Was a PR Person the Real Pulitzer Winner?
From Matt Smith of SF Weekly:
Publicists have a dreary and emotionally exhausting job. Daily, they must cold-call and suck up to journalists in attempts to forge relationships that are built, fundamentally, on dysfunction.
In an ideal journalistic world, you see, publicists wouldn't exist. Journalists would be resourceful, hardworking, and freethinking, never needing the press releases, story tips, staged interviews, and other "on-message" news that publicists provide. But because they often lack these qualities, reporters eventually wind up accepting at least some of the fare that publicists pass out, albeit with resentment and suspicion, even contempt.
Publicists' bosses don't make things easier. The official rules of public relations say it's the client or cause that's supposed to shine, not the PR agent. So most often flacks toil anonymously, disrespected, maligned, and ignored -- even in cases where their work is so good it generates a Pulitzer Prize.
That's right, a Pulitzer Prize. Last week the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism awarded journalism's highest honor to a series of newspaper editorials that resulted from the efforts of a Bay Area publicist -- but without giving her any credit.
It's a great lead. The rest of the story is here.
I would only add that, having been both a PR guy and a writer for an alternative weekly, I think the latter vocation is far more "dreary and emotionally exhausting." I won't detail all the reasons here; to each his own, I guess.
posted by Scott Baradell at
9:24 AM
1 Comments:
It's laughable for Matt Smith to suggest that press releases exist because journalists don't work hard enough. Or that calls to journalists, employing a certain diplomatic persuasion and attempting to learn what sort of stories do interest them and their readers, amount to "sucking up."
Furthermore I may toil behind the scenes, but I'm far from anonymous. I get boat-loads of spam because my e-mail address is prominently published on every other release my company issues.
For a newspaper to accept a Pulitzer for editorials they did not draft is in an ethical gray area (did they edit them? was it a bold choice to publish them?), but it's appropriate that the original PR person who submitted the editorial idea is proud of her work for her organization, not fuming at the lack of recognition.
The real offense seems to be that the newspaper exaggerated in its coverage of the controversy and debate, not that it chose to express its editors' opinions through outsider-drafted editorials.
By
Joy Jennings, at 4/14/2005
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