PR meets the WWW / Constantin Basturea’s weblog

Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. That purpose is to provide people people with information they need to understand the world. The first challenge is finding the information that people need to live their lifes. The second is to make it meaningful, relevant, and engaging.

Engagement really falls under journalist’s commitment to the citizenry. As one reporter interviewed by the team of our academic research partners put it, “If you are the kind of person who, once you have found something, find that you are not satisfied about knowing it until you figure out a way to tell somebody else, then you’re a journalist.”

Part of a journalist’s responsibility, in other words, is not just providing information, but providing it in such a way that people will be inclined to listen.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, 2001, p. 149.

Note (Oct. 3, 2005): The original entry included only the quote that’s now in bold. The comments helped me realize that it might be useful to add some context :) The way I read the quote (and the reason for posting it here) is that journalism is based, in part, on the desire to share with other people what you know.

Dominic Timms writes in today’s Guardian (reg. required) that firms are “in the dark over blog threat,” according to “the Blog Relations PR Survey”:

Nearly two-thirds of businesses have not woken up to the threat posed to their brands and reputations by disgruntled bloggers, a survey of PR professionals revealed today.

While more than 60% of PR executives interviewed believed that web blogs (sic!) by unhappy employees or exasperated customers can damage corporate reputations, but 58% said businesses were insufficiently aware of the threat. [...]

The survey showed that American PR companies were ahead of their European counterparts when it came to looking at blogs.

More than 80% of US executives admitting reading blogs “at least five times a week,” a figures which fell to just 36% in Europe.

While the percents quoted by the Guardian are quite impressive, they’re misleading.

What’s missing from the article is that only 50 people participated in the survey, and that the way they were selected doesn’t allow any generalizations. In other words, there is no way to say how representative these numbers are for the PR pros from US and Europe; the numbers are relevant only for the small group of practitioners that took the survey — that’s all.

Kudos to Blog Relations for publishing the survey.

Kudos to the Guardian for writing about weblogs as a business communications tool; I hope next time they’re going to be more accurate about reporting stats.

Steve Wilson, Senior Director of Global Web Communications at McDonald’s and a key person in the project of introducing blogging at McDo, has started a personal weblog. Welcome!

(Hat tip: Alan L. Nelson)

• August 29 - September 6: starting the Katrina Help Wiki (about)
• September 6 - 23: organizing the Global PR Blog Week 2.0.

• Barney Lerten, a journalist, is writting Please Release Me!, a weblog (and a future book) about press releases and the New PR (aparently they’re not mutually exclusive).
• Is this the Corporate Communications Blog of Cadbury Schweppes? Well, if it is, then welcome to the blogosphere! Update (Oct. 3, 2005) The blog has been deleted.
• Steve Cody, managing partner and co-founder of Peppercom, is blogging at RepMan about “the importance of a good reputation in a world gone mad“.
• Our PR blogger colleague Octavio Rojas is the proud author of a new book on public relations. Congratulations!
• “The Opinion Makers: Weblogs as challenge for campaigns, marketing, PR and media” is a new book (available in German, for now) about weblogs, authored by Dr. Ansgar Zerfass and Dietrich Boelter. And there’s a book blog, too.

H.L. Mencken used to answer letters from his critics with a pre-printed post card that read, “You have the right to your wrong opinion.�

(source)