What real journalists really want from public relations

I’m fairly picky when it comes to surveys. So, it’s not without some reservation that I say “a job well done” to the recent survey on media relations and journalists’ use of online newsrooms, blogs, RSS and social media by Bulldog Reporter and Florida-based provider of e-business and social newsroom software, TEKgroup International, neither of which I’d ever dealt with prior to receipt of a pitch from TEKgroup’s Aimee Adler and my download of the survey’s Executive Summary last week.

I’m picky generally, but I’ve also had some experience conducting surveys and have worked in the past with the same online provider that TEKgroup and Bulldog Reporter used, Survey Monkey. I know from experience that to do them well is complicated. In hindsight, one often realizes the missed opportunity of a question that, had it been better phrased, could have yielded lots more value in terms of insight; or, that because of the nature of the survey universe, the outcome of a particular question is painfully obvious and you’ve wasted precious lines of Q&A on a redundant result.

So, I’m not given to easy praise and (though my hurdles aren’t as high as the AP, which at last check won’t even report on online surveys) when it comes to surveys on topics that interest me, I do usually look critically at things like size of the sample, the methodology and any missed opportunities to drill down deeper and really get to the nitty gritty. The Bulldog/TEKgroup survey scores high in my book on the first two items, but falls a bit short on the latter — for reasons I’ll explain. Even so, it’s well worth a read-through … or three. But here are some highlights:

Sample size: Very healthy, at 2,046 working-journalist respondents. It’s not easy to get anyone to respond to surveys and with that many respondents, this survey must have a +/- margin of error in the low single digits, and I imagine it has a confidence level in the high 90s. That said, I wish they would have published that information in the Executive Summary, but they did not.

Methodology: I won’t quibble much, as this is pretty standard online survey stuff. I assume the universe was pre-qualified or they had a qualifying first question on the landing page that asked if the respondents were truly working journalists — and if not, they were disqualified. I would have preferred that they included info about qualification of respondents in the ExecSumm, but more than that I would have liked to have known if all 2,046 respondents were required to respond to every question or if they could pass on some of the questions and continue with the survey. On any given question, knowing how large of a sample of respondents actually answered that question helps to qualify the validity of the percentages, i.e. on question #3, do 8.8% of the total 2,046 respondents actually cover government/politics, or is that just 8.8% of a lesser number who bothered to respond to the question. It can make a difference.

Findings: Those that most interested me? There’s the obvious about PR practices: fully 86% of respondents said material sent by PR is “usually not relevant” to their work, 73% said PR calls “interrupt them” and “waste time.” So, the critics from within and outside the publics relations field appear to be correct about what is wrong with PR; but, unsatisfyingly so, as it turns out, in the same sort of way that, say, Karl Marx was able to pinpoint the basis for the ills of unchecked capitalism but was perfectly clueless in devising a system that would deliver a satisfactory replacement!

And there’s the surprising in this survey, to me at least, in that 71% said they could not easily find information they needed on corporate web sites (I actually thought websites have gotten much better at that in recent years, but … maybe I’m clueless on that!). At the same time, fully 73.3% of respondents said they visit corporate websites or online newsrooms at least once a week in search of information. That means there are either a lot of journalists out there who are masochistically in love with frustrating corporate websites, or there’s some contradiction in the responses here, or there’s a logical explanation that cross-tabulating some of the responses might have revealed (I know this can be done with Survey Monkey, so I assume there is more interesting information here that the authors haven’t revealed in the ExecSumm).

As for lessons in social media relations, the fact that 32.6% of the working journalists polled say they “never” visit a social media website and 62.7% of respondents say they receive absolutely no RSS feeds of “blogs, podcasts, videocasts or other news services” is very telling. With such a large survey sample, cross-tabulating should reveal some interesting detail to these numbers and that what one would find would be some telling generational stories, older journalists vs younger journalists, editors vs reporters, etc. In fact, the fault I find with the survey results as released is that they tell you only so much about who the respondents really are — as least as summarized in the public report, they generate as many additional questions as they answer. Not necessarily a bad thing, as this should stimulate interest and lead to more granular surveys in the future.

Why is it important to address these questions? From my perspective, as a former journalist who worked for the better part of two decades throughout the long tail of media — from print- and e-newsletters to business magazines, wire services to online portal content, daily and weekly newspapers and more — I find much of the online commentary among PR professionals about “what journalists want” or “need in order to do their work” falls far short of the mark. It’s as if there’s this widespread misperception in our world that there is some kind of generic, prototypical journalist in existence and if only we could find the silver-bullet delivery vehicle that will allow PR to reach this mythical journalist with the client’s message, all would be resolved.

In some circles, the prototypical journalist actually becomes embodied in an individual, who by virtue of a pronouncement that rings deep and true with a group particularly primed to hear the message (here, I’m thinking, a pronouncement such as Die! Press Release, Die!), becomes an icon, a kind of oracle of the movement, whether reluctant or not, whose pronouncement is taken as the collegial voice of all journalists on what it is they need or want from PR in order to do their work.

The problem is, to bastardize a well-known line of Gertrude Stein … a journalist is not a journalist is not a journalist!

Depending on their type of media, their position within the news organization, the size of their organization, their deadlines, their age and at what point in their career they were introduced to IT tools of today’s working journalist, they all need different things — sometimes very different things — to help them do their work.

Surveys like the Bulldog/TEKgroup study are a great start to help us demistify this fundamental misperception of the existence of the generic prototypical journalist. The fact that 77.9% of the survey respondents said they preferred to receive information “Via press releases sent to me by email” helps give us a reality check — this is what a solid sampling of real, working journalists are telling us and we should listen.

Further, the fact that 87% of the survey respondents were working journalists and that we know approximately what kinds of positions they occupy within their news organizations helps us to begin to get even more granular, encourages us to drill down deeper in surveys of this kind to find out what works for and with journalists — different kinds of journalists — and what does not. In particular, for those of us who watching and trying to work with transition that’s taking place from traditional media to social media, information about which kind of journalists are actually using online media to do research, who is utilizing RSS feeds of social media and who among the different levels of gatekeepers within different types of media organizations are using what information channel to receive information and thereby take decisions on what makes the news … is invaluable!

Honing the survey questions with that in mind, then cross-tabulating the results and then making the full results public — not just the Executive Summary — would make for a truly solid contribution to the entire debate about the impact of online and social media on journalism and journalists. I know somebody’s already working on that now … and I can’t wait to see the results!

Other surveys of what journalists find useful from PR professionals at:

More ‘What real journalists really want from public relations’

Survey: Media relations and Europe – from the journalist’s perspective

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