An American tale
I recently applied for and received my complimentary copy of CorpComms, the magazine for the corporate communicator, and found it to be a great read. I had seen it billed as a great alternative to PR Week, but I wouldn’t agree. It’s more like the apple to PR Week’s orange, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, like I said, it’s a good read, full of interesting features but has little hard news. At £75 for 10 issues, I can see the value for in-house folks, but it’s a little beyond the reach of us independents, especially when you consider all the excellent discussion of PR issues and news that you can access for free online.
CorpComm’s content is not available anywhere online, from what I can tell. Which is a shame because the April issue has a really funny article by Simon English, of the Independent, I wish I could link to it for you.
In it he compares UK PRs to those in the US:
“I never thought I would miss British PRs. Then I met the Americans. Five years ago I left London for New York, leaving a bunch of public relations executives I was pleased to see the back of. I am not sure if the Brits now just seem better by comparison or if the whole industry moved on in my absence. Either way, the conclusion is clear: the yanks are crazy. It isn’t that the US PR industry isn’t professional. It’s that they simply don’t have the slightest understanding of what a journalist is after.”
He then goes on with some humorous anecdotes of his trials and tribulations in the USA. Basically describing American PRs as disorganised, whiny and hostile. He seems them as barriers to getting the facts.
Well I’ve worked on both sides of the pond and I’m here to tell you that he is wrong. British PR is quite different from the US practice. But then, the British culture is quite different from that of the US, so no surprises there. The US flacks I worked with were hard-working professionals with a thorough understanding of needs of reporters and served them well.
I’m sorry that Mr. English’s experience was not the same.
UPDATE: There is a good debate about hack/flack relations going around the blogosphere stemming from the recent Financial Times feature, The Truth about Spin. Neville Hobson’s blog has 33 comments on the subject. Hacking Cough gives the journo’s point of view. And Richard Bailey puts in his two cents worth. They are all worth a read.
Filed under: public relations
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Sher,
No wonder he was angry! He did’t have any U-S publicists doing his homework for him! Didn’t you actually write stories that somebody else dared to put their byline on? Or was that just a dirty little secret that you shared with me over martinis? (Actually, I had bourbon. You had gin
RR
Hey, I do that all the time…it’s the way of business.
Which is that Stacey…writing copy for journos or buying my gin? Either way, you’re right!
[...] That provocative comment was the catalyst for a discussion in the post that, at the last count, ran to 52 comments and trackbacks. It also prompted most conversation participants - David Tebbutt, Philip Young, Chris Edwards and Sherrilynne Starkie - to sound off on their own blogs, opening up further conversations there and in other blogs that linked to theirs. The post attracted the attention of David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government in the UK and a member of the cabinet. [...]
[...] An American Tale where a UK journo critiques US PRs [...]