CorpComms Magazine

On my e-mail program at work, I have a folder into which I drop the worst of the PR pitches that come my way. Now and again, when I'm asked what infuriates journalists most about public relations, I dip into this virtual rubbish bin to remind myself of the horrors I would otherwise have blocked out.

Scrolling through the most recent entries, I realise that most fall into the category of time-wasters. In the last few weeks I have been asked to consider subjects as varied as 'executive-style tanning salons', 'dog-sharing', 'surprising cheese facts', 'metrospiritual' T-shirts and 'leather erotic outfits and accessories (the chains, buttons and embellished jewellery are nickel-free, to help prevent rashes or irritating marks)'.

Entertaining as it is to contemplate what my week might look like if I were to follow up each of these invitations, it is hard to believe that the PRs who sent them spent any time thinking about whether the Financial Times would ever cover such subjects. As a result of their scattergun approach, they have wasted their own time - time that could have been better spent honing a pitch to Tanning Today or Cheese Weekly - as well as mine.

The other truth that emerges from this hall of shame is that the more obscure the client, the more likely the PR is to oversell.

Two e-mails from my time working in New York as the dotcom bubble deflated illustrate the point. 'I know. You got our launch release yesterday and the first thing you probably thought was, These guys MUST BE CRAZY to launch an e-commerce B2C at this point in the industry,' went the first. 'But these guys are the farthest thing from crazy. They're closer to genius than crazy.'

The second, an invitation to lunch with a little-known Portuguese software company, spared me the capital letters but went straight for the hyperbole, describing its chief executive as 'Carlos the Conqueror - a throwback to the Portugal of explorers like Dias, de Gama and Magellan'.

I will not dwell on the saddest pitches in the pile (the press release that began 'Coming out as gay or bisexual may not seem like the best gift to give this Mother's Day...', or the half-hearted boast that the client had been ranked the 27th fastest-growing company in Utah); nor, I suspect, do I need to labour the point about jargon-laden press releases (I quote: 'Our PSP suite also supports native reuse of MQ-Series integration scripts and components as well as internal EAI and external XML-based eBI integration').

I will reserve my bile instead for those PR professionals who try to write the story for you. The e-mail that started off with the words, 'I'd like to suggest a feature profile story, perhaps titled The Zen of litigation,' was bad enough (not least because it went on to describe the lawyer in question as 'priest, poet and prizefighter'), but the following helpful suggestion takes the prize: 'If I were writing this story - and, of course, I am not - I would play off the famous Rudyard Kipling book, The man who would be king, and entitle the piece, The man who would change the advertising business.' No self-respecting reporter wants their story dictated to them.

Stopping the press

All of these e-mails share a common thread - the PR is trying to get a story into the paper that the paper doesn't want to print. The more common cause of friction, particularly with larger companies and more, well, professional PR professionals, is when a PR is trying to keep out a story that we do want to print.

Any responsible journalist will understand when a PR says that a story should not run because it is factually inaccurate - a few are even grateful to those PRs who save them from getting things wrong. But too often, the motivation is simply to stall or obfuscate in the hope of stopping a story that is absolutely true but is uncomfortable reading for the company.

To misquote the old Yellow Pages ad, journalists are not just there for the nice things in life, like the strong results, the new hire or the exciting product launch. Things go wrong in companies all the time (if they didn't, there would be less call for PR professionals), and when they do, journalists have to cover it.

The best PRs I work with - and my experience of the worst has taught me to appreciate the many good ones - won't hide when there is bad news to discuss. Just as they would for a 'good news' story, they provide access to senior management, they know their companies and clients sufficiently well to provide pertinent facts and background information, and they spend time getting their point of view across.

This last point is often overlooked in a PR crisis. It may be tempting to hide when there is bad news, and hope that it will go away. But if we are not hearing your side of the story, we will only have the other side to go with. That is a far bigger PR failure than filling my inbox with erotic leather goods and surprising cheese facts.

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