Earlier this month I reported about an editorial in the Contra Costa Times that took the fire department and board of supervisors to task for spending money on PR agencies during difficult financial times.
Now, a Florida newspaper has gotten into the act. The editorial writers at The Stewart News, a Scripps paper, say, “Martin County needed to get out a lot of information during Hurricane Wilma, but did it have to spend $17,900 with a local PR firm to get it?”
The brief editorial explains the situation, then expresses the editors’ woeful lack of understanding of what is required in a crisis and what professional PR counselors do: “Even if the firm spent seven days on the job, how many people are paid $17,900 for that length of time? The county has people who know how to answer questions, and who would not be at their regular posts during a storm, so why didn’t it use them?”
Fortunately, one of the two comments posted to the online version of the editorial asks the same questions I’m inclined to ask:
Does anybody in Martin County actually know what a Public Relations spokesman does? Do you know what the bill for a PR person would charge in Ft. Lauderdale? A hell of a lot more than 17K. Complain all you want but remember that this is a service that counties troughout the nation pay to represent them on TV. What iff CNN happened to show up in Martin County for a report? Send in some amatuer to open his mouth an say the wrong thing and embarass the County? THIS is why you hire a professional. Martin County did the right thing by hiring a professional PR person.
Allen Myers deserves credit for taking the editors to task for their uninformed opinion, but the mere publication of the editorial so soon on the heels of the California example suggests a disturbing trend, all the more confounding considering how much newspapers depend on PR professionals for a majority of the content they publish in their own papers. (I’ve referred here before to a study suggesting that 80% or more of a newspaper’s content originates with a statement, press release, or contact from a spokesperson of some kind.)
Have you seen other editorials condemning public institutions for hiring PR agencies?
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
