The time-honoured “do journalists make good PRs?” debate continued yesterday with this piece from Chameleon’s Steve Loynes in the Huffington Post on the PRCA’s decision to hire a PR Week writer to its comms team. While I agree with Loynes’ central theme that PR agencies or brands should think carefully about hiring journalists to senior communications positions simply because they have been journalists, I don’t know the journalist in question and neither am I a member of the PRCA so this post in no way comments on that decision.
Rather than further entrench clearly opposing opinion, as was clear from the Twitter response when the piece went live, I thought I’d just draw on my own experience of having been both a technology journalist and a PR to help those in the media thinking about migrating to the dark side.
I’m in a unique position, having “fell” into tech PR after university, jumped the fence to journalism (2000-2002: IT Week, Computing and I was a founder member of what became V3.co.uk) as that’s what I really wanted to do (when the lowly salaries of an account executive and junior reporter were pretty much the same), then went back to PR again when it was clear that it was a better – if harder – long-term option if I ever wanted a mortgage and a healthy liver. Most of my journo friends and colleagues went on to form their own content creation firms or became analysts when the market contracted. Some went into PR and did very well.
Migrating from media to PR
Experienced journalists need to realise that moving to PR will be a culture shock. They will be stunned at the level of energy many agencies waste in petty internal politics and processes, how far many brands’ messaging and outreach is from where the journalist knows it should be, and they need to get used to no longer being the celebrity.
Then there’s the small question of accountability. While within a publication a journalist will be accountable to his/her readership, editor, publisher and – often resentfully – the ad sales team, in PR, there is a whole new level of accountability – to often ball-breaking clients; to the agency directorship; and to junior and middle-ranking staff, before whom a journalist appointed to a senior comms position must lead by example.
I will attempt to articulate simply what the journalist should bring to the party and what they need to bring to succeed at a senior communications level.
What skills a journalist should be able to bring to PR:
- Content creation skills
- Story identification and re-positioning of client corporate messaging
- Training executives how to pitch properly by phone, email and social media
- Potentially on-page search engine optimisation (SEO) knowledge
- Contacts and understanding of how the media works
What skills a journalist needs to develop to succeed in PR:
- Client handling skills
- People management skills: PR is a world away from running daily editorial meetings
- Strategic business insight: understanding clients’ messaging, financial implications of actions, internal client resourcing etc.
- Organisational, planning and logistical skills
- Account management: budgeting
- Presentational skills
- New business skills: essentially, how to sell the agency
- Holistic, strategic understanding of how social media channels, search and content can support – and be supported by – public relations outreach
Oh – and there’ll be a lot of PowerPoint…
There are probably many skills on both sides that I left out, but as someone who’s been on both sides – indeed, I have contributed to New Media Knowledge since 2008 so still get pitched to on a daily basis by PRs - I am mindful that plenty of agencies have barely changed at all in the time I’ve been in this industry. As it happens, “PR” is just a small part of what I do now; the rest comes from digital consultancy, content creation and social media/SEO training.
To summarise: Yes, of course journalists can make good PRs, but they need to accept the massive culture gap and that’s why there’s lucrative financial compensation which comes with making the leap. PR agencies likewise can gain from having an experienced journalist in their midst. It can be frustrating to adjust and the journalist will always retain a certain rebelliousness against often baffling agency/client cultures, but so long as the PR world is richer for that journalist’s presence in its camp and the (former) journalist is happy then it will have been worth it.
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