If you look at a lot of the big stories gaining traction recently among consumers, business leaders and communications professionals, many of them revolve around the media itself.
Just yesterday we heard the sad news that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper will close on May 3 after a 240-year run. Whether it’s a consequence of the three-year journalist strike that ended last November or the Block family ownership’s statement about cash losses over the past 20 years, the fact remains it marks the end of one of the most storied regional media brands and a further erosion of local journalism when it is needed more than ever.
Over the weekend, it emerged that major news outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post declined to publish information it had received about the forthcoming strikes on Venezuela to capture President Maduro for fear of putting the lives of U.S. military personnel at risk. Representatives from the Trump administration, which has been consistent in bombarding journalists from mainstream media as fake news outlets and “stupid” and “not nice” people, graciously thanked the media for keeping quiet before the raids.
In the PR world, something of a non-story got people very agitated over the holidays when Martin Sorrell, founder of iconic holding company WPP and now founder and executive chairman of beleaguered digital advertising and marketing services company S4 Capital, said “there was no such thing as PR anymore” on BBC Radio 4’s high-profile Today program in debate with U.K. trade body PRCA’s CEO Sarah Waddington.
Sorrell has always been good for a snappy soundbite, but he is increasingly out of touch with the modern world of marcomms and, let’s face it, needs to be concentrating on the challenges his own company is facing rather than taking potshots at the PR industry. His presence on the BBC is also a function of a very cozy long-term relationship he has built up with the U.K.’s national broadcaster that has made him the go-to representative for pretty much any story on advertising and communications.
The Beeb needs to do better in widening its net of voices in the sector to feature more relevant and up-to-date voices, such as Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun, or Edelman leader Richard Edelman, or comms leaders of large U.K.-based companies such as Unilever, for example. It is also incumbent on the industry to be more vocal in talking about the value of what it does. When was the last time you saw Omnicom CEO John Wren doing a mainstream media piece, for example?
Elsewhere, if media is to be taken seriously it must maintain its standards and due diligence to retain credibility, and not be drawn into the febrile noise and echo chamber environment characterized by social media.
I recall a story late last year about WPP supposedly being in advanced talks to do a deal with French holding company Havas. The London Times did a piece on it. One of the advertising trades posted a breaking news alert late on a Friday night saying, among other things, that “serious talks” were taking place between the two.
It’s at times like this when you have to decide whether to rouse your reporting team over the weekend, which we would do for really big stories. But then you consider that, at the time, new WPP CEO Cindy Rose had just purchased a tranche of shares in the company and would have been breaking insider trading laws by engaging in serious talks about a deal such as the one being touted with Havas. Talks about lots of things happen all the time between business entities, both casual and in more formal settings, but this one was just not a real, contemporaneous story. Stand down team.
There are other more high-profile examples of lower standards being deployed before publishing stories and it is vital that this trend is arrested, before the reality starts mirroring the egregious rhetoric coming out of the administration about mainstream media.
PR pros also have a role to play in maintaining good and respectful relations with media outlets. More and more, you find media relations folks completely ignoring requests for comment. If a company doesn’t want to comment, then it should just say so. Radio silence is not a recipe designed to build effective long-term relationships with journalists.
Now more than ever, we need credible, effective, truthful, nonpartisan media — and we need companies and brands to properly engage with it and not try to take advantage of some supposed flipping of the power dynamic. That should be in the interests of all credible PR professionals in the long term.
