By Bill Huey
The Burson-Marsteller/Facebook flapdoodle has almost run its course, except that Burson continues firing wildly at its own foot by fiddling with its Facebook page to delete negative comments.
Everyone got what they deserved, and, fortunately for Burson-Marsteller, the International Monetary Fund chief’s sexual escapades came along over the weekend to wipe the Facebook story off the Big News agenda. Which makes the point that someone is almost always going to do something worse than you did, so don’t panic when a crisis arises—especially if no one was killed or maimed.
The two high-profile former journalists at Burson-Marsteller who perpetrated the dastardly plot will be spared the axe because they are new hires and “will be given additional ethics training,” the company said. How’s that again? Additional ethics training to former journalists about not trolling for journalists under a false front? Where will this end?
Nevertheless, it is time for lessons learned. One of the most salient lessons -- and one that the PR business never seems to learn -- is that PR and journalism are different pursuits. That PR is not just journalism practiced in a corporate setting, and firms that hire marquee or even second-tier journalists in hopes of bolstering their cred are simply barking up the wrong tree.
How are PR and journalism different? In an extended rant on Slate, “Press Box” columnist Jack Shafer said flatly that PR people push lies, while reporters are guardians of the truth:
“Every reporter approached by PR firms knows that the primary focus of PR firms is to push lies. If PR people were being paid to push the truth, they'd be called reporters,” Shafer wrote.
Of course, as an editor who once bought into a completely fabricated story called “Monkeyfishing,” about alleged fishing for monkeys in Florida from a reporter who repeatedly bamboozled him when asked for more factual detail, Shafer should know the difference.
PR and journalism are different because their aims are different. Ignore that fundamental fact and you are asking for trouble. But PR firms have done it repeatedly over the years, luring quondam journalists to the so-called “dark side” and touting them as someone “who has an intimate, first-hand knowledge of the news business and can shape compelling stories that move people to action,” or similar nonsense.
Sometimes it works out. Reporters, after all, are highly adaptive creatures, and some of them learn to appreciate the difference between their old career as journalists and their new career as strategists and advisors.
But just as often, the skill sets don’t travel well. The new hires remain stuck in the journalism mode, pontificating to everyone within range about “news values” and how to make news, or telling war stories about the time they interviewed some flavor-of –the-month big shot and told him straight to his face that he was lying, etc.
You know the type because you’ve probably encountered them. They simply don’t understand that they are no longer in the news business, and their new employers are either too dense or too timid to explain it to them.
Of course, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, you might think that PR and journalism are more similar than they are different. If you are convinced of that, try putting out some job feelers to The New York Times or Time or one of the networks and see what happens. And don’t let that one-way door hit you in the face.
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Bill Huey is president of Strategic Communications, a corporate and marketing consultancy in Atlanta, and author of “Carbon Man,” a novel about greed. |