As I remember it I caught flak for this story in The Australian which was part of this one. In cutting the original in two Noel Turnbull’s comments, below, appeared in both stories by accident and gave one spinner an opportunity to knock me.
FLAKS, spin doctors, the enemy, the dark side. These are just some of
the phrases journalists use to describe those in the public relations
industry. Noel Turnbull, chairman of leading local PR firm Turnbull
Porter Novelli, says: “There is this complicity. Journalists make a
fuss about PR people and issues management because they don’t want to
admit how much is fed to them by PR people.”
While there has been very little research in this field in the past 10 years, a study published earlier this year, titled Feeding the Watchdogs — An Analysis of the Relationships Between Australian PR Practitioners and Journalists, found that over a one-week period, 37 per cent of stories in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Courier-Mail were directly “influenced” by some form of public relations activity.
Clara Zawawi, general manager of PR firm Phoenix PPR in Brisbane, who conducted the study for her doctoral thesis at Queensland University of Technology, found that if the reporting of surveys, issues papers and submissions was also taken into account, 47 per cent of content could be attributed to PR.
To evaluate “influence”, Zawawi looked for keywords or facts that came from an original press release. Zawawi is not alleging 37 per cent of articles were rewritten press releases, rather that they contained some content from an active PR campaign whether taken from a press release or from contact with a press officer.
What worried her was the extent to which journalists accepted PR material without researching stories in detail. “At the end of the day, journalists and PR people work very closely together. That’s okay as long as journalists have the time to follow up in the proper way,” she says.
“Journalists don’t have the funding or the resources to follow up on the other side. They are lucky PR people are so honest.”
Jim Macnamara, president of the Public Relations Institute of Australia, found similar results in his 1993 masters thesis, PR and the Media. After reading 2500 articles, he found 31 per cent were wholly or partly based on media releases. Of those, 47 per cent were published in trade and specialist media, 32 per cent in national, state or capital city media. In some smaller trade, specialist or suburban publications media press release content was close to 70 per cent.
“I deliberately use the word influence,” Macnamara says. “I think it’s important to recognise the impact of PR. Journalists tend to be highly dismissive of PR but only when it’s done badly. It’s a fact of everyday life that journalists receive information from PRs and meet PRs and rely on it.
“When I wrote my thesis so many journalists said they didn’t use PR material — but a whole load of them wrote stories containing whole slabs of PR material.”
British PR analysis expert and CEO of Echo Research, Sandra Macleod, found at Echo Research’s international forum of 40 world business editors earlier this year, that there was frustration over the amount of material sent by PRs. Matthew Wilson of the San Francisco Chronicle said: “PRs must be paid by volume. They do their companies a disservice by producing so much stuff. A limited or targeted contact is much better.” This is where the animosity develops between journalists and the PR industry. Many news editors are sceptical of Zawawi’s figures. Some senior PRs are also sceptical (although they did not want to be named, not wanting to be seen to be supporting the journalists’ views).
Likewise, reporting this story was made difficult by the reluctance of journalists to talk — on or off the record. Andy Byrne, news editor at Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph says of Zawawi’s findings: “I would say it was a lot less than that [37 per cent] at The Daily Telegraph. I would have thought it was about 10-15 per cent. If I’m talking 300 faxes then I’m talking about 25-30 stories which make it into the paper. But I wouldn’t like them to dry up.”
On the 37 per cent figure, James Button, a deputy editor at Melbourne’s The Age, says: “It doesn’t surprise me. But I hope that figure would be high for the news section. I feel confident that most journalists wouldn’t write a story off a press release. They would get an idea from it and then research it and develop it.”
Glen Mulcaster, editor of The Age’s IT section, says: “We tend to be a bit anti-PR. The rule seems to be that the newsworthiness of any topic is inversely proportional [to] the amount spent on getting the message out.”
Tony Rasman, vice president and director of PR firm Fleishman-Hillard Stratcom, believes there are healthy relationships between PRs and journalists, with PRs packaging information for the media on behalf of their clients. “The subtext of all this is that journalists are lazy,” he says. “I think what has happened is that they are time poor.”
He believes the influx of marketing and PR graduates into the industry has reduced journalistic nous. “A lot of PRs don’t understand how the media works,” he says. His firm’s policy — that only senior staff contact journalists — is unusual in a business where the hard grind of media relations is most often left to the juniors.
In newspapers, the section most influenced by PR is business, according to Zawawi’s pilot study for her doctorate, which put the figure at 86 per cent of business news being PR-driven. And although business journalists approached for this story wouldn’t go on the record, some of them said as many as nine out of 10 stories in the business section come from a PR source because the listed companies they write about have to release information through the Australian Stock Exchange.
This is where the crossover occurs into the shadowy world of “leaks”. In Britain, where there is a tradition of business stories being broken in the Sunday papers, the flow of information from PRs to business reporters has become a fine art. Journalists do deals with the dozen or so leading financial PR companies for exclusive leaks. Sometimes the stories are negative, most of the time positive.
But the best leakers of all are politicians. Brendan Pearson, who writes on trade and foreign affairs from The Australian Financial Review’s Canberra bureau, says: “Inevitably there are more leaks in government … some leak for malicious reasons. It gets worse during election campaigns. I reckon if somebody did an analysis of leaks there would be more this year than last.”
But as The Age’s Button, acknowledges: “The journalist can risk being the footsoldier for somebody else’s work.”