Know-Nothing Journalists Give Bad PR Advice (Again)

I almost didn't even react to this latest example of journalists giving businesspeople bad advice about PR, but I couldn't help it. I figured it was better to blog about it than to leave a comment on someone else's blog.

Here's the story: a Boston web trade group held an event on Tuesday called, “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR.” All the panelists came from the media, in other words, the people being pitched, not the people with any experience at pitching (panelists: Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe, Wade Roush from Xconomy, Peter Kafka from AllThingsD, and Bob Brown of Network World). Working journalists were recruited to give profit-seeking businesspeople advice on conducting PR, a marketing department function.

For fun, let me ask: would a right-thinking trade group ask a panel of business writers to opine on "bootstrapping R&D," "bootstrapping legal," or "bootstrapping HR?"

But journalists think they know something about PR, so they opined on what cash-strapped companies ought to do to maximize publicity without hiring those expensive, pesky, clueless PR people who presumably bug them all the time with useless pitches. Here's the moderator's summary of the panel:

As far as these reporter/bloggers were concerned, PR agencies aren’t worth much.

BTW, his post was titled, "PR Bashing Harsh but Fair." Excuse me, but was that the title and intent of the panel? I thought the idea was to give sound business advice, right? [Here's a longer and more nuanced summary of the proceedings]

Anyway, enough. In my experience, the vast majority of journalists know nothing about how PR works or why companies need it. That's not to say that a lot of PR isn't overpriced garbage or that PR people don't annoy journos with stupid pitches. It is to say that there is a perfectly normal role for communications and PR in a growing company, and smart entrepreneurs will figure out how to use it to build their businesses. But don't ask a working reporter -- you're wasting your time.

Tip: it's actually pretty hard to do PR right without some professional help. It's time-consuming and can be unproductive if you don't know what you're doing. But if you're sure that you want to do it and don't have squat in the bank, at least buy a book like "PR for Dummies" or one of the others in my "Recommended" ad from Amazon to the right.