PR People from a journalist's perspective

By John Schwartz

js135210@ohio.edu

As a non-PR man myself, I imagine that a lot of the interaction I will have with PR people will be with them being between me and the information I want. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

PR people do a great job of synthesizing and collecting useful information for journalists to use in their articles. I remember during my internship I was contacted by a PR individual who wanted to know if the paper wanted to do a story on their startup company that was rapidly growing. He put me in direct touch with the CEO and made sure that I was satisfied with all of my answers.

The company which contacted me to do a story.

And I imagine that my classmates have many more countless examples of when, with them perhaps not even knowing, a PR person has helped them tremendously.

What most people tend not to realize is even though PR people work for the company, most of them are trained as journalists, which means they have a least a moderate understanding of both the truth and what the people who are getting or asking for the information need in order to write an informed and interesting story.

In one of the readings for today it was clear that sometimes PR professionals will go so far as to resign from their companies if they are uncomfortable with the level of unethical behavior going around, which I can certainly appreciate. The more unethical, the harder they make the PR person’s job.

Another reading focused on the scandal wherein Rupert Murdoch blamed his underlings and said that they “betrayed” him. Obviously the News of the World scandal was perpetrated by some very poor journalists whose list of wrongdoings is almost too heinous to name. But as the article goes on to say, they are only going to be as unethical as they think they can get away with with their supervisors. The last time was apparently a bit too far, but one shudders to imagine the unethical stepping stones it took to get to their last scandal.

All in all, while I don’t personally see the appeal of working for a company in a PR capacity, I respect and wish the best for those of my classmates that do. The more that they work hard and are passionate about it, the easier my job will be on the other side of the fence.