Some public relations practitioners think that journalists shouldn’t venture into the PR field. “A journalist is interested in conveying news while maintaining a critical distance from their subjects while a PR practitioner is interested in developing and maintaining relationships through strategic communication,” Abigael Jemutai stated recently in a daily newspaper.
Abigail is greatly mistaken. Journalists and PR experts rely on the decisions and actions of an organisation to work. These form the raw material for the messaging.
Second, while differences exist between the journalist and the PR expert in their handling of their work, both deal with information and communication. All are engaged in gathering and conveying information about an organisation or an issue for different purposes.
The journalist and the PR student undergo nearly the same training experience. Because they both will deal with information and communicate it. They both study communication from its broadest possible viewpoint. Both study the functions and effects of communication in society.
Both also use the communication technologies human beings have developed over the centuries for purposes of building, maintaining and restoring relationships between individuals, within institutions and across institutions and cultures.
Study programmes also expose students to the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of communication. The assumptions are that all communications occur in a cultural, economic and political environment. Students must appreciate this to work for and not against society.
Most critically, they also study or should study what is news and what makes news. This is important because any communication is purposeful or strategic. Human beings don’t communicate mindlessly. The communication must be strategic. The strategic value of any message is its salience – its relevance to the hopes, fears and aspirations of the people.
The founding father of modern PR, Ivy Lee, in his Declaration of Principles, noted that the duty of public relations experts is to “supply the press and the public prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which are of value and interest to the public to know”.
As Lee noted, all communication is of value and attracts interest. It must also have a purpose. The PR practitioner must know this – courtesy of his training in journalism and the purposes of communication holds in society.
Journalists and PR experts deal with words. They should know the power of words. In the end, individuals communicate in words, paragraphs and sentences.
News writing, feature and editorial writing, and caption writing are some of the courses or units any serious training institution offers students – whether they wind up as journalists or PR experts. Institutions conduct their communication through writing. More than 90 percent of the work of a PR practitioner is through writing.
Impeccable writing abilities are required – writing that is simple, clear and lucid. Writing that resonates with the highly educated and the modestly educated alike.
Training in journalism makes one have boundless curiosity, keen powers of observation, an interest in human relationships, integrity, commitment, and a sense of style, tact and fair-mindedness.
PR experts need the knowledge, skills, tact and judgement of journalists in helping an organisation communicate purposefully with their stakeholders.
In the final analysis, public and private organisations, politicians, businesspeople, need wordsmiths. They need journalists. They need PR experts. They need people trained in journalism and media studies.
— The writer is a Communications Officer with the Ministry of Education
