There’s been quite a row on the other side of the pond about an organization called Editorial Intelligence (EI), created by London PR professor Julia Hobsbawm to encourage dialogue between journalists and PR people. EI put a number of journalists on its board, but other journalists cried “conflict of interest” and several of the board members have since resigned.
John Lloyd, one of the resigning board members, offers a defense of his position on the board in this commentary. Excerpt:
The aim of EI grew out of work which Julia had been doing for some years, which I have discussed often with her and which I think is very valuable. She has challenged, in articles and speeches, the conventional view of the relationship between journalism and PR as that of the dog and the lamppost — a self-serving one for us, but not an accurate one.
Her contentions include that:
- there is no automatic presumption that journalists will be more accurate or truthful than PRs. Julia’s contention is that the sanctions on PRs for being inaccurate or downright untruthful are high, both from the side of the journalists with whom they must work and the clients for whom they work.
- Journalism increasingly depends on PR — and will continue to do so, the more reporting budgets and staffs are pared down and the more consumer and celebrity journalism grows in relation to other sorts. Much journalism — in the widest sense of the trade — is public relations, with the themes, direction and sometimes even the pictures and the prose supplied by a PR.
- public relations usually has to declare itself — in the sense that a PR is openly working for this or that client. Thus the PR’s “bias” is generally open: a journalist’s often is not.
- publicists will always seek to make the best of the client or client’s product: but that is understood by the most junior reporter, and elementary journalistic practice warns against using only a PR source for a story (which is not to say it isn’t done, at higher than elementary levels).
All of these views are debatable: and that is the point. They should be debated. The value of EI is that it was a forum both for doing public relations and for having that debate. The form of its public events was, in many cases, to bring journalists, business people and public relations people together for debate — on the reasonable assumption that all had a stake in thrashing through issues, in clarifying their respective roles and in finding, through discussion, a greater understanding of what kind of world the media make.
Where do we sign up?
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