Nearly 200 PR executives will honor Charlotte Otto tonight at the Bryant Park Grill as the 2015 “Paladin” of the PRSA Foundation. Many journalists, meanwhile, are in despair, a 2015 Pulitzer winner having been found in PR.

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Harris Diamond, former CEO of Weber Shandwick and now head of Interpublic’s McCann Worldgroup, was the 2014 Paladin recipient.

Gawker reporter Gabrielle Bluestone, a 2015 American University law grad who has passed the New York State Bar exam, found Pulitzer winner Rob Kuznia, formerly at the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., working as a publicist for the USC Shoah Foundation. [A second Pulitzer winner, Natalie Caula Hauff, was also found to be working in PR.]

Kuznia, who exposed corruption in Torrance, told Bluestone that he regretted not being a journalist but he couldn’t make ends meet at the 63,000-circulation paper.

Bluestone headlined her report, “Pulitzer Winner Left Journalism for a PR Job So He Could Pay His Rent.” It touched off scores of comments by current or ex-journalists, most of them bemoaning the low pay levels and lack of a good future in journalism. Many have taken PR and marketing jobs.

“Life as a newspaper journalist is a crushing series of indignities ending only with your final layoff…” wrote one ex-journalist.

“Local newspapers aren’t dying,” wrote another. “They’re already dead. They just haven’t admitted it as yet.”

J Prof Warned Students of Difficult Career

Another writer said his journalism professor told the class that only 25% of J grads get jobs in the field and only half of them last more than five years. “That class was 13 years ago,” said the writer.

Other participants said fellow J students mostly ended up in private sector jobs in healthcare and other specialties. “None have writing as the major function of their jobs,” one writer said.

“I wish my J professors had been that honest,” wrote “chicaboom.” The professor had told the class about $50K starting salaries in 2009. “The same year, J-school apps skyrocketed from laid-off journalists going back to grad school for…some reason. To be fair, I was also very naïve and idealistic. And now I work comfortably in marketing.”

Another also found many classmates to be “writing in some capacity…but only one of them works at an actual newspaper as a reporter. The rest of us are writing marketing copy, in-house editors/writers for big companies/PR, content development, etc. I consider that ‘in the field’ as opposed to people who went to J-school and are selling life insurance or running a bar, etc.”

Newspaper Reporter at Bottom

CareerCast this month put newspaper reporter as the worst among 200 jobs in the U.S. Reporters earn $35,267 in a field that has a minus 13.1 hiring outlook. Earnings of top level PR people were put at $191,144. The field was said to have a plus 12.4 hiring range.

Bluestone, who has been at Gawker since April 2013, was a legal intern in the Kings County District Attorney’s Office from May to August 2013. She had the same post in the New York Appellate Term, Second Department, from June 2012 to August 2012. Before that she was a writer at the Washington Post three years.

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Otto was at P&G 33 years until her retirement in 2009. This included 13 years in marketing and 20 years in global PA and external relations.

P&G does not use the title, “PR” or “public relations.”

Paul Fox has been P&G’s director of corporate communications since 2005. Previous posts were managing director, Grayling PR, U.K., 1994-98; VP, Miller Shandwick Technologies, Boston, 1998-2000, and director, global external relations, The Gillette Co., Boston, 2000-2005.

A former U.K. journalist, he served in government PR posts during the 1980s, worked for a major airline, and headed three PR firms in Europe before coming to the U.S. in 1998.