Fact-Checking Journalism: The Future of PR?
David Andrew Goldman | Monday, June 20th, 2011 | No Comments »
If you had been working in public relations 100 years ago, you would have found a journalism climate that greatly resembles that of today – and if the future of the industry parallels the changes in the past, then PR and marketing professionals will need to remember their history to become more effective today.
The history of U.S. journalism is complex, but the broad themes are simple enough. Until the first half of the nineteenth century, a newspaper was little more than a newsletter of a political faction. Editorials published by the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties against Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in the 1800 presidential election make today’s pundits seem like polite, fatherly gentlemen.
Sixty years later, however, everything had changed because of the invention of the railroad and telegraph as well as the Civil War. The railroad allowed journalists to travel anywhere quickly, and the telegraph allowed journalists to write more often while publishers could print more swiftly.
But the advancements came at a price. It cost roughly one penny per word to transmit an article through a telegraph. In modern terms, the cost would have been $230 just to send a 1,000-word article. As a result of the price – and the fact that telegraphs were unreliable, particularly on Civil War battlefields – journalists began getting to the point. They wrote “just the facts” and included the most-important ones first – the method still named the inverted pyramid and which remains the most-respected style.
As the demand for newspapers continued to increase, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer gave birth to “yellow journalism” decades later to attract more readers in a fractured, hyper-competitive market. The practice influenced the “muckrakers,” who were journalists who wanted to expose wrongdoing and “defend the common man” (the most famous of whom was Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle”).
It was soon thereafter – during World War I – that public relations began as a formal discipline with several prominent marketers helping with the U.S. government’s propaganda during the conflict. Afterward, several of the experts gained their first prominent client – a tobacco company – and succeeded in convincing both women and society in general that is was acceptable for the “fairer sex” to smoke cigarettes. Soon, PR would become greatly associated with (if not allied against) journalism – especially those yellow journalists who eschewed facts in favor of sensational stories and those muckrakers who were always poking their inquisitive noses into everything.
Over the next several decades, different newspapers and their television counterparts would use different styles from the historical precedents, and PR professionals would need to adapt accordingly. The New York Times and NBC Nightly News were the authoritative voices who reported the neutral, sober facts – which spokespersons would try to confirm. The Boston Herald and “Inside Edition” were the tabloid, sensational outlets whom PR pros would try to dissuade. The Village Voice and investigative TV programs were the ones whom public-relations teams would hope to avoid.
Today, however, “just the facts” and “muckraking” journalism is in decline while “yellow journalism” seems to be on the rise – and PR professionals will need to adapt accordingly. Hearst and Pulitzer were fighting at a competitive time when each major city had numerous daily newspapers; today there are virtually an unlimited number of news sites and blogs online, and newspaper advertising-revenue has been plummeting for years. “Yellow journalism” was fiercely populist; many media outlets today, particular on the political right, demean the so-called “liberal elites.” One hundred years ago, tabloid newspapers loved a good crime, death, or celebrity story – and the same is increasingly true of TV news today.
In such an environment, how can public-relations professionals operate most successfully? Another modern-journalism trend, according to the American Journalism Review, provides a possible insight:
Just this year [2010], at least two dozen media organizations or universities launched or joined fact-checking operations. Some are flying solo; some are joining the St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact network; and others are forming new cooperatives, such as AZ Fact Check, a partnership announced in August that includes the Arizona Republic, Phoenix’s 12 News and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
As with many things in business and economics, it comes down to supply and demand: When the market for “yellow journalism” is saturated, the demand for authoritative journalism will increase again. In a world of tens of thousands of online and offline media outlets, people will increasingly want to know whom they can trust. Just as “yellow journalism” gave way first to the muckrakers and then to publications that reported neutrally on the facts in the early 20th century, so may the same occur today.
And this is where PR experts can help both journalists and themselves through strategic-marketing practices that combine online and offline strategies. In a media climate in which nothing seems to be true, PR professionals can become assets to reporters by providing them with “just the facts.” In a prior post on GE and the New York Times, we noted how social media can be an effective tool through which spokespersons can communicate with journalists. Corporate blogs and online press-releases allow firms to publish vast amounts of data for journalists (and customers) to use without needing to take the time to research and confirm everything – and the medium spreads through newsrooms and the entire Internet far more quickly that way. But it goes beyond the technical and into the personal. Often, a majority of conversations between spokespersons and journalists is “on background” or “off the record.” If a PR expert can convince a cynical reporter that he is a trustworthy, authoritative resource on a given topic – no tall order – then both parties will benefit (as long as the expert is indeed describing himself accurately) over the long-run.
As the AJR article notes, “reporters are leaving the comfort of the press box, where they watch and report on the action, and are getting onto the field to play referee.” And they will need the help of PR experts to become good referees in a combative, fast-paced world.
