No.
Great piece in the Press Gazette this week about Trinity Mirror’s Neil Benson suggesting that setting up a PR arm on the side would be a shot in the arm for struggling regional publishers.
It’s not a completely crazy idea. There is the obvious editorial integrity problem. But having started out in regional newspapers myself and witnessed reporters openly taking cash payments in exchange for stories that local businesses or big-wigs wanted to see in print, there’s a point of view that to an (illicit) extent the lines between PR and journalism in the regional media are already a little blurred in places.
Regional journalists have the contacts, knowledge, appreciation of local sentiment and, typically, know the local media like the backs of their hands. What most of them (and why should they?) have sod all knowledge of is marketing. Example: as a chief reporter I was once asked to spend a day on a “marketing exercise” because the paper was expanding its circulation area to a town in the next county. My brief was to “have a drive down there, go to a few pubs, put yourself about a bit and get to know a few people”. The local populace was just drooling at the prospect of next Monday’s farming section after that.
So to my mind regional publishers should focus their energy on the thing they have fought shy of for way too long – how to change their business models so they can make money across diverse media platforms, given new technology is changing the way media is consumed. The nationals are feverishly (and in a few cases, a bit clumsily) attacking the problem, yet I am still to hear of a regional publisher that is doing anything more strategic than “doing a lot more stuff online now”.
Would regional journalists make really good PR people? Many of them undoubtedly would. And many of them would make disastrous PRs. Mates I have in journalism all fit into one or the other of these categories. Often the best investigative reporters would be great journalists but struggle with being the middleman between clients and the media. Should regional publishers needing to let reporters go look to place them with PR agencies, much like recruiters, and charge a fee? That might work. But then publishers should stick to publishing and its ailments, not look to take on recruitment firms.
One thing, above all, that this discussion left me with is the thought that regional publishers should work more closely with PR agencies. Our specialism is in delivering content that they can profit from using, and at the moment they’re struggling to figure out how to make those profits flow. If we worked together on that, PR could have sustainable outlets for the content and publishers could have sustainable business models.
Great point about regional publishers needing to embrace new media platforms. And yes – regional hacks would have little knowledge of marketing….but I think sometimes there’s too much “marketing” in PR. To the extent many PRs lose sight of what is or isn’t newsworthy and fail to get coverage. I reckon regional journos would on the whole make decent PRs, but they’d have to come out of the dark ages.
Fair point Harriet. But by ‘marketing’ I assume you mean bullshit. Yes, PR can be full of that and the audience trust/distrust factor is steadily exposing it. To push PR forward, PRs need to understand new and conventional media better (and most of the self-professed digital gurus may have little knowledge of the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, for instance) and where PR fits into the way marketing as a discipline/industry is changing (again, digital the driver).
On PRs losing sight of what is/isn’t a story – ask a PR to sum up the alleged story in six or seven words. Often a good acid test for whether they’re really done their homework I find.