Briefing: public relations for journalists
Welcome to the dark side
You’ve heard the phrase. We’ve heard the phrase. Let’s pause a moment to unpick it.
Public relations is often presented as the dark side in contrast to journalism. Journalists strive to tell the truth; by contrast, public relations people – while they should always be accurate and avoid telling lies – cannot tell the whole truth because they are spokespeople for one group or perspective.
In this Manichean view, journalism is a force for enlightenment and public relations is propaganda. The two must inevitably be locked in struggle.
If this were the final word on this question, why would anyone leave the one for the other? Or, why wouldn’t there be a reverse flow of people leaving public relations to work in journalism?
Either public relations is not so dark, or journalism not so perfect a world in which to work. Only that could explain the largely one-way traffic from people leaving journalism to work in public relations, public affairs or communication roles.
There is a dark side to public relations, and we will strive to present it here. But it’s a different dark side than the one you expect. And it is true that we need to address the question of propaganda and public relations. The answer we propose may surprise you.
But before going there, let’s try a much more stinging critique of public relations.
You’ve received those effusive phone calls and mock-friendly email pitches from a public relations person. You’ve received the bizarrely misdirected missive bigging up some ‘revolutionary’ product that’s of no interest to you or to your readers, viewers of listeners. What’s so dark about that? If it’s an attempt at propaganda, it’s largely ineffective because you’re quick to ignore it.
So the much more perceptive critique of public relations is less that it’s dark than that it’s too light. It’s fluffy. That rather than peering into the dark, public relations outputs focus remorselessly on the positive, the light side. In the words of one academic, public relations is ‘hemispheric communication’ because the sun only shines on one side of the globe at any one time.
Surely a propagandist, schooled in the art of post-truth communication, would home in on our fears and would seek to spread discord. You as a journalist know that as a species we’re most responsive to bad news: that’s because we’ve evolved by being alert to the things that threaten our survival. Terrorism, war, floods, famine and disease dominate the news headlines. You’ll struggle to find mention of them in most public relations outputs other than from activists.
You thought the dark side was commercial public relations. In truth, it’s the light side of the industry.
Money talks
Or is it dark because there’s always a paymaster in public relations and so ‘he who pays the piper, calls the tune’?
If this is your concern, it’s a legitimate one. We should certainly talk about money.
But before returning to public relations, let’s ask if journalism is so very different? Setting aside the funding model of the BBC (now under threat) and perhaps the enlightened oversight of The Guardian newspaper (by the Scott Trust), there’s usually a media business or a wealthy individual behind the media outlet. They will often make decisions about the title (to merge or close, or rationalise) that have all to do with business and little to do with editorial quality. Editorial independence is a valuable principle in a democratic society, but how many journalists would run stories against the interests of their proprietor? How many would report negatively about their largest advertisers or sponsors? You see, money talks.
This isn’t even the main money problem in journalism and the media. The challenge is to find a sustainable funding model. The BBC’s licence fee funding is under threat. Many print titles and commercial television stations are suffering from the shift in advertising spend to online platforms and a decline in subscriptions. (Meanwhile, how many journalists are employed by Facebook, Google and Amazon?)
By contrast, the funding model of public relations presented earlier as a weakness now appears a strength. There are an unlimited number of organisations and individuals who are willing to pay for public relations representation. From startup businesses seeking publicity, to well-established brands managing their reputations; from public sector bodies defending their legitimacy and demonstrating their responsiveness to the public, to small and large charities fighting for funds and attention.
It’s not easy money, but there are plenty of people willing to pay for public relations. That’s why the number of people working in public relations continues to rise (estimated to be around 100,000 in the UK) even while the number working in journalism is in decline.
If public relations were solely about media relations, then logically its numbers should be in decline too. We need to explain why this isn’t the case.
Journalism may see itself in opposition to public relations, but it’s no longer reciprocated. The world has moved on. Here’s why.
Now we’re all the media
The balance of power between journalists and public relations people has shifted in the digital age. In the twentieth century, the mass media century, journalists and editors were gatekeepers of public information. Public relations people were supplicants at the gate, more often turned away than allowed to pass through. When they had a monoploly on the dissemination of news, journalists held real power.
Now there are more channels for getting information into the public domain. There are websites and social media channels, none of which needs the permission of a journalist or editor. And there are still advertising channels largely operating outside editorial control (it’s a commercial transaction, governed by different rules).
Journalists are courted because they are seen as influencers who have the power to inform and persuade large numbers of people (or who are highly trusted by niche, valuable groups). Now, when we talk of influencers, who do we think of? More likely some minor celebrity on Instagram with a large following and a willingness to cash in on their fame and followers.
Ultimately, the big media gatekeeper now is Google and its army of bots and its clever algorithms. Appearing on the front page of a newspaper or in the broadcast news bulletin is for many less important than appearing on the first page of a Google search result. In this analysis, media coverage is less about the publicity than about the link and the signal this sends to Google. There’s a fear that very soon this whole process from end to end might be automated with scarcely any need for human intervention. From writing a news release, to the resulting news report and links and social media ‘conversations’, to the scraping of the news into aggregators like Google news.
Introducing ‘content marketing’ and ‘brand journalism’
The message is that it’s pointless to continue to fight the battles of the twentieth century now that we’re in the third decade of the twenty-first. Journalism and public relations are not opposites; they are both part of a fast-evolving media ecosystem.
By viewing them as opposites, you risk missing the most important developments of the past twenty years. The fast-growing digital marketing industry recognises the primacy of Google search rankings. In this world, the goal is to send ranking signals to search engines through quality links, for example. Media websites are important sources of links, and media outreach is more about link building rather than PR’s focus on helping journalists to do their jobs.
The distinctions between digital marketing and public relations have blurred and so PR practitioners are having to learn the language of data and metrics alongside their traditional strengths in storytelling and relationship building. Meanwhile, digital marketers are learning from the PR toolkit in order increase their ability to earn coverage and links.
Content marketing is the widely-used phrase, but many of us would see it as a public relations approach. Trevor Young defines it as ‘Strategically creating, publishing and amplifying original content that’s of interest, relevance and value to a specific audience, with the ultimate goal of influencing a desired outcome.’
Cut through this language, and you’ll realise you’ve been doing this as a journalist. Your reports and stories have focused on clarifying and dramatising complex news in order to inform the public. Yet there’s already too much content; the hard skill is not to create more, but rather to enable content to be discovered through social sharing. The point about the desired outcome is that since someone is paying for you to run the campaign and create the content, they will ask for evidence of its success. For journalists, the work ends with the story or the package, but if you work in marketing or PR then the effects of the content will have to be measured.
Brand journalism is a form of content marketing that takes the approach to its logical conclusion. It puts quality of content at the centre, and hides any obvious promotional intent. Red Bull is a good example of this approach: its website has channels devoted to adventure and extreme sports – content designed to attract a young, adventure-seeking audience. The site is all about the brand rather than being about the product or the company. It sounds obvious: give people more of what they’re interested in and back off the self-serving promotion. Yet if it were so obvious, where are the scores of comparable examples? In reality, it’s hard to persuade businesses to spend millions creating content that avoids direct self-promotion.
Let’s talk some more about money
That public relations has many paymasters is not a weakness, it’s a strength. If you object to working for a tobacco company, say, you don’t have to. It would be easy to find a client or employer whose interests align with yours. There’s a well-established path from local newspaper to local government or NHS Trust. All serve the local community; all need improved internal and external communication and stronger relationships with key partners.
We have some data on the economic size of the public relations sector. We also have annual surveys that indicate average salaries depending on experience, location and sector. Looked at from the perspective of fully professional areas such as medicine and the law, these salaries may appear modest. Looked at from the perspective of most working journalists, they appear generous. And salaries only tell part of the picture. While 69% of those in the CIPR State of the Profession 2022 study worked in-house for a salary, 31% worked in an agency or as independents. Many of these are business owners, some of whom may gain the rewards of turning startups into multi-million pound turnover businesses. So public relations is a salaried profession, but also an entrepreneurial industry.
Source: CIPR State of the Profession 2022
These figures present a simple narrative, and suggest reassuring prospects for rewards to follow seniority. I suspect the picture is much more complex. It doesn’t at first glance make sense that those over retirement age should be earning more than the annual income of those at the peak of their careers when in their early thirties. I suspect it’s because those who have retired would have no motivation to fill out an annual professional body survey. So the only people aged over 64 who do so are the survivors who still love the work they do. By definition, these would be the most senior managers and business owners.
Where the figures are likely to be accurate is that salaries and incomes follow demand and reward capability in a free market. Anyone can set themselves up as a public relations practitioner. That’s not the challenge. The challenge in year one is to find and win business in a competitive market and deliver the work to a satisfactory level – and to get paid for it.
According to the same State of the Profession survey, independent (ie self-employed) practitioners earned on averge £60,733 – somewhat more than the average salary of all employees as stated above.
That equates to earning £390 a day for three days work a week for every week of the year. This calculation is based on three productive days a week because if self-employed you are not paid to promote yourself, to meet and win new clients, to go on training courses, to be sick or take holiday.
From press office to content marketing
The world of public relations shifted around the time of the millennium. Somewhere between the birth of Google in 1998 and the launch of the iPhone in 2007 our working lives began to change. Here’s a narrative to explain this change.
Before Google, we lived in a world in which press officers wrote press releases and organised press conferences. That’s the world you know as a journalist. There’s still work in this world of ‘traditional PR’, but it’s not future-proof and nor will it offer the best pay and prospects.
After Google, the basic press office role has morphed into a digital PR role that’s as much about links and Google search results as it is about coverage. Traditional PR became digital PR. A world that was once all about words is increasingly about numbers and data. The reasons are easy to understand.
If you’re paid to run a public relations campaign, at some point you will be asked to justify this spend in terms of results achieved. Counting coverage is no longer an acceptable measure. Counting coverage, calculating the advertising equivalent cost of this coverage and then adding in a multiplier because editorial is more valuable than advertising – well, that’s now outlawed as flawed and unprofessional. Some clients may demand it because they don’t know any better; some PR teams may still offer it on the grounds that they always have and that clients expect it, but they’re on the wrong side of history.
The problem is that press coverage is not the end result of a public relations campaign. It is, in the jargon, an output of public relations rather than its intended outcome.
A journalism background is useful in the early years of a public relations career, when the work revolves around media (press office work or content marketing), but it’s little preparation for understanding organisational communication and power dynamics within the organisation.