Robert Fulghum got it right in his famous book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Share, be kind to one another, and respect each other.
We respect each other at work, in business partnerships, in dealing with customers, and when communicating with media. But, these days the media environment requires some new rules of respect.
Once upon a time journalists and public relations executives would gather in local watering holes to forge relationships over highballs and unfiltered cigarettes. Reporters needed to cultivate good sources. Companies needed good publicity. Although news was far from a gentleman’s sport, this was an era when embargoes were honored and exclusives were earned.
Disrupted by social media, journalism is today experiencing a renaissance marked by a different level of accessibility between reporters and news makers. We can now follow and converse with our favorite reporters on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Their ideas flow freely, liberated from copy editors, untethered by producers’ deadlines and distanced from legal eyes.
However, there are signs the familiarity is breeding contempt.
The Rules
For example, although reporters want more visuals for their stories, as more content is placed on the Web, they consider it disrespectful for a PR practitioner to attach a large file to an email without requesting permission first. Such an inconvenience may be forgiven if there’s a genuinely newsworthy pitch involved. However, clemency may not be granted when certain lines are crossed.
Media furor erupted in June 2011 over the publicity surrounding the much anticipated release of the Duke Nukem Forever video game by publisher 2K Games. The title had been in development for nearly 15 years and the long wait by the Duke Nukem franchise’s fans contributed to the massive hype surrounding the launch. When the game failed to impress reviewers, the angry publicist took to Twitter in apparent retaliation to announce that the harshest critics would be blacklisted from future title releases. “Bad scores are fine. Venom filled reviews…that’s completely different,” one tweet read.
The gaming press lashed out in print, on blogs and social networks. Eventually the publicist apologized but ultimately parted ways with 2K Games because the damage to the client relationship had been done.
Ben Kuchera, a reporter for Ars Technica website, observed: “A large part of my job is dealing with people who work in public relations. The vast majority of those whose do PR for video game companies are polite, well-intentioned, and extremely professional. They need us to get their games coverage, and we need them for access to the developers and early code toreview games in a timely manner. The press and PR relationship may sometimes be strained, but it’s rarely adversarial.”
(This post is an excerpt from an article originally published in the G&S Insight newsletter. Read the entire article.)