There`s a time-honoured theme that reporters feel they have to revisit every so often - the one of exaggeration, lies and PR speak.
Perhaps you question why we find it necessary to "rant", as we say, about buzz. But perhaps you also understand it is often well intentioned, and can be quite useful when designing your media communications campaign.
However, to reiterate past truths is not my intention. The thing with journalists that I want to bring to your attention, the thing many of them don`t get, is that they`re not the only ones with a handle on meaningful communication.
The unfeeling
What got me started on this topic today was the press release I received from an anti-virus (AV) company - one of the most spectacularly defiant pieces of self-aggrandisement I have yet seen.
It made every rash assertion in the book, but cleverly only flirted with complete deletion. Bold to the point of megalomania in every claim, the curious thing is that almost every one of its claims could be substantiated, or were at least neutralised with shrewd reported-speech style qualification.
It claims not a single virus has escaped its clutches, but this is backed up by the verifiable statement that this was the word from one "VB100%" (an AV authority, I shouldn`t wonder). Equally impressively, it then claimed that it is "arguably the most secure" AV product out there. With a word like "arguably", I`m not arguing. I just delete.
Just as a journalist sometimes errs in thinking everyone else is bound by the same strict rules of expressing himself, so a PR sometimes thinks journalists are bound by the client`s decree.
Carel Alberts, technology editor, ITWeb
They were lucky, though. The thing any wizened paranoiac of long-standing journalistic service does in a case such as this is to sit back, hear the alarm bells, and haul out the quotation marks, along with a quiver full of paranoid words like "claims", "according to", "reportedly" and so on.
But even when these words slip past an older hack, I wouldn`t advise any company to create such high artifice. Young hacks are puritanical strict types, made practically insensate with the regulation editing dogma drummed into them.
They subscribe unquestioningly, and terribly earnestly, to the sacred principles of veracity over mere claims, measurability versus fluff, significance over poor news judgment and neutrality over hyperbole, to name a few.
Because a press release that flirts with death seems to want to die, they kill it. To the strict young journalistic mind, it is easy to ignore the possibility that a press release sometimes actually means something measurable, neutral or even significant by what seems like blatant half-truths and a universe of other methods of pulling a fast one on them. A young journalist, let me repeat, is brutal and expedient, and not to be trifled with.
Called bad for a reason
Some PR is bad by any name. Let`s start with poor news judgment. One PR phoned me up in a hissy fit about an event I`d attended and not covered. No amount of explanation helped, not even when I explained that a company that is formed late in June and celebrates its formation in September does not merit coverage of the roof wetting party. Just as a journalist sometimes errs in thinking everyone else is bound by the same strict rules of expressing himself, so a PR sometimes thinks journalists are bound by the client`s decree.
Then there are rash, unsubstantiated claims and the issue of measurability. Not even the AV company I mention could escape the snip when it made the following claim: that it is the "best" AV product on the market. Not only is this unsubstantiated, but also almost impossible to be corroborated by any journalist with a deadline. Both these complexities arise because, not being a market leader, the company`s claim will be "according to" some study, the origins, commissioning and authority of which must then be tested.
Called bad, but is good
"Market leader" is an interesting one. A company can rightly claim to be an industry leader, but the trouble is this almost never gets through, or only when the journalist gets to say it. Why does this happen? The easy answer is that it, too, smacks of unsubstantiated claim.
Even when Microsoft rightly claims to be a market leader, this is more often than not complicated in terms of local verifiability and the fact that so many companies claim it that the meaning of the expression has all but disappeared.
My advice is not to use words like "industry-leading", "important", "leverage" or "greatly enhanced". Subs and journalists like to keep it simple, and facts masquerading as claims don`t help.
Damned both ways, but with recourse
How does all this serve to alleviate your creative frustration? Not a whole lot, I admit. My advice is to view this as sorely needed marketer`s therapy. And you can always, as one PR does, motivate a watertight case for your client/MD to be interviewed by the offending journalist, whenever the need for a press release arises.
It`s called outsourcing your core business, and befits any audacious PR robbed of the outlet of a creative press release.
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