I haven’t forgotten that. The rules are the same; it’s just that, in PR and Adv. you have the chance to bend the rules more often. I’m not debating your comment: it’s true and you’re right. Those two areas are all about marketing and selling a product, company or image. But don’t think journalists never bend the rules, embellish or get the facts messed up. It happens. It’s not supposed to: reporters are supposed to be in search of the truth. As Lizard was saying, sometimes they only have enough time to get unsubstantiated “facts” which often turn out to be not so true.
My point is: it’s all about money, no matter what area we’re talking about. Sometimes stories in newspapers don’t run if it negatively affects a major advertiser. Sometimes stories run, especially in magazines, solely for the purpose of benefitting a major advertiser. Don’t think the newspapers and magazines don’t sell out, just because the Ad and PR people are open about it.
Disclaimer: not ALL publications sell out, cater to advertisers, bend truths, etc. That would be the papers and mags with less integrity. The National Enquirer comes to mind – it is a newspaper, although nobody really believes it’s a credible one. I’m sure you can come up with more local examples if you really studied the publications you read.
It’s been my experience that reporters aren’t going to softpedal a story to appease an advertise, but rather are going to find their story pulled by some VP twerp. Whereas PR people strive for that softpedalling themselves.
It’s an age-old question: is it better to do something yourself, or have someone do it to you?
Personally, I could never work in PR, because I’m too committed to honesty. If the company I work for has done something wrong, I’ll say so.
Oh, and Priceguy, I’ve found very often that police on the scene of an incident can be extremely fluid with facts-- either from pressure, adrenalin, or a desire to withhold facts in hopes of ‘outing’ a criminal.
LOL. That’s exactly the reason my PR professor proclaimed that I had no business practicing public relations. I am not willing to lie or fight for a cause I don’t believe in. (I was NOT at the top of my class!) And, that’s exactly why I don’t work for a PR agency. The majority of my PR work at this company is sending out press releases about people who got promoted or other mundane things, just to get our company press coverage.
But I think you’re right about the VP twerps. It’s not the reporters who want to spin the stories, but the editors or publishers. Too many areas of journalism have been bastardized by the bottom line. Bleh.
Is investigative journalism dying in the US as it seems to be in the UK?
I’ve noticed that over the last few years more and more newspaper articles end with “do you know this person” or “were you a witness to this event” and there is phone number where you can contact the paper.
Don’t journalist have “sources” anymore? Don’t they leave the office and investigate?
Question about TV reporters: in a smaller city (75,000) there is what I would consider a large turnover of news anchors. Are they getting better jobs in other cities? Are they fired? Where are they going? How do contracts like that work? I imagine that the standard career path for talking heads is to start small, some place local, then go to bigger cities, and possibly end up at a network or cable channel. How accurate is that?
Question about how much reporters can change: How much are reporters allowed to twist quotes and ham up the story to make it more “touching” or whatever? I was interviewed for something and apparently I’m not good at giving sound bites, because the reporter took what I pretty much said, but added a significant amount of drama to the story which I thought made me look like an idiot. How much stretching and changing can reporters do to a quote?
Those notices you’re seeing at the end of stories don’t necessarily mean the reporters aren’t doing their job. Even the police post “Wanted” notices and ask people to be on the lookout for certain people, and investigation is their bread and butter. Sometimes there just is no other way to get more sources.
But having said that, the decline of investigative journalism in the U.S. has been a fiercely debated subject for the last several years. The debate focuses on several key issues. In a nutshell, they are:
1- Is a decline actually ocurring?
2- If the anwer is “yes,” then why is it ocurring?
3- If a decline is ocurring, does it have any greater significance, or is it just part of a cycle?
As for question #1, I personally think that “investigative journalism,” per se, is not on the decline. However, I do think that smaller newspapers have been cutting back on staff so much in the last several years, the reporters that are left simply don’t have time to be more thorough. When I was a cops & courts reporter, I was expected to come in early five days a week and devote at least 1/4 of my work day to compiling the police log. I was also expected to single-handedly cover everything that five different local police agencies were doing. Not only that, but if there were any interesting trials ocurring at the county courthouse, I had to cover those, too.
So given all that, I’m still kind of proud that I managed to go out and knock on doors as much as I did. The most basic part of an investigation is aggressively approaching total strangers and asking them questions. At no point in journalism school was I ever taught this; I pretty much just learned it on my own. A lot of journalists just don’t have that much initiative.
Question #2 is a hazy, semi-political issue. Besides the cutbacks in staff, there is also a point of view that says many papers are afraid to jump into a potentially fractious story because they are essentially businesses, and investigative journalism can be bad for business in the short term. A paper can come under fire from powerful businesspeople or politicians for taking a stand, and it takes cajones to resist that kind of pressure. In the early days of the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration put tremendous pressure on the Washington Post’s publishing company. So much pressure, in fact, that it’s stock price declined a great deal. In today’s business climate, with so many papers owned by publicly-traded chains instead of locally, such stock declines would be unacceptable. Even then, at the Post, higher-ups in the company tried to pressue Katherine Graham (the majority owner) to lay off the story. She refused.
As for question #3, well you’re on your own there!
Hi guys, I don’t know if reviving an old thread is frowned upon, encouraged, or ignorable.
So Lizard, GorgonHeap, are you still there to answer newspaper/reporter questions? I’ve got a bunch of them, actually, – I’m doing research for a story I’m writing – and it might be more appropriate to contact you directly rather than on the bulletin board. My profile should have an e-mail link and you can contact me at your convenience. Or, if you prefer to answer a deluge of questions on the board, we can do that too, I’m happy to post 'em. Just tell me your preferred method of discourse.
Hey! I spent 20 years in PR and I resent that. I have NEVER been asked to lie for a client. I have been blessed with bosses who had enough morals to tell clients to go to hell if they were asked to lie.
Usually, if a PR person gets caught in a lie, it’s because the client lied to us.
As for “fighting for a cause I don’t believe in” most PR is about marketing, and frankly, unless you don’t believe in capitalism to start with, there isn’t that much that comes up in your job that’s a matter of principle.
