Posted by Matt Purdue
In today’s L.A. Times, James Rainey’s column is a must-read for PR professionals. Rainey pithily summarizes the latest chapter of the Alessandra Staney saga at the New York Times (sorry, I refuse to capitalize the self-aggrandizing “the” in the paper’s title). A bit of background: Stanley, the NYT’s leading TV critic, has been chastised almost without mercy for the shoddy job she did on Walter Cronkite’s obituary in the July 17 edition. It’s become widely known that the obit included at least eight factual errors.
Everyone from Gawker to Katie Couric have ripped Stanley (and, to a lesser extent, her editors) for, once again, playing fast and loose with veracity. In one of the most scathing rebukes I’ve ever seen a journalist fire at a colleague, the NYT’s public editor placed blame with a reporter “with a history of errors [who] wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.”
While it’s fun to revel in the schadenfreude of a journalist gone off the rails, as PR professionals it’s important to keep one thing in mind: most reporters would kill to be Alessandra Stanley right now, even with all her travails. In the reporting realm, Stanley has one of the best jobs on the planet, and journos admire her. Journalists can be so dangerous because their brains are wired paradoxically: many of them have big egos, but they also realize that they make human mistakes. So play up to those egos, and downplay their mistakes.
As a PR professional, you can absolutely feel free to thank and praise a journalist for a job well done. You can even point out to a journalist when he or she makes a factual reporting mistake that involves one of your clients. In fact, that’s your job, and most journalists will appreciate it if you bring a glaring error to their attention. But never rub it in, and never point out one journalist’s mistakes to one of their colleagues.
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