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| Issue No. 200406
| June 2004
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The PIOnet Newsletter is sponsored by Newswise and Dick Jones Communications
Feature Editor: Dick Jones Editor/Publisher: Roger Johnson
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PIOnet Newsletter is produced monthly to support media relations' vital role in integrated marketing for your institution. This role is not always adequately recognized, understood, or acknowledged. Our goal is to give you data, arguments, evidence, and ideas to enhance the understanding of and appreciation for media relations at your institution.
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Take the Broad View for Media Relations Success
by Dick Jones
Dick Jones Communications
Some in institutional advancement have a view of media relations that is too narrow.
An example: Once we helped to place a significant positive admissions story for an east coast liberal arts college in The Denver Post. "That's okay," said the PR director, "but we get no students from Denver, and we have only a couple of alumni there. It really doesn't do us much good."
The story, however, went into syndication -- as do many stories originated at large metro papers -- and appeared prominently in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia had been designated a "target city" for admissions by this particular college. This added immense value to a placement that had originally been thought to be irrelevant.
It is difficult to overstate how interconnected the news media are today. Just a few days ago, the media relations director of a medical center called to tell me that a story about the center that appeared in a small Pennsylvania town paper had been picked up by The Miami Herald. Also, reporters now routinely find story sources by doing Internet searches of existing news articles on the same topic. And they avidly peruse the Newswise offerings, as you know.
This is happening for several reasons. A main one is that there are fewer reporters, and they are asked to do more and more. The reduction in staff numbers at news outlets increases the use of news generated via wire service or syndication.
The result has been to render geography less important as far as a news story placement's role in marketing is concerned. A story in The Seattle Times can turn up in The Orlando Sentinel and benefit a Florida school. A piece in The Los Angeles Times could aid the marketing efforts of a college in Maine.
I hope your supervisors realize that. My sense is that many do not. If you have anything to share on this topic, we'd like to hear it.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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How Does Public Relations Look in the News?
by Zoltan Bedy, Ph.D
Oswego State University of New York
Public Information Officers (PIOs) and other public relations (PR) practitioners interact regularly with colleagues in the news media. It's part of the job. That interaction is, in large measure, what puts the "Public" in the PIO title and in what PR folks do. But the interaction, or "alliance," between public relations professionals and journalists is -- and has been -- an uneven (and occasionally, rough) one. The reason for this often rocky relationship is PR's not-exactly-favorable image among journalists.
The Public Relations Society of America defines public relations as a function that " . . . helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other." Most other recent definitions include relationship management as part of the PR function, or categorize public relations as a management function within an organization.
A study conducted over a three-year period suggests, however, that "news stories primarily use the term public relations to suggest image building, reputation management, and persuasion efforts" and that "the use of public relations terms was likely to refer to publicity, image, campaigns of persuasion, and marketing efforts to promote an organization's products or services."
"The Portrayal of Public Relations in the News Media," by Samsup Jo, (Mass Communication & Society, 2003, 6 (4), 397-411) is a content analysis of stories published in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and aired on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news over a three-year period (October 1998 to October 2001) in which the term public relations was used. Despite recent efforts by PR practitioners to redefine and alter public perception of the profession, this study indicates a divergence between the practitioners' functional definition and the way the media use the term public relations in news stories.
The study tested three hypotheses:
- The overall connotation of public relations is more likely to be negative than positive in news stories.
- With regard to the function of public relations, image making is more likely to appear in the news stories than is management function.
- The negative use of public relations is more likely to be associated with a business organization than with a government agency.
A LexisNexis search yielded 567 stories containing "the term public relations, or a related term such as public relations war. . . . The study excluded public relations terms related to position and company name, such as public relations agency, public relations firm, and public relations director/manager." That screening left a total of 303 (207 print, 96 broadcast) stories for analysis. The content analysis unit was a news story containing the term public relations. Among other analyses and classifications, perhaps the most interesting one to report here is the analysis of the connotation of the term public relations in the news context -- whether the term public relations was used positively, negatively, or neutrally.
A positive meaning presents the positive function of PR, "suggesting an accurate meaning of public relations and a beneficial outcome to an organization." A negative meaning involves a problem of image, or inability to manage organizational reputation, thus "representing public relations in a derogatory manner." A neutral meaning of the term was demonstrated in the descriptive use of public relations, "as in the phrases public relations strategy and public relations campaign."
The good news to come out of this study for PR practitioners is that in the 303 news stories in which the term public relations was used, the neutral meaning -- "involving the general naming of public relations related to its routine function" -- was most frequent (142 stories/47%). The not-so-good news is that the negative connotation of PR was evident more than three times as often as the positive connotation (124 stories/41% vs. 37 stories/12%) in news stories. The negative connotation of PR was also found to be more evident in stories dealing with business organizations and federal and state government. When the term public relations was used when dealing with a nonprofit organization, the connotation tended to be more positive, while stories involving celebrities or politicians had a more negative tone.
The findings in this study suggest that, despite PR practitioners' efforts at emphasizing public relations as relationship management, news stories primarily use the term public relations to imply image building, reputation management, and persuasion efforts.
The study's author suggests that one reason for the negative bent of nearly half the stories having to do with PR is that the working relationship between journalists and public relations practitioners needs to be better developed, with more two-way communication. Says Jo, "The results imply that public relations practitioners trying to pitch their clients' stories need to understand the news value of those stories from the perspective of the news media." In order to develop a symbiotic relationship with journalists, PR practitioners need to find the "news" in what they pitch to journalists and become familiar with the criteria for newsworthiness against which journalists measure pitched ideas.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Book Review: Guerrilla Publicity: Hundreds of Sure-Fire Tactics to Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars
by Jan Thomas
Thomas Hunt & Associates Public Relations
Although Guerrilla Publicity: Hundreds of Sure-Fire Tactics to Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, Jill Lublin, and Mark Steisel was written for do-it-yourself business owners, the book provides a few interesting tips that can be used to build the brand of a college or university. For instance, the steps the authors recommend for creating a personal sound bite can be adapted for higher ed media training sessions and used to help professors develop effective synopses of their work and experience.
The book's strategies for handling a crisis are excellent, and the declaration, "When disasters occur, your first concern should be to do everything in your power to restore your customers' confidence, because if you don't, you're gambling with your business future," is a concise version of a public relations (PR) law notoriously difficult to articulate.
Similarly, the chapters entitled Fifteen Things the Media Hates and Fifteen Things the Media Loves have enough practical information to justify being clipped out and taped beside every PR person's computer or telephone.
Unfortunately, there are also some blatant misrepresentations in the book. For instance, experienced PR people will probably cringe when they read recommendations for working with the media such as, "Don't worry about making a pest or nuisance of yourself. Media people are always busy and they understand that follow-up is a part of the business. Usually, their failure to respond is due more to lack of time than lack of interest in you or your story. So, think of your following up as doing the media a favor, similar to a hotel wake-up call, a reminder that at first may be jarring, but that becomes well appreciated when the initial shock abates." [Emphasis added by authors.]
Well, okay. That's one approach -- but don't be surprised if reporters put you on their "Avoid at all costs" list if you try it more than once.
The greatest caution, however, is that Guerrilla Publicity -- like most titles in Jay Conrad Levinson's series of over 20 guerrilla marketing books -- was written for small business owners and sole proprietors. For them, the line between self-promotion and a company's brand is often both indistinguishable and immaterial. The distinction between self-promotion and company brand is much more important in higher education, where the brand belongs to an institution, not to the PR professional(s) working to enhance it.
All in all, Guerrilla Publicity can provide some innovative tips and helpful reminders for higher ed PR people, but it should not be considered essential reading. If you're working with interns, work-study students, or new staff just beginning a career in PR, you may want to consider reading the book first, highlighting applicable sections, and reviewing selected text with these members of your team. Thanks to a cheery, you-can-do-it writing style, the book can then be a valuable reference guide.
Guerrilla Publicity: Hundreds of Sure-Fire Tactics to Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars, by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, and Jill Lublin, with Mark Steisel, Adams Media Corporation, 2002.
This book is available on Amazon.com.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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International Media Relations: Language Barriers
by Tom Miller
Imperial College London
Bilingual or trilingual? Public Information Officers (PIOs) from the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK, representing technically or scientifically leaning universities (*1), got together recently to discuss their press office resources, configurations, outputs, achievements, and goals.
The meeting of PIOs revealed that their practices had more in common than in difference, but for those wanting to reach beyond their national media market and catch the eye of international web surfers or foreign journalists, coping with the issue of translating communications material is key.
The similarities will be familiar to many on PIOnet. They include a focus on communicating about their university by highlighting news about staff and student endeavours and by telling these stories in compelling ways, taking care to form and maintain good relationships with the media covering their relevant beats, the ability to facilitate reactions from experts for the media in an instant, an understanding of the value of the relationships they build, and an ability to demonstrate how their work reaches key audiences. PIOs are drawn from a mixture of backgrounds -- PR, journalism, and academia -- and all recognise that being located in or close to a country's main media market is a big plus in helping to achieve their goals.
What differ are the efforts needed to crack the language barrier and manage messages across different languages. At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), where Swiss German is most commonly spoken, each corporate press release issued needs to be translated into three languages: German, Italian, and French. For science news, they translate the text into German and English.
Imagine the impact of tinkering with the phrasing of words in the draft versions of these news releases -- it quickly leads to double headaches, as the translated versions have to be sent back and forth between writer and translator for alterations before a final version is complete. Deadlines for timely news have to be brought forward to allow for these additional rounds of editing. However, universities that must communicate with the media in multiple languages may have an inbuilt advantage on campus. By calling on bilingual students, typically from overseas, to assist with such translations, the schools can usually build strong-enough relationships to produce translated versions more rapidly as the draft reaches completion.
Beyond media relations, two examples of direct bilingual communications stand out from the meeting. At the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, the research magazine Delft Outlook is published four times a year (*2) and is written in Dutch and English. At ETH Zurich, their daily updated news website 'ETH Life' (*3,4) is made available in an English edition, and is nicely trailed by a weekly e-newsletter, also in English.
Links:
- IDEA League
- TU Delft Outlook research magazine
- ETH Life (in German)
- ETH Life International
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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