Public relations practitioners will not be able to implement their main task (to build positive image) working for organization, whereas journalists will not be able to follow all events without being in touch with agents (practitioners) of organizations creating or influencing those events. In this post I would like to ponder how public relations and journalism interacts.
As a part of public relations practitioners’ technical roles, they deal with the media. They use mass media to get positive publicity for their organizations. The practitioners also supply journalists with newsworthly information for publication or broadcasting. Conversely, journalists get a vast amount of news of public interest for the media from practitioners in different organizations.
Public relations practitioners and journalists collaboration is quite strong and due to it practitioners have to establish good media relations in order to reach the main goal. The practitioners issue newsworthly information in various ways to the media, for example, news release, organizing press conferences, disseminating news through email, personal contact, etc. Here journalists’ work is rewrite news releases prepared by the practitioners, identify newsworthly information by contacting the practitioners who act as news source, interview them, attend press conferences, meetings, seminars to gather information. As a result, the practitioners will not get media coverage without the help of journalists. At the same time, the practitioners greatly assist the journalists in obtaining news.
However, in all cases the practitioner is the first source of information for journalists. Everything in contact between journalist and organization is gathering through practitioner who arranges interview with organization’s employees and is in charge of contacting with media. As a result, a tension between the public relations practitioners and journalists exists, because journalists may want to interview other persons working for an organization, but they are not allowed to do this because of internal rules and every time the practitioner is included in collecting the information.
Proceeding about journalism and public relations interaction, journalistic skills also are included in the practitioners’ work. According to Clear and Weideman, the public relations practitioner successful work includes these journalistic skills: interviews conducting; writing articles for own publications; producing publications that require editing, page layout, photography; conducting research for articles; rewriting information received to comply with the style and nature of in-house publications.
While in collective working with public relations practitioners journalists have to deal with interviewing sources; writing news reports and articles; editing news reports and articles, doing page layouts, taking photographs; conducting research for background information.
In conclusion, all facts and descriptions of situations mentioned above affirm the existence of public relations and journalism interaction. The only way for the practitioners to create and maintain positive image of organization is dealing with media, whereas journalists gather information easily and at the same time create wider reflection of events that are delivered through mass media channels.
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