Common Mistakes in PR: Trusting "Wild Animals"

Common Mistakes in PR: Trusting "Wild Animals"

By Diane D. Stein

A common mistake in PR is getting lulled into trusting a journalist. If you're a lion tamer, and you for one second forget that they're a wild animal, you could get eaten for lunch. It's the same thing with a journalist if you ever for one second forget that they're a journalist. It's not that the journalist is a bad person; it's just that they have a certain job to do.

It can never be stressed enough how important this is.

I had a relationship with a journalist who I will never forget because she stabbed me in the back so hard. I was flabbergasted. I had been working with this journalist for years on stories for a client of mine, and felt like I could trust her.

A new branch of my client's non-profit group was opening in a new area (the area her paper was in). Since we had a great relationship, I gave her an exclusive on it. She did several positive interviews, and the questions she asked were completely amazing. It went very well. There was no warning whatsoever as to what was about to happen.

When the story came out, it completely trashed my client. It was almost like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. What had happened to the reporter who interviewed my client? As it turns out, her body had been snatched, since it wasn't actually her writing the story. The editor of her paper actually wrote the story on my client before he even sent the journalist out to do interviews.

He kept the journalist in the dark about what was going on, since he knew that she had a relationship with me, and she might have let it slip, or she might have felt bad and not done it. So he let her do all of her reporting with no intention whatsoever to print it.

He took little snippets from the work she had done so they could claim they had done their due diligence on putting the story together, but it was a complete trashing. I learned my lesson. That is one mistake I will never make again.

I later found out from talking to this reporter that she had decided to go and start a family. She had actually quit her job because of what her editor had done. So it's not that she had malice aforethought in coming to her interviews, it's just the nature of the beast. Never trust a journalist to the exclusion of your client and your job. Be nice to them, and treat them well, but keep your guard up.

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