Magazine

Public relations primer

The Dutch capital is playing host to catwalk models, hot designers, fashionistas, financial backers, industry buffs and posers during Amsterdam International Fashion Week, which is being held until 28 July.

Apart from the inevitable flurry of journalists reporting from the event, there is also another group of people, one harder to avoid than a G-string at the underwear shows: PR people.

As with a burgeoning number of people and organisations these days, many within the fashion industry have PR agencies representing them, from the designers to the investors. In order to get an interview, journalists have to go through these PR people. If the press reps deem the journalist and his or her media organisation worthy, the journalist is granted an interview.

Of course, this is not unique to the fashion industry. Public relations has become an integral part of the media world and society, and journalists work with the industry all the time.

To name a few advantages...

Of course, working with PR people can be beneficial to journalists. Press people are points of contact for journalists, and an important part of their jobs is to provide information to journalists. They know their client’s schedule, and so can figure out when their client has time for an interview.

In general, too, these spokespeople can be useful in providing information, even if that information is biased toward their clients. Whether we like it or not, all journalists know that on a slow news day, a press release from some PR agency can provide the basis for a story. When there aren’t many interesting things going on, information from the PR agencies definitely helps fill the void.

Worrying trend

However, there are some worrying aspects to public relations and the relationship between people within that industry and journalists. Recently, for the first time in my career, I have had PR people ask to look at articles I am writing, after I interview their clients and before I send the articles to be printed. (Has anyone else had a similar experience? Do you think this is a new trend or has this always happened? Let me know what you think!)

As a journalist, the idea of having a PR person read something I wrote prior to publication – with the intention of changing it if they don’t like what they read – smacks of bald-faced censorship. It goes completely against every journalistic fibre in my body – and is also simply insulting to me as a professional.

Another thing about PR people is that they are, by default, biased towards their clients. There is nothing wrong with this per se; after all, that’s their job. The problem arises when journalists forget this and use press releases or present information from PR people as fact. In the chaos and stress of the newsroom, it is often easy to use information from PR agencies. However, it is also easy to forget that it is not necessarily fact, or at least not the whole picture.

The bigger picture

Looking at public relations in the larger social context, the industry begins to look even more sinister. Ultimately, PR is a layer – a barrier – between both the source of the information and the journalist, and the source of the information and ordinary people. Society today is full of lies, spin and cover-ups, and people – both journalists and non-journalists – struggle to sort through what is really happening in the world as they sift through the layers and lies between themselves and everything else they hear about. PR is one layer clouding the truth.

As journalists, we pride ourselves in being realistic. And, if we’re doing so, we will see clearly that Public Relations and dealing with its representatives is part of our job, and can even be useful to us. However, we must also fight against the barrier it creates between us and reality, what is really happening We must go straight to the source whenever we can so that we can do our job, namely, understand what is really going on, and tell our audience all about it.

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Flickr photos from users sabinesabine and carolynhack, respectively.

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