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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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As news evolves, PR must be as accountable to the public as it is to its clients

As news evolves, PR must be as accountable to the public as it is to its clients

The Future of News

People who don’t understand PR tend to conflate it with media relations. While earning media coverage is just one of many PR activities, the profound changes shaking the news business are good news for public relations. There’s hardly an online news outlet that hasn’t taken steps to offer native advertising. The decimation of the ranks of paid journalists means more opportunity for brands to influence what gets coverage. The ability for companies to go directly to their audiences, bypassing the filter of the media, has reduced reliance on hostile outlets to tell company stories.

If you think all this presages a rosy future for the PR business, think again. As PR becomes an increasingly potent force for shaping the news people see, practitioners will need to be at least as accountable to the public as they are to their clients. The time has come to take the “public” in public relations seriously.

Can PR eat its own dog food?

PR agencies exist to bill clients. Among the counsel agencies are giving to clients these days is the mandate to get serious about corporate social responsibility (CSR). A pile of recent surveys makes it clear that the public—the target audience PR tries to reach on behalf of its clients—expects businesses to contribute to society as much as they do to their own bottom lines.

The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer—which found trust in business at historic lows—notes that the opportunity to build trust “lies squarely in the areas of integrity and engagement…81% agree that a company can take actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community where it operates. Seventy-five percent believe that a company should be more profitable by finding ways to solve societal and community problems.”

Then there’s a recently-released study from the Economist Intelligence Unit that found 71% of business leaders believe their organizations’ responsibility to respect human rights transcends adherence to local laws. Forty-four percent of respondents said CEOs need to take the lead on human rights as a business issue.

For good measure, let’s add the 2014 Deloitte Millennial Survey, which found Millennials believe “business can do much more to address society’s challenges in the areas of most concern: resource scarcity (68%), climate change (65%), and income inequality (64%). Additionally, 50% of Millennials surveyed want to work for a business with ethical practices.”

Even the Melbourne Mandate—a noteworthy statement of principle from the Global Alliance for Public Relations—calls out the need for PR practitioners to help their clients demonstrate societal responsibility by (among other things) “supporting the sustainability strategies of the communities from which the organisation obtains resources and its licence to operate” and “defining accountability metrics against which contributions to society should be measured and improved.”

A few companies are paying heed. Salesforce.com, Amazon, Angie’s List, and others took action to pressure Indiana’s state government to walk back its controversial religious freedom act. The big surprise, though, came from WalMart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, . The retail giant took a very strong and visible position on legislation sent to Governor Asa Hutchinson that was virtually identical to Indiana’s. That led commentators to wonder if the Republican Party was losing a staunch long-time ally. WalMart’s actions, though, had more to do with recognizing its role in dealing with human rights issues than it did with political alliances.

(WalMart has a ways to go before it can claim to have rehabilitated its CSR reputation, mainly with the compensation it pays its own employees.)

Societal IssuesPR counselors are busily boosting their billable hours by helping organizations recognize these new mandates and adjust their behaviors accordingly. I wonder, though, how many agencies are implementing similar practices to govern their own behaviors? Last year, the Climate Investigations Center queried 25 PR agencies to ask if they would take on clients seeking to spread the belief that there is no human impact on climate. Fewer than half said they would not, despite the fact that such campaigns would breach the ethics codes of most PR associations and institutes. PR agencies also are among the chief culprits in “Merchants of Doubt,” the book and the documentary film currently in theaters.

And yet we chafe at the belief that PR is “built on slickness, grandiosity, and charm.”

The news angle

It is under this shadow that PR is becoming a primary source of news for consumers. As the chart below indicates, there are roughly four PR practitioners for every journalist in the U.S., and that ratio will increase by 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. What’s more, the median PR pay is, on average, about $17,000 more per year than journalists’ median pay.

Employment Projects for PR and Journalism

Reporters may not like to admit it, but they have always relied on PR to keep them abreast of what’s going on in business, government, non-profits, and NGOs. In 2011, a ProPublica report (co-published with the Columbia Journalism Review) found that PR was filling in the news gap left by the shrinking ranks of journalists, and noted…

The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it.

According to June Deery in the 2012 book Consuming Reality, between 50% and 90% of the news stories in newspapers or on television originate entirely or in part from a PR agency.

While we in PR should be delighted that we can tell our clients’ and employers’ stories through the news, the idea that we can collectively turn news writ large into a propaganda machine should stop us dead in our tracks. Of course we are accountable to our clients. It’s why they pay us. At the same time, however, we should adopt an overt responsibility to the public. As our audiences demand accountability from business, as trust erodes because business puts profit ahead of societal good, we need to ensure our efforts add value to news but do not corrupt it.

There are sparkling examples of PR enhancing news. Native advertising, when practiced ethically, can deliver content that is important, useful, valuable, entertaining, and/or interesting, but that editors didn’t have the interest or resources to assign to a reporter. Netflix’s native ad in support of the season 2 premiere of Orange is the New Black, appearing in The New York Times, was a work of full-blown investigative journalism, with a quote from the author of the book on which the series is based—who had all the right credentials, even if there had never been a series based on her book—the only hint of a direct connection between the show and the article.

If PR is going to dominate the news, the industry must embrace the ethics and standards of journalism to supplement the codes that govern the organizations that represent the industry.

Responsible reporting should be just one tenet of PR’s commitment to addressing societal issues. I await the day when I learn of a PR agency that has become a benefit corporation, a for-profit company that have a corporate purpose to “create a material positive impact on society and the environment,” among other things. (If you know of any PR agencies that already are benefit corporations, please let me know.)

Partners in news

Just how PR can play a part in ensuring a thriving, robust, ethical news ecosystem is a subject we should begin discussing and debating now. Nobody can claim to know what that ecosystem will look like in five or 10 years—consider that The New York Times is simultaneously planninig to publish directly through Facebook and deliver one-sentence headlines via the Apple Watch—but we can certainly consider possibilities and take steps to make them happen.

In his book, Geeks Bearing Gifts, Jeff Jarvis imagines one possible future in which journalism listens to its public about what’s important to them, then uses data to deliver highly localized news. During a storm, a news consumer doesn’t really need to know about power outages 35 miles away; she needs to know about those outages in her own neighborhood. Jarvis suggests news operations can collect tweets and other communications from people in these communities in order to deliver hyper-local updates. What if the power utility partnered with news organizations to deliver data about what they know, where crews have been deployed, the estimated time power will be restored?

Some in PR might characterize the current relationship with the media as a partnership. The two do, after all, need each other. It’s an uneasy partnership at best, however, with PR practitioners struggling to get reporters to pay attention to their news (one report suggests the average reporter gets 20-plus PR pitches a week, which seems low to me) while journalists suffer crises of conscience over their reliance on paid representatives of organizations when they should be doing original reporting.

Utility RepairsA real partnership is one where both sides are committed to the same goal, in this case informing the public about matters of true importance to them. While utilities can (and should) share hyperlocal information about power restoration during a storm via their own owned and social media channels, news organizations can curate information from multiple sources—including the utility—into packages that make it easy for consumers to find what’s relevant to them. Establishing the relationships that serve the public interest rather than just the media’s (to create and sell content) or the client’s (to tell its story and build support) is one way PR can have a positive and beneficial impact on the future shape of news.

There are others, and what they are should be a topic of conversation among ourselves in the PR industry and with our clients and the media. The alternative is more of what concerns Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. Writing in the Washington Post, Gelman shared the Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for journalism and PR employment and questioned the outcomes of a world in which “we’re getting less of our news from journalism and more from public relations.”

Gelman quotes statistician Mark Palko, who wrote...

My biggest concerns about the role of PR in modern journalism are not the question of accuracy or bias, though both of these are important. What really concerns me is the way these outside influences determine what does and does not get covered and the lack of awareness (or at least acknowledgement) on the part of the press.

As consumers of media ourselves, we in the PR industry should be equally concerned. As organizations that recognize our role in addressing societal issues, we should also be engaged in figuring out solutions. We should not be continuing down the path of dominating media with favorable stories about our clients; we should be helping media figure out how we can work together to improve the coverage of everything in an era where everything is up for reinvention.

Will every practitioner get on board?

Skeptics may argue that there is no hope that PR, as an industry, will adopt values that ensure their work contributes to society. They would be right, of course. PR is not regulated in most countries; neither individual practitioners nor agencies need licenses. Considering there are low-life, greedy, ethically-challenged, bottom-feeding pond scum working in the most heavily regulated professions, we can’t expect the PR industry to be free of those willing to do dubious work for horrible clients.

We can’t worry about everybody. We can only take direct action for ourselves. Counseling our clients to embrace true CSR values is important, but it’s not enough. We need to model that behavior. We need to walk the talk.

When we all but control the news—especially in a democratic society—we hold an awesome responsibility (in the classic sense of that word).

Am I just dreaming, or can PR truly become an advocate for the public in addition to the clients whose messages they consume? Can we give new meaning to the “public” in public relations?

Comments
  • 1.As a broadcaster with 36 years and now taking baby steps in PR - I totally agree with this article. While I work for a fledgling fim/video company outside of Vancouver Canada, I still am a one man show for a local news blog. Therefore I HAVE NO CHOICE but to embrace PR feeds for info that makes it to the web.
    Filtering, of course, will always be the challenge.BTW I edit MyChilliwackNews.com for free--- their ownership has very little money..lolz

    Don Lehn | April 2015 | Canada

  • 2.A dissection of public relations is necessary because for real success, change and progress must be made. An analytical and critical evaluation of the public relations industry as a whole is important to ensure that the focus and the purpose of PR isn’t lost in the translation between company to media to market. This type of critical evaluation will help keep PR people in check and better tailor their efforts to not only their company, but to the public, which is, after all, the natural reason that public relations exists in the business world. The comparison of the pros and cons of the practice, and ways in which the industry can improve to strengthen the relationship between the public and business can only make it better and more productive. This way, not only do companies that seek the collaboration with a PR member get what they pay for, but the public knows who and what the companies that they are giving their money to are and what they represent. It’s a win-win for companies, clients, practitioners and the public.

    Olivia Sisk | May 2015 | United States

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