Organizations, in the quest for publicity, send press releases to newspapers in the hopes that what they say will be deemed newsworthy and find its way into print. When a press release does contain information selected for publication, is it considered acceptable for the paper to print the press release word-for-word as an original story? I ask because the few real-life press releases I’ve seen already looked like professionally written stories, and because it is the goal of the PR person to get that story into a paper in the first place. If such a practice is against the rules, how much tinkering must be done to the original release? Or do you just print the news release (assuming it’s already in a printable form) with credit going to the appropriate PR person (or organization the PR person works for)?
What’s the scoop on this, legally, ethically, and so forth?
Also, to the journalists who frequent this board–-I understand that you all are from more than one nation, so it might be useful if you say where you are from if you decide to answer–-the rules possibly being different in the U.K. than in they are in the U.S., for example.
I hope everybody feels free to ask or answer any other questions related to these kinds of issues.
All I know is that in high school, I took a press release from the school board, incorporated some news I saw on TV and read in the real newspaper (attributed all of them), slapped it together to fill a hole in the paper and I won a citywide journalism award for it. I think I just got a trophy, there was no money involved.
I thought it was weird since I was rewarded for something I did the least amount of work on.
Publishing guy speaking. US-based. I have run magazines and newsletters for more than 10 years. Mostly on the business side but I’ve done some editorial work, too.
It’s not unacceptable for what you described to occur in magazines, especially of the trade variety. The PR firms don’t even ask for attribution. Hell, they don’t want attribution. And they’re even happier if you use the release word for word.
But using it in a journalistic sense, i.e. putting one in a newspaper or some other vehicle that purports to reports news in an objective fashion is a no-no. And most of the PR flacks know this. That’s why they have expense accounts.
I will second what Jonathan Chance said. It was long the disgrace of the computer magazine industry that many, perhaps most, of the glowing notices that new products received were because they were nothing more than slightly rewritten press releases. And much of this was because the magazines wanted the ad money that doing this would bring in.
That was an especially blatant example, but the practice is longstanding.
Newspapers, especially smaller ones but some big names as well, do occasionally get caught printing press releases as they stand. This is not always a horrible thing. I just sent off a release about an award that an organization I belong to gives out. Although it would be very nice if the newspapers were to do extensive interviews and put together a big story, I wouldn’t mind just getting the winners’ names in the paper.
Somewhere between just the facts and rook the customer flackery is the great middle ground that Mephisto is looking at. There, you have to know your audience and your publication’s purpose and sense of ethics and do what you think is right.