Great PRs and marketers “resist PR” as much as journalists

I saw this shared in the TechJPR community recently and made me realise something I hadn’t thought about before.

Often journalistic skills and experience are praised as an asset in PR because of things like quality of writing and an instinct for generating a good story. But actually, the characteristic of being able to completely call bullshit on something like an old-fashioned Editor is also something a lot of PRs could learn from.

Whether you call it being afraid to push back when clients ask you to promote a story or drinking the Kool Aid and not approaching stories with the scrutiny a a great journalist excels at, I think the point it the same.

One of the most valuable properties for someone trying to PR a story is to be able to step outside of their own agenda, their own hopes and targets — and see it as if it had just arrived in your inbox with 100x other near identical emails.

Far from self-hating, this should help PRs broaden their horizons and add new dimensions to their toolkit. If the announcement your client is asking you to push just isn’t going to fly from a media relations perspective, what are the other ways of getting it out there?

Think about what the next opportunity is and thank God you aren’t doing PR 20 years ago when your only tool was a media tour and a fax machine.

In reality, the best PRs now are good marketers. So are the best advertisers, social media advisors, search marketing people — we are all playing the same game.