Week 8

This weeks readings from the article “To contact … or not? Investigating journalists’ assessments of public relations subsidies and contact preferences” by Lynne M Sallot and Elizabeth A. Johnson explores a study in which these questions were addressed: “How do journalists assess the quality of practitioners’ framing in their information subsidies for news media? What modes of contact do journalists prefer practitioners to use?”
Some results that I found significant were:
· “Journalists complained of practitioners’ lack of news sense and values, accuracy, timeliness, and style of presentation—such as using inverted pyramid format, in 74%…reports of the interviews” and “journalists griped about lack of local angle as a major problem”
· “Seventy-eight percent of the reports included laments about practitioners offering information that was overtly and overly self-serving.”
· “Sixty-nine percent of the reports charged practitioners with lacking ethics.”
This article strengthens the idea, shown in last weeks readings, that PR practitioners need to have a good understanding of what journalists want and how they think.
I think that the key points from these readings were:- that the way information sent to the media is framed affects relationships with journalists.The readings made me think more about public relations theory/practice in that:- the relationship between PR practitioners and journalists seems to be quite tenuous, and a good understanding of the “other side” is essential.