Saw Sally Whittle’s post last week and have been meaning to disagree with it ever since. Journalists don’t suck any more than anyone else, you get rude ones, nice ones, honest ones and dishonest ones that’ll tell you anything to get you off the phone, complete space cowboys who probably mean to print your story but then lose it up their own… well you get the point, they come in all shapes and sizes just like PR people and firemen and insurance brokers.
In PR its easy to blame the journo – there will always be stories that don’t make it, but all that means is that your story has to better than the rest. If you don’t want a journalist to be rude to you, don’t send then crap they don’t want. And if you don’t know whether a story is ball park right for the journo in question, then you haven’t done your research.
I’m not saying I’m perfect in this respect, and I’m not defending journalists who are needlessly rude, it’s just that dealing with it is part PR.
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July 22, 2008 at 10:12 am
Sally Whittle
Oh, come on, with that sort of attitude and reasonableness, what’s left to moan about down the pub? Tsk.
I’ve been a hack for 10 years. I don’t send crap pitches. Proof of this? The client got covered in almost every title I approached. I just think it’s interesting how pitching a story as a hack can be hard work, but pitching a virtually identical story with a PR hat on means an almost instant 95% drop* in the courtesy levels.
* made-up number
Thanks
Sally
July 22, 2008 at 10:50 am
Sam Oakley
OK, fair enough. I’m only trying to reconcile the fact that journos are often rude (ish) to me yet for some reason I still like them. dunno why, they’re just more interesting as a group than most other professional groups.
oh, doctors and teachers are nice too except that they talk shop too much.
August 12, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Kayode Dauda
Yes there are definitely some awkward individuals in the world of journalism, but isn’t that just life? There will always be rude people around, but there will (hopefully) always be the nice ones too. In the PR world we wouldn’t get very far without them and have to console ourselves with the fact that we have the tact and professionalism to deal with them well, i.e. being polite and waiting until we’ve hung up the phone to have a moan. Besides, wouldn’t it be boring if there were no difficult journos to deal with…?!