Week 7

As we can see from the reading, journalists and public relations practitioners share an adversarial relationship. It seems that journalists tend to have a condescending attitude towards PR practitioners although up to 60 per cent of their news are obtained from press releases or information provided by PR personnel. Thus it is no wonder that PR practitioners have to work doubly hard to gain the trust of journalists. To do so, effort has to be taken to understand the nature of the beat, the style of the journalists and how the journalists write and what interests them.

Additionally, for a media release to be effective, the PR practitioner has to craft the story in such a way that it resembles a news story with the important news values such as timeliness, prominence, impact and proximity highlighted. This will not only the make the job of a journalist easier, it will attract their attention and therefore increase the chances of the event or topic covered getting published. Additionally, the story cannot be overtly biased, otherwise journalists will not bite the bait. The PR practitioner has to achieve not only balance within the story, but he or she has to serve the interest of the company at the same time. It is indeed not easy being a PR practitioner!

I noticed from the article that a common lament of journalists is the lack of good language skills amongst PR practitioners. I used to think that having good language skills is secondary for a PR practitioner as compared to a journalist, however I am wrong! Poor use of language puts a journalist off and this is the least that the PR practitioner hopes for.

From this reading, I realized that the job of a PR practitioner is demanding and multi-faceted. Not only do PR practitioners have to serve the interests of the company, they have to ‘please’ journalists as well. Additionally, other areas of their work include strategizing, events management, sponsorships etc. A PR practitioner has to be good at almost everything!