part 1
Many people visiting this site might be aware that I changed my job after 44 years as a journalist… It’ s been an interesting adjustment - and this is the first in a series of articles I am writing as Editorial Director at RAW Food & Drink…
If we ignore the period when nothing happened because of the pandemic lockdown, I have now been a PR man for six months - which is no big deal, unless it’s measured against more than four decades when I worked as a journalist. Then it becomes a bit more of a story, because everyone knows that some dyed-in-the-wool journos regard the move to PR as a step across to the dark-side.
I was one of those cynical old hacks - and here’s one reason why…
After I added the title Food Editor to my overall job title of Editor-at-Large at the Western Morning News where I worked for 20 years, my computer’s inbox swelled to more than 400 PR related emails a day. That was far too many - it meant I had to spend ages each morning pressing delete, delete, delete - spending no more than a second or two scanning each.
There were, however, some names which would cause me to hesitate. Not many. Perhaps just half-a-dozen out of the 400. These were the public relations people who knew me and the titles for which I worked - the ones who took the trouble to know what would interest me, and why.
A well-known regional editor mentioned this slew of PR generated “garbage” in his column only recently, describing it as “utterly maddening”. Back in the day, I’d have used stronger terms than that.
After the 400th “hope you are well” or “hope you had a great weekend” I’d be tearing my hair out. Especially knowing there’d be another 400 the next day, and another 400 the day after that…
But let’s get back to the half-dozen or so names which stood out in my daily diet of emails - the PRs who’d make me sit up and take notice…
I used to think: “If they can do it, why can’t the rest of them? How hard can it be? You have a journalist here who has worked for years at a big regional daily - one which happens to have one of the wealthiest readerships of any newspaper in the UK. If these PRs would like to have their clients’ stories loud and proud in front of that demographic, surely it isn’t too much to ask that they know the style of the paper and the interests of the particular journalist whose attention they are trying to attract?”
And then I’d think: “Why don’t they realise that a little homework would take them out of every journalist’s delete, delete, delete road to nowhere? Presumably their agencies are being paid good money - can they really get away with it by simply saying they sent out press releases to 100s of journalists? Surely, the value of the service they offer lies in the actual results?”
Such were the thoughts of an experienced journalist on the receiving end. I didn’t really know how the public relations business worked, nor did I care.
My concerns were along the lines of…
Will this interest my readers?
If it ticks our boxes, how easy will it be for me to produce good copy from the material I’m being fed?
Are the images suitable - not just product shots?
Indeed, are there any images?
Are there good usable quotes that will be relevant to our readership?
Are there some easy to follow facts and figures?
And because I was mainly a feature writer, often producing big double page spreads, I’d also be thinking… Okay, I am interested in this, but it’s going to mean getting in the car to go and interview someone, or see or experience something.
How easy is the PR going to make that for me?
Will they move heaven and earth to fit with my schedule, or am I going to have to mess around jumping through their hoops?
Will I enjoy it or will I be bored? Because if I get bored, it’s certain that the eventual copy will bore the arses off the readers.
And so on…
Remember: this was one of, say, just half a dozen PR emails out of 400. So then, if I was interested, there would be a quick phone-call or an email back to the PR. Only they provided all the right answers to the above would it begin to be a possible story that might actually see the light of day.
If not, then it would join the many thousands of others in an invisible bin. The great unseen iceberg of PR material under the surface…
All those stories - so important to countless businesses and organisations which would love to see them aired in front of a larger public - that lurk and die in the murky underwater depths of the public relations ocean.
Frozen out, invisible, forgotten…
This was part of the story of my relationship with the public relations industry during 44 years in journalism (mainly newspapers, some magazines, radio and TV)… Writing here, I speak for myself, but I think you would hear the same sort of thing from most experienced journalists in many areas of the media.
As you may be able to see, my dealings with PRs were almost entirely navigated on auto-pilot. And the default reaction of the auto-pilot was to hit the delete button.
In the rare instances when I was sufficiently impressed by a story that I would want to take over the controls, it would tend to be just a momentary thing (a 30-second scan of an email, for instance) unless - to continue the pilot analogy - there was a very interesting landing to be made up ahead.
I now live and work in a world which, to my mind, is made up of interesting landings. I am certainly not in this public relations business to hit the auto-pilot switch and let a robot send 100s of emails out in the hopes one of them may stick.
The goal is to reach a destination - a page-lead in a daily newspaper, a double page feature spread in a magazine, etc… And this means I must work backwards from that goal.
How do we get there?
What work should we be doing right now to make it happen?
It’s obvious we must thoroughly research the client’s story from the beginning - and then let’s take a 365 degree look around to see what the prevailing weather and all the other traffic may be doing.
Sorry, I’m flogging this pilot analogy to death, I know. But I wanted to highlight the auto-pilot syndrome because it is something which hard-pressed journalists and editors are relying on more and more to get them through the workload, now that newsrooms etc have shrunk away to almost nothing.
I haven’t even begun to describe how I ended up working with RAW Food & Drink PR yet, or why (one reason, of course, was that Hayley Reynolds of RAW was one of those PRs whose name would always make me stop and take notice).
Nor have I started to mention the amazing things we’ve been doing over the past month or so since the coronavirus lockdown began to be relaxed…
I’ll get on to all that in the next article in this series.
