Who’s the boss? PR pros or journalists? (Study)

When it comes to relationships between journalists and PR people, the journalist is the boss while the PR professional is the decision-maker.

That’s the conclusion of a study by Chantal Francoeur, a professor in the media school at the Université du Québec à Montréal, who set out to find “who’s the boss” when it comes to dealings between the two groups. She presented her research at Concordia University’s Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism Studies in Montreal last week.

For her research, Francoeur interviewed 20 TV, radio and print reporters working in daily media and 32 PR professionals working in the private and public sectors.

Francoeur found while journalists like to say they try to avoid dealing with PR persons most of the time for stories, the reality is much different. “Journalists negotiate with PR people every day because they have no choice.”

Journalists also told Francoeur it used to be easier to phone people for interviews without being directed to a PR department. But now, “if I reach someone directly, the person tells me I have to go through a PR person,” she was told. As a result, journalists now “accept the inevitability of their relationships with PR people,” Francoeur says, though some journalists will try to work on a story for as long as possible before contacting a PR person.

Journalists also complain about hitting dead ends when asked by PR people to send questions by email instead of doing an interview. The results are often frustrating, with one commenting: “You send in 10 questions. They only reply to one of them, which is as good as replying to nothing at all.”

Meanwhile, PR people act as organizational gatekeepers and told Francoeur, “yes of course we control the message.”

Another told her, they think about what type of story they’d like to see, “then we choose who we assign the story to.”

Many PR people see themselves as journalists – and often are ex-journalists – and do the same research that journalists would do, she says.

While the traditional media world is getting smaller, the PR world is well-organized and structured, and far surpasses the media in size with a conservative estimate of at least four PR professionals to one journalist, she says.

Another conservative estimate holds that at least 40% of articles on front-pages of newspapers contain PR materials. There are many ways PR material can get into media reports and “it’s so ingrained, you can’t tell,” she says.

“Journalists still have some space to maneuvre, but it’s getting tinier and tinier,” Francoeur says.