VIEWPOINT: What colour is the sky on your planet, good PR folk?

There are people within the industry who are their own worst enemies. These are the people who work for large, well-known communications companies, who espouse high standards and ethics, and yet somehow manage to smear egg on their own faces at every turn. The worst perpetrators are to be found, ironically enough, within the PR industry. This industry is made up of companies whose job is to promote goodwill and positive coverage for their clients - yet you wouldn't know it from the day-to-day run-ins you have with PR practitioners. A classic case in point is the PR account handler who calls up the press and begins the conversation with the fatal line, "My client has booked an ad in a forthcoming edition of your magazine and we would like to arrange editorial coverage in the same issue". Nothing gets a journalist's back up faster than this; and the PR person has effectively destroyed any goodwill that might have existed prior to that ill-conceived phone call. But is the PR company necessarily to blame? Could the fault really lie with clients who fail to brief and prepare their PR reps to deal with situations? Oddly enough, it is the PR companies with large media owners as their clients which are the greatest offenders when it comes to downright stupidity in dealing with the press. And you would think that as media owners, they themselves would have stringent standards and ethics when it comes to dealing with other media, simply because they should know what is and is not acceptable. Yet, time and time again, MEDIA is at the receiving end of telephone calls from PR account handlers who clearly haven't the faintest clue either about their client, or how to do their jobs properly ... and it reflects badly on the client, too.

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