Can PR pros and reporters be friendly?
Some reporters and PR pros seem dead set on believing that the relationship must be adversarial. This author thinks otherwise.
There seems to be a lot of talk about how reporters dislike PR pros. Is the supposed uneasy relationship between reporters and PR pros real, or just a lot of hype?
If you believe articles like this one, you’re in the same camp as many in the PR field. On a recent Twitter chat when this topic came up, the overwhelming majority of participants seemed to believe that reporters don’t care for PR pros or see value in what they offer.
There are those of us, however, who have had a different experience. We believe there are ways to foster a healthy relationship with reporters. While there may be those in PR who don’t give the rest of us a good name—by sending pitches without doing research, failing to proof what they send, pestering a reporter to death and the list of PR “don’ts” goes on—there are those of us who honestly rarely feel that a reporter views what we offer as a negative.
So, how can we as PR pros get on a reporter’s good side? Here are some ways to be of value:
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