One of the major preconceived notions about PR is that it’s all about getting the word out. I mean, of course it is – but our job is also about protecting the client, and this can seem strange to journalists from time-to-time.

 

I take fielding pr requests very seriously — and have gleaned a greater understanding and compassion for throughout my pr career. I often try and take a moment and look behind the curtain:  the people at our client’s companies are extremely valuable and it's our role to empathize with the reality that anyone speaking to the press has a responsibility for the livelihoods of these employees. When someone speaks to the press on behalf of an organization, their words carry a lot of weight, and the stakes are high.

 

Employees want to know that their paycheck is going to come in on time. They want to know that they can pay their car and home payment, and put their kids through college. And bad reviews really sting. I've had many clients who've had bad restaurant or product reviews that caused very real, psychological damage.

 

That said, I think that some journalists don’t fully understand the full gravity of a client’s responsibility. Setting up an interview and prepping a client might seem so simple, so transactional – but a lot goes on behind the scenes, and a lot is at stake.

 

From Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, everybody wants things said and done a certain way — and rightly so. At the same time, with so many layers and so many voices involved, it can get chaotic. So when journalists post on LinkedIN or in their newly popular Substack newsletters and say, ‘I just wish PR people would X, Y, Z’, just know that there are many layers to unpack within the organization to achieve the desired result. It's about us relaying everything internally, in a way that makes our client feel comfortable enough to want to even hop on a call and have everything on the record. As publicists, our goal is to get as much information as possible to relay an informed narrative to our client while also maximizing the press opportunity to its greatest potential.

 

At the end of the day, the ideal relationship between a publicist and an editor is to produce great content together, collaboratively and symbiotically. The goal is to end up with as objective of a story as possible, one that is both informative and inspirational. That takes teamwork between a journalist and a publicist, bottom line.

 

And good journalists realize that a publicist can offer them more than what they’re asking for to tell an even better story. We can collectively help make that story resonate on a verbal and visual level to jointly win on all cylinders.

 

#MakePBJ

 

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