According to holdthefrontpage.co.uk, journalists consider less than 10% of the PR material they receive to be relevant to them:
Most PR material ‘irrelevant’ say journalists
Two thirds of journalists want to receive less material from the commercial PR sector according to the preliminary results of an online survey.
[...] Early results have shown that half the respondents consider less than 10pc of the content delivered to them by the commercial PR sector is relevant and that two-thirds of them want to receive less such material.
When I read the report, my first thought was that the findings themselves are a little weak in the PR stakes – a great headline but not much content. There’s little information in the report about a) the number of respondents and b) how broadly representative that sample is of journalists in general. So, ironically, the piece may be guilty of exactly what makes so much PR just hot air: a lack of credible numbers to back it up.
Of course, it’s now relatively easy to set oneself up as a PR professional, buy access to a media database and start churning out releases in all directions. Spam exists in every industry – why should PR be any different? They say spam accounts for some 90-95% of all emails sent, so it’s not really surprising that journalists are being targeted.
The real issue is this: are experienced PR professionals who should know better putting out hardly relevant and barely interesting information en masse? Well yes, some are. Do they make up the majority? Actually, I think not.
Remember, a PR person’s job is to get coverage. Very few, if any, of us are being paid simply to spew out information. It has to find a voice in a media that is then heard by the client’s target audience. Spam won’t achieve that, so I find it hard to believe it’s a practice that’s dominating mainstream PR activity.
Of course, I can see why a journalist on the receiving end of hundreds of time-wasting emails and calls per day would think differently.
Wow, quite shocking statistics. It needs to be somewhat tempered by the volume of media stories generated from PR – in which case journalists are genuinely receiving a whole load of guff and only 10 per cent of it is used (though that 10 per cent fills up to 75/80 per cent of some papers) or they’re not being quite honest.
It does however behove upon all of us to target more of our work as much as possible – thereby building relationships with those journalists that most benefit your clients.
It’d be interesting to see what journalists have to say on those statistics.
Does this call for a change to the underlying model, or just better targeting?
Also, if some journalists write, let’s say 50%, of their published work based on press releases, they’re essentially saying that they’re unable to just print everything that they’re sent. ‘Boo hoo! I have to actually work for a living!’
Also, is this also a technology issue? Doesn’t the software that PR people use that supplies the contact details of the journalists have a tagging type thing? Isn’t that exactly what PR Newswire sell?
Well, as they say there are lies, damned lies and statistics…
I think in many respects it’s merely a symptom of our society’s current mode of operation in its overemphasis on quality rather than quality of communications. Workers in all areas – not just journalists – are pressured to produce high volumes in tight timescales, which results in a lack of research going into pieces and a lot of churning. PR ‘spam’ is simply another example in another industry. But I do think that people can tell the difference and that quality does still count. At least, I certainly hope it does.
I think that the sheer volume of PR out there and the ease of which a release can be sent to anyone at the touch of a button to entire mailing lists as opposed to the traditional postage distribution route has rewritten the rules of the game. There is now a lot of noise for journalists to sift through in order to get the job done.
Favourable media coverage is worth its weight in gold. To the public, a positive mention in an article is far more powerful than an advertisement because editorial – reviews, articles and so on – is seen as more trustworthy. PR pays off because it has more credibility than advertising. Getting the media to say a good thing about your product or service is smart marketing.
As well as generating good publicity, PR is also about avoiding and handling bad publicity. Publicity is created and generated by the media. If you can write great press releases and create good media relations, you could get a lot of free publicity for your business/cause/idea/individual or whatever.
If you take the example of a small business looking to get great coverage, what the press wants to publish may not necessarily be their business goals – your good news could be deemed trivial. In short, getting good PR is not always easy.
With so many newspapers suffering the twin onslaught of the recession and Google taking so much of their business you would think they would realise that the savvy PR companies are already leaving the journalists out of the promotions! The rubbish is still making it through!
Publicity is just a part of PR, which is ultimately about getting people talking about you – or in our case our clients. More and more we are discovering (a harsh lesson as I am a journalist in my heart) that social media can deliver more chatter about clients and more enquiries and ultimately more business than publicity based PR can achieve. Ironically, played well enough it becomes a story in itself and you get the publicity after all!
Of course, well written press releases that are relevant to publications, represent real news values and are delivered in a timely and targeted fashion will still get published.
Too much PR is written by marketing folk who think they understand what a story is! That’s the stuff that gives PR a bad name and means so many press releases are treated with contempt by busy journalists.
Thanks for a great post Emily – as soon as I finished the latest batch of client material I might just blog about this myself!
Many PRs will continue to take a shotgun approach to sending out press releases as long as there is no detrement to doing so and they see returns on it.
Equally many journalists will continue to read press releases that they are statistically unlikely to pursue further ‘just in case’, as they too will see returns on doing so.
Frankly, the results don’t surprise me. It would be interesting to compare the media’s attitude today to pre-Internet days. I think in some respect the Web has enabled PR practitioners to become media-feeding machines, or perhaps more accurately, media-barfing machines, since much of what is sent seems to be immediately rejected. Ultimately, it speaks to the laziness of PR practitioners (and I too I must confess have at times been guilty of push-media). It’s just too easy not to screen a list and far too easy to just hit “send.”