Do PR practitioners need journalism backgrounds?
Many moons ago, before I transitioned into the business communications world that would be my career for the rest of my life, I was a newspaper reporter. My degree is in journalism and, at the time, I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything other than writing hard news and in-depth analyses for a daily newspaper. The transition to corporate communications wasn’t easy. It took a while to understand that I was no longer a watchdog, but rather I was working to further my employer’s business goals. True, I continued to use many of the skills I’d acquired as a journalist; I still use those skills today, some 30 years later. But while the skills apply, it’s not journalism.
Nevertheless, I was offended the first time I met internal communications guru Roger D’Aprix. The head of the department, Dave Orman, brought Roger to ARCO headquarters in Los Angeles to explain his views to the internal communications staff. At the time, Roger was promoting the notion of proactive communications. He stated strongly that he would never hire a former journalist to do employee communications because reporters know only how to report; they are reactive. Since all but one of the ARCO employee communications staff came from newspaper backgrounds, we dismissed the idea. After all, back in 1977 ARCO was one of the few corporations with a strategic, business-focused employee communications effort. Communicators producing fluffy house organs were jealous of us. We had employment inquiries every day. Orman, without question, was one of the pioneers of modern strategic internal communications (in part because he listened to a lot of what D’Aprix preached).
I continued to hire former newspaper reporters in subsequent jobs where I managed the communications department, even when my responsibilities expanded to include media relations and other externally-focused communications. But that doesn’t mean I would only hire former reporters. I raise this in response to a column penned by Wayne Pollard, president of Hunter-Pollard , with the incendiary title, “A Return to Journalism: PR Can Save Itself by Hiring Hacks, Not Just Flacks.” In the article, Pollard suggests that one of PR’s big issues today is the fact that too many practitioners have degrees in public relations but no journalism experience.
Those doing media relations need to do more than put themselves in a reporter???s shoes; they need to have worn those shoes…I???m not saying that only former journalists can be great at media relations. What I am saying is that the likelihood of a former journalist making some of the basic media relations mistakes is slim.
It would be easy to make analogies here suggesting that anybody who deals with a particular audience needs to have once worked in that audience’s field (e.g., to be an effective police reporter, you need to have once been a cop). But that response skirts the issue, which is that public relations practitioners need to be trained to understand their audiences. The problem with agencies sending lame press releases to reporters whose beats are far afield of the releases’ subject matter aren’t making this mistake because they’ve never been reporters. They’re making the mistake because they haven’t been taught what will offend a reporter or piss him off. Pollard suggests “PR neophytes without journalism experience can learn media relations via baptism by fire.” No such baptism is required if their schooling includes an understanding of what reporters want and don’t want.
Looking for journalism backgrounds, though, could actually hinder public relations efforts that are getting far more conversational and much less one-way, top-down (for instance, the ability to participate in a blogospheric conversation). And strategic public relations isn’t necessarily about media relations, which, while it will never go away as an element of PR, is certainly diminishing in overall importance.
One of the benefits of hiring a journalist is that you’ll get a communicator who can write. I’m routinely shocked to hear about another PR graduate who went through an entire four-year degree program without having to take a single writing class. But any entry-level PR job candidate should be subjected to a writing test, and there are plenty of communicators without journalism backgrounds who can write the socks off of many journalists.
Obviously, I have nothing against hiring former journalists into PR jobs, since I used to be one myself. But I do resist the notion that it should be a prerequisite to a PR job.
12/23/05 | 7 Comments | Do PR practitioners need journalism backgrounds?