A PR Pro's Advice to Bloggers and Social Media Mavens
This week I met a young woman who writes a popular blog about dining out in the Boston area. A sophomore at Harvard College, she has built a following for her blog among young foodies, which has generated a second following: PR agencies that represent restaurants.
Like many popular, grassroots bloggers, it seems that she has become a journalist almost by accident. She asked me a simple but important question. “If a PR person invites me to an event for their client,” she said, “Do I have to write something? And if I don’t, will they retaliate somehow?”
“No,” I said, “You don’t have to write anything. You are a journalist. You write only what you care about, what you think is compelling. That’s what journalists do. There is no quid pro quo. You don’t owe PR people anything if you attend their event.”
Typically, I said, when journalists take the time for a briefing or an event, the chances are good they’ll go on to write an article or maybe just a mention on their blog. That’s just being a productive journalist who uses his or her time wisely. And if you never write about their clients, eventually the PR people will stop inviting you to their events.
For me, with more than 20 years of PR experience, this conversation crystallized the shift in reporting created by the social media revolution. Just 10 years ago, the print and broadcast media employed thousands of journalists who graduated from journalism programs fiercely embracing their journalistic integrity. Our jobs as PR people was to bring them stories that were so compelling, so newsworthy, that the reporter would take an interview with our client and write a story.
Now the ranks of journalists are thinning while an army of bloggers has sprung up in their place. Each blogger makes up his or her rules as they go along. If they are lucky enough to become popular, bloggers may start to wonder, as she did, what, if anything, they owe to those friendly PR people who keep offering them story ideas and inviting them to fun events. And another question is even more important: what do bloggers owe to readers who rely on their opinions?
The fact is that independence is the source of a writer’s authority, credibility and power. PR simply mirrors that credibility. Every good PR person prizes the stories about their clients that are written by good, skeptical, independent journalists, whether they write for a popular blog or for The Wall Street Journal. Winning their good opinion is an achievement we value highly, and so do our clients.
So if you are a young blogger, here’s some advice from a PR pro who has arranged interviews with some of the smartest business journalists of our times. Do you owe anything to the PR people who invite you to events or send you interesting pitches? Nope, you do not owe us a thing. Nada. Zip. And that’s just as it should be.
Posted by Carol McGarry on April 12, 2010 at 6:14 PM
