As journalism flounders, public relations continues to thrive. But
that’s good news for both sides of the divide, argues a PR academic.

It is time to admit that the two disciplines of journalism and PR are two sides
of the same coin and that there is now complete freedom of movement
between them. What’s more, with PR generally being better remunerated
and flourishing, whereas journalism – print and broadcast – seems to be in a
constant state of crisis, has public relations emerged from being seen by
journalism as a poor and distant relation to taking on the role of a rich and
powerful cousin?

With the continuing growth of jobs in the PR industry – in business,
politics, government and with exploding demand for PR online – more and
more students who might have been attracted to journalism courses are now
opting for PR degrees. Drawn to London, as the centre of European media,
they arrive in increasing numbers from all over the world. At Westminster
University, some 65 per cent of undergraduate PR students are foreign. In
the MA (PR) course this year, that figure is 100 per cent. A typical
undergraduate applicant is approximately 18 years old, female, and from a
Middle Eastern or former Soviet state. She has zero knowledge of, or prior
interest in, the British media, the pool in which she must learn to swim if she
is to win her degree, let alone become a successful practitioner. At some point
early in the first semester, our student, failing to understand the nuanced
persuasion of gift bags, drinks, or a day at the tennis, asks: “Why not just pay
them to write our story?”

To help sort out such confusion, public relations courses on offer need
journalism as their stablemate. PR students benefit from taking journalism
classes, learning to report and write, and hearing from teachers who know the
media’s daily routine and requirements intimately, while witnessing their
continuing efforts to instill integrity. No one else has the authority – and
credibility – of a tutor who has done time on the beat.

It is equally true that today’s young journalist, schooled at university,
will deal with public relations operators many times in the normal course of a
day – for her entire career – whether she likes it or not. In this world of
mutual dependency, some formal study of the other discipline is obviously
desirable, if only to appreciate the sophistry of persuasive techniques the
budding newshound will encounter. But students of both disciplines will
also soon see for themselves that there are more (and better paid) entry-level
jobs in public relations, and that a significant number of high-profile
journalists cross over into PR. What’s more, there are journalists-turned-
PRs, as well as those who started out in public relations, now occupying the
public high-ground: David Cameron and Peter Mandelson come to mind.

Recently it has become a truism that “good communications, positive
media relations and a proactive reputation management strategy are critical
to all modern organisations in public, private, or third sectors”, says the
Chartered Institute of Public Relations 2009. From church to State to sports
clubs to industry, from the socially beneficial to rapacious marketers, it is
almost impossible to find an organisational exception to this rule. Bill Gates
famously said he’d spend his last dime on PR, and now all who can afford it
seek intermediation when facing journalists. This astonishing fact is hardly
due to the saintliness and bottom-line effectiveness of public relations per se,
but more likely to the widespread conviction that the press is always out to
get you, it always has an (unspoken) agenda, and there is a perceived need to
try to level the playing field. An even more profoundly held belief, or fear, is
that all reporters and journalists are of Jeremy Paxman-like proportions. The
lure of appearing live on television for a business or charity leader is thus
undermined by a dread of looking foolish. Someone else needs to smooth the
way, hand-hold, and if necessary, take the rap. And who better than an exjourno?

The idea has form as shown by a galaxy of stars, from Andrew Gowers,
who left editing the Financial Times to head marketing and communications
for Lehman Brothers, now conspicuous in a similar role at BP, to Amanda
Platell, making the more unusual return voyage from editing the Sunday
Express to political spin and then back to journalism. The list of tabloid
editors crossing over to public relations – David Yelland, Stuart Higgins, Phil
Hall and Andy Coulson being the more recent examples – emphasise the
drift. Along with the so far exclusive Piers Morgan brand of editor-celebrity,
all contribute to the new PR-journalism hybrid.

Across all sectors and embedded throughout public relations agencies –
including on their boards – former press lions reap the rewards of their
well-known faces and bylines. Michael Cole went from BBC TV to Harrods, from
where he handled the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, victims in
one of the biggest stories of the last decade, and on to set up the public
relations agency Michael Cole & Company. Sir Nicholas Lloyd, former editor
of the Daily Express, also started an agency whose website states: “Brown
Lloyd James has unmatched personal contacts with major news editors”, and
whose clients are The Daily Telegraph and The Really Useful Group, among
others. Clarence Mitchell moved from BBC TV to the Foreign Office and
then on via the Madeleine McCann campaign and Freud Communications to
the Conservative Party, where he joined a leader and many colleagues from
the public relations industry.

PR is now ‘accepted as necessary and legitimate’

Nothing new there. Governments of recent decades all used journaliststurned-
public relations operators to bridge both worlds at the interstices of
politics. But how do these men (and fewer women) justify their new
existence? What, apart from the obvious, makes them sleep at night, having
jumped from the noble ship of journalism to its seamier cousin? Here, the
greatest exemplar, Alastair Campbell, provides some insight. Looking down
his nose he made an expression of disgust when, in 1995, having left the Daily
Mirror to become Tony Blair’s press secretary, he was welcomed to the ranks
of publicists. But fast forward nine years and the legendary spin doctor told a
riveted audience at the International Public Relations Association annual
summit: “There is a revolution going on, a lot of it driven by 24-hour news.
As the media have grown and adapted, so PR has grown and adapted. PR is
now accepted as a necessary and legitimate thing to do. The problem is not
with PR, the problem is with politics and spin.”

While doubtless Campbell had many reasons for his U-turn, he
nevertheless illustrates a change of heart typical of those on a similar
trajectory. After working in both fields, it is easy to see that journalism and
PR are not so very different. Both rely on research, fact-digging, and the
ability to put across the story to gain maximum impact. Whether it’s simply
relations, is introduced to PR students early, but curiously not to budding
journalists unless they are taking PR modules. He repays some thinking.
Bernays, like most democrats, maintained that the efficient running of
society relied on the media to argue agendas and counter-agendas. A man of
strategic insight and tactical masterstrokes (think Alastair Campbell and Sir
Tim Bell combined, with a dash of his distant cousin Matthew Freud), he
further promulgated the beneficial social role of professional persuasion.
Airing alternative and minority viewpoints that the press may overlook
could change society for the greater good, he argued. It is hard to look back
dispassionately on his 1928 Torches of Freedom march in New York City
to get your own by-line on the front page, or to sell more copies of your paper,
or to sell your client’s product or service, many of the same skills are
required. With more and more journalists operating as freelances, add on the
necessary skill to pitch to an editor and that’s exactly the same ability as PRs
need – thick skin and all.

So where does this leave the student of either craft? Unlike journalism,
there is a scarcity of PR literature to draw on for prospective students
seeking informed opinion (in itself, unlikely) and many students apply with
only a vague notion of the course on which they’re embarking. Applicants in
interviews sometimes cite influencing public opinion – occasionally for
social benefit – although more usually they opt for clients’ commercial gain.
But few have any idea how well informed they must be if they are to be
effective.

Edward Bernays (1891-1995), often described as the father of public
relations, is introduced to PR students early, but curiously not to budding
journalists unless they are taking PR modules. He repays some thinking.
Bernays, like most democrats, maintained that the efficient running of
society relied on the media to argue agendas and counter-agendas. A man of
strategic insight and tactical masterstrokes (think Alastair Campbell and Sir
Tim Bell combined, with a dash of his distant cousin Matthew Freud), he
further promulgated the beneficial social role of professional persuasion.
Airing alternative and minority viewpoints that the press may overlook
could change society for the greater good, he argued. It is hard to look back
dispassionately on his 1928 Torches of Freedom march in New York City
where, in a defiant political gesture that challenged the rights of women to
smoke in public, he persuaded suffragettes to march – smoking – down Fifth
Avenue. Bernays’s client, Lucky Strike, benefited, as has the entire American
tobacco industry ever since. Smoking became a gesture of freedom and
demand for equality among young women, an association that persists even
today.

Bernays maintained that in a fractured society – one we might call
multicultural today – social causes need publicity, and wrote: “Symbols need
to be attached to proposals… to make them less abstract and more
marketable. Circumstances need to be created to dramatize their importance
and also get the attention of newspapers. The press is vitally important
because newspaper coverage can re-translate these pro-social ideas so that
they become fact with [the] power to influence large bodies of people.”
Branded “the assassin of democracy” and vilified for manipulating the press,
Bernays’s reputation, along with other publicists in the first half of the last
century, took a direct hit after the Second World War. Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter is said to have described Bernays as a “professional poisoner
of the public mind, exploiter of foolishness, fanaticism and self-interest”.
His brand of public persuasion was seen as the inspiration for Nazi
propaganda, and Bernays himself, acceding to this ruinous post-war view,
said that effective propaganda must have, at its core, the truth: “But, it is
more than that. It is also about shaping or creating events to demonstrate
that truth.”

A veneer of respectability

But PR’s ability to change perception, presaged by Bernays, is now
commonplace: Unilever’s resoundingly successful commercial Dove soap
“Campaign for Real Beauty” and, in social marketing – with society as the
beneficiary rather than the initiating organisation – anti-smoking,
contraception, AIDs, and drink-driving campaigns, among countless others,
give PR a veneer of social respectability. Interestingly, it is in some editorial
suites that the last bastions stand, and public relations is still verboten. Daily
Mail editor Paul Dacre famously never lunches with PRs, although some of
those operating on his behalf beyond his door occasionally do, even if holding
their noses. Nevertheless reporters need data and contacts and publicists
need reporters. It works both ways. A widespread modus operandi exists
among professionals based on a shared understanding of the omnipresent
pressure of an insatiable 24-hour media market. Given their proximity, the
consequent growth in free movement between the two disciplines is hardly
surprising.

With luck and time, the workplace reality will be reflected in higher
education, particularly in journalism schools, where students facing an
uncertain future could benefit from greater appreciation and integration. In
its latest employment survey (March this year) recruitment specialists
Reed.co.uk’s figures show that demand for those working in marketing and
PR bucks the general trend and continues to rise; a glimmer of hope in an
otherwise adverse story. CBI figures corroborate the finding, showing a
continuing steady rise in these sectors. As professional purveyors of
information, it is surely good news for those on both sides of the ancient
divide that part of the market is buoyant, offering jobs for both prospective
journalism and public relations practitioners.

Trish Evans is a former journalist and PR strategist who runs the BA Public
Relations degree course at the University of Westminster, London.