Distribution in the Public Relations Industry

publicity outlet a media vehicle (for instance, a particular magazine, a specific TV interview program, a particular radio talk show) that has in the past been open to input from public relations practitioners

Once materials for the media part of a public relations campaign have been prepared, the PR firm must distribute them to the proper publicity outlets. A publicity outlet is a media vehicle (for instance, a particular magazine, a specific TV interview program, a particular radio talk show) that has in the past been open to input from public relations practitioners. “Proper” in this case has two meanings: it refers to both outlets that reach the kinds of people the firm is targeting and outlets that are appropriate for the particular ideas, products, or services that the firm is trying to push.

Public relations practitioners keep lists of the publicity outlets in different areas that are appropriate for different types of products and for reaching different groups of people. When they are working on a particular campaign, they use these lists to determine which outlets to concentrate on and whom to contact. Sometimes only a press release will be sent. At other times, PR practitioners will be so familiar with the individuals involved that they will phone them directly. In fact, having good connections among media people, especially the press corps, is a crucial asset in the PR business.

Advanced distribution technologies have also become crucial to the PR industry during the past few years. PR practitioners use fax machines and email to send press releases. They pay firms to track the discussions—the buzz—about their clients on chat rooms, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, and they respond by paying people to go online and insert comments that reflect the positive spin that fits the aim of the PR campaign. (They’re supposed to say they represent the firm, but they don’t always do that.) PR practitioners use satellite linkups to set up interviews with TV reporters from around the country and the world for their clients. They also use satellites to send video press releases to appropriate publicity outlets. These are packages of photographs, video clips, and interviews from which a reporter can choose to create a story. A video press release for a new adventure film, for example, might contain short clips from the movie, a background piece on the special effects used to make the movie, and separate as well as combined interviews with the male and female stars. Each piece would be designed to be used as a feature story on a local television newscast. The interviews will be shot in a way that allows news people in local stations to create the impression that the discussion was created exclusively for their broadcasts.

Exhibition in the Public Relations Industry

information subsidies the time and money that PR people provide media practitioners that helps them get their work done

“But,” you may ask, “why do TV anti print journalists use this material? Haven’t we learned that journalists pride themselves on their objectivity and independence?” Good question. The answer lies in the costs of news reporting in the print and electronic worlds. Costs here relate both to monetary expense and the amount of time involved. Reporting stories totally from scratch can cost a lot of money. It can also cost reporters an enormous amount of time, time that they often do not have because of deadlines.

Imagine how many reporters The Washington Post would have to assign to the Departments of State and Agriculture, the Treasury, and the other cabinet-level divisions of the U.S. government if there were no systematic way to find out about meetings, speeches, reports, and other materials emanating from each. The paper could not afford to ferret out all that information, but it doesn’t have to do so because each department's public relations division provides it with the basic schedule. Moreover, in key parts of the government, such as the State Department, public relations repre­sentatives summarize key issues for reporters and answer their questions.

In addition to allowing news organizations to allocate fewer journalists to government agencies, these press briefings help journalists budget their time efficiently. The briefings enable journalists to gather the basic information needed to write their daily stories. They can then spend the rest of their time following up issues raised by the briefings; each journalist hopes that their stories will stand out from those of other journalists who were also at the meetings.

As you can see, PR practitioners help the media get their work done. Communication professor Oscar Gandy calls this sort of help to media organizations and their personnel information subsidies. The term means that PR people's help with information is akin to advancing money and time. Faced with a beautifully done clip that is part of a video press release, a TV station's news director may genuinely believe that some of the material in that clip is interesting enough to warrant a story. She or he also knows that the low cost of putting that spot on the air will offset the extra expenses of a locally produced story.

The danger of information subsidies from a client's standpoint is that they may not be used. News organizations receive many more offerings from PR firms than they have room for, and journalists can often be quite selective. The most successful, and most expensive, public relations practitioners work hard to establish strong relationships with members of the press to help grease the path to coverage. In the mid- 1990s, The New York Times reported that Sard Verbinnen, the head of the PR agency with that name, would get pieces in the news by currying favor with journalists: giving an “exclusive” about a deal or an interview with a chief executive to one newspaper and then offering a behind-the-scenes look at a transaction to a reporter of another paper that did not get the original exclusive. By doing that, he would be able to call on both sources to help him with coverage when he needed it.

For Verbinnen or anyone else, though, coverage doesn't always work out the way the PR practitioner wants it to. Good journalists do their own independent investigations of material suggested by a press release or some other PR initiative. Consequently. what begins as an attempt to present a favorable image of a firm or a person may backfire if the reporter finds material that contradicts the original report.