Category: public relations

The business of journalism and the future of PR

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An annual report from a news outlet says a lot about the business of journalism. For one thing, journalism is a business.

It may also be a nonprofit mission. 

One thing journalism is not is an institution with a unique claim to the first amendment and role in democracy. Oh it certainly has “a” role, but it is not unique to journalism. When “freedom of the press” was inscribed into our First Amendment it was a reference not to an institution or an as-yet unformed profession. It was about people who owned and operated a printing press. 

In other words, business men.

These people were printers, and they printed leaflets, advertisements and many things, including newspapers. All of the above had been restricted under the British Stamp Act, requiring a literal stamp of approval by the government before anything could be published. This was one of many grievances our founders had against King George. 

In our modern era, the “press” includes all forms of means to produce and distribute information. So-called “mainstream” media are part of that. But so are an increasing number of other voices contributing information and perspective to the public sphere.

So, our democracy has become also a cacophony. It is the beautiful mess of freedom. But in this mess traditional journalism has had to adapt, to pivot, just like any other businesses adjusting to technology, market demand and other changes.

My thinking on this was prompted by two publications recently. One was an article in Crain’s Grand Rapids Business about the creative ways journalism is handling it’s current business crisis. Incidentally,  Crains just recently added a paywall, so subscription is required to read this article. Crain’s also has gone from free publication of those personnel and brief company updates to a paid model. Both are signs of the business reality of needing revenue from multiple sources now that the old model of subscriptions and large advertising income alone is not sustainable.

Another item that caught my eye was the Bridge Michigan and Bridge Detroit annual report. It is an interesting read, showcasing their values, coverage areas, awards won, and the annual report requisite numbers about readership and revenue. I found it interesting and well done, as a subscriber and a PR professional. It meets the goal of annual reports of transparency, loyalty building, brand promotion and solicitation. 

Both the article and annual report from media outlets I subscribe to are a reminder to me not to take good reporting for granted. They also are evident that journalism is not taking readers for granted. Nor should they. The competitive landscape has changed:

  • So much of the media marketplace is online, where news is shared not in a branded publication or outlet but a single story at a time, aggregated by third parties like Apple News, Flipboard and others or users’ own forms of curation;
  • News links have been banned in some countries on social media because publishers need to make the profit, not the social platforms. But this also limits distribution;
  • Many other businesses are doing brand journalism that extends beyond their product or service lines and simple brings more content into the overall media mix. Examples include Coke‘s studio and UPS stories. 
  • Traditional media organizations are increasingly seeing competition from independent journalists who start their solo brand on platforms like Substack. Examples include Christopher Rufo, Matt Taibi, and Bari Weiss, all of whom left jobs at prominent media to be journalism entrepreneurs.
  • Then there is the host of alternative media platforms ranging from the Daily Wire and Blaze Media on the Right to Slate and Huffington Post on the left. 
  • To round out the landscape there is a growing number of think-tanks and other similar institutions that put out daily articles. These include the American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal, the Cato Institute, and the Brookings Institute.

All of this relates to public relations in several ways. Obviously, the media relations aspect of public relations is affected—if people don’t read or believe the media en masse, it has less credibility and reach and is therefore less useful as a public relations channel. Secondly, public relations professionals have increasing outlets to reach, and can also be very successful representing organizations with branded journalism and other channels they can control as part of a growing mix of tactical options.

One of the key questions going forward has to be if journalism in competition will see objectivity as a unique selling proposition or a competitive liability. Will news outlets brand themselves by ideology or neutrality. This will also affect the decisions of which media PR professionals pitch and where media planners buy advertising. 

There are examples of both with new online outlets in Michigan. Bridge, which I mentioned earlier, promotes objectivity and bi-partisan reporting in its annual report. Meanwhile, the Michigan Advance sells its “top notch progressive commentary”.

While each journalism outlet will make its own editorial policy and market-driven decisions, there is also an issue of journalism damaging its “institutional brand.’ For example, public relations professionals hate the expression “just PR” which takes a single episode of bad practice and smears the whole profession. I wrote about the notion of “just journalism” previously due to the growing lack of objectivity in reporting, with even some editors speaking of it with disdain as something old-fashioned. 

Since writing that I have seen more examples of waning objectivity not just at the national level but in local media. My local paper refused to cover a story about a teacher quitting over mandated critical race theory lessons because the editor’s wife was a teacher and became the managing editor is “against book banning,’ even though that was not the issue in this case. It was news, regardless of editors’ personal opinions. A local TV station refused to cover people who were concerned about the appropriateness of public drag queen performances because they “did not want to give platform to hate.” Again, that is a pre-judgment and subjective value decision, not one of objective journalism to tell the story and represent all views.

I don’t know if the market—i.e. readers, listeners, viewers and in turn advertisers—will restore journalism to a sustainable business with a unique identity as professional purveyors of objective truth. It could be we have enjoyed a period of time in which news media was central to communication and a revered societal institution that will one day be seen as quaint, as different groups settle into their partisan echo chambers to be fed red herrings and propaganda. But, change happened before in the media.

A little less than 80 years ago, in 1947, prominent media formed the Hutchins Commission, chaired by Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, in an impressive act of professional self regulation. They asserted a need for freedom of the press but also a need for journalists to resist sensationalism and give society what it needs.

And so, once again perhaps journalism may need a business retreat. As a profession, it needs to consider what it offers of unique value to society. It is not enough to assert its “importance to democracy” when readers are tired of its flaws and many others as I mentioned above are doing their own reporting, ranging from objective to perspective. 

The need to balance corporate and personal values

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Last semester in a  discussion about employee relations a student asked me about the situation in which an employee’s values don’t match the company values.

It’s a good question. I think about it personally. I myself have had to say publicly that I get my values from God and not my employer. 

Nevertheless companies talk a lot about their “values.”

The Institute for Public Relations Study recently addressed this question and shared a study on the subject. Of interest is that a third to almost a half of employees, by different age groups, said their company’s values aligned with their own “somewhat” or “not at all.”

My question is “should they?” And if so, what specific types of values?

I would say values should be categorized as collective vs. individual, or organizational vs personal.

Collective or corporate (i.e. any organization, not just a corporation) are universal, related to an organizations mission, and not likely to violate a personal value. Examples of these would be that the customer comes first, quality is job one, we try harder. Values related to how a job is done, operational goals, and organizational culture. 

Personal or individual values are based on more deeply held beliefs associated with an individual’s own identity. These are associated with an individual’s family, ethnic or national culture, faith, and other things that precede and supersede the workplace. Often these values are related to the hot topics debated in society that are not directly related to one’s job. 

So when a company “takes a stand on social issues,” which stand do they take? Are they conscious of the unintended consequence that stand serving as a proclamation to some employees—and other stakeholders—that their personal values-based position on said issue is not valued, welcomed, accepted? Such employees will go from ambassador to stranger, they will go from being proud of their job to seeing it as just a paycheck, and maybe a temporary relationship on the path to something where they don’t feel insulted.

Getting employees to identify with employer is great to some extent. We spend significant amount of time at work, one of the first things people ask you is what do you do or where do you work? I have read academic research about going beyond employee engagement to employee-organization identity fusion. That sounds a little extreme to me, as if a person gives up their individual identity in order to blend into a workplace. That is more akin to an authoritarian regime than the “value” of individual autonomy and diversity. 

Indeed, it is useful to foster a positive culture, one in which employees are engaged, productive, happy and serve as brand ambassadors even beyond the work setting. They can be proud of where they work, and even should be. But a profession and particular job is but one aspect of identity. I would even say it is secondary, marginal, and circumstantial.

Personal identity is deeper, more permanent. You can change jobs, it is harder to change your ethnicity, faith, and other aspects of personal identity. If implied one must do the latter they are increasingly likely to do the former.

The noble thing for companies to do, therefore, is work toward values that are appropriate for the mission of the organization as an aspect of organizational culture. But they should maintain and even be upfront about having institutional neutrality on the topics of our day that reflect a personal value. They should seek with intention a balance of being both non-discriminatory AND non-celebratory of any personal values.

This may be different in the case of small or privately owned enterprises, in which an owner will publicly proclaim their personal values or even make them part of the organizational values. This could be a follower of Jesus Christ or an avowed secular humanist. I’ve seen both. That is up to them. But in either case they will both attract and repel employees on the bases of personal value, as opposed to business metrics such as product or service quality, customer service and others. 

Of course, many non-profits were founded and exist  entirely around a cause that is intimately related to a value that is deeply personal. These could be as disparate as advancing the Christian Gospel or advocating for abortion. Here it would be ethical to be clear about a non-profit organization’s purpose, and it will affect who applies for jobs, volunteers and donates to the organization.

But behind alignment with core mission, neutrality on unrelated personal matters should be an organizational value with which most individuals can agree. I have written about the virtue of neutrality before.  

A term related to values that is expressed often in recent years by corporations and CCOs is “purpose.” Purpose generally defined is beyond mission and considers the positive role an organization plays in society. In discussing this concept at length, Ranjay Gulati in his book “Deep Purpose”  offers a cautionary note that echoes what I have been saying: “Culture should not coerce conformity. It should seek to find an overlap between personal passion and company goals. The best cultures facilitate individuality.”

Gulati also offers prudent advice about articulating values generally and enabling individuals to enact them. This is more like guidelines than rules and can help avoid a corporate value trampling on individual values. Among the many examples in the book he mentions Apple under Steve Jobs: “As we’ve seen, Steve Jobs helped create Apple University with the goal of training people not to think exactly as he did, but rather to understand his guiding principles and mindset and apply them using their own judgment in the leader’s absence.”

My answer to the student in class was brief and basically asked students to consider that there are differences between corporate and personal values. I did acknowledge that it was a good question and I have more to say on the subject. I’ve done that here, and I hope PR and other management professionals will give consideration to the difference.

Gen Z and other new employees need to position between Imposter Syndrome and Dunning-Kruger Effect

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I have been a professor at my university for more than 20 years. My career is older than the very life of my current students. 

In that time I have seen a lot of changes in everything from student attitudes to terminology. While I always favor looking at individuals verses a group identity, there are some common threads in the Gen Z student and young professional. Among them are two ways of thinking: “Imposter Syndrome” and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. They are the extremes on a scale of one’s self-perception of ability in the workplace. 

I would advise Gen Z to adopt Aristotle’s ‘Golden Mean’ and position themselves between these two extremes. 

Imposter Syndrome is the phenomenon where one feels like a phony, that they are in a workplace but really don’t deserve to be there, that they lack skills and knowledge of those around them. 

To this I say to students they need to bolster their own sense of self-efficacy. Also, it is important to remind them that college does not teach them everything. A bachelor’s degree gives students a lot, but it is a baseline. College teaches students how to learn. They must continue this in the specific workplace and industry where they land. I speak regularly to chief communication officers (CCOs) who are describing the next thing they need to learn even after decades of experience. On certain topics I continue to read and listen and learn. So no recent graduate of young professional should feel like an imposter. College graduation is called a “commencement” because it is a beginning, not a final conclusion.

Last semester a good student finished presenting a project to a client and left the room and shouted in the hallway “I’m done with college!” It was a joyous and funny moment. No doubt the excitement and jubilation were well worth it after all the work done. But I said to her, congratulations. Now the learning begins. 

The other extreme is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which someone without a lot of knowledge or ability overestimates their competence and proficiency. This is the person who thinks they are too cool for school. It’s the person who thinks a three-month internship grants more knowledge and experience than a 30-year career. It’s the recent graduate who assumes a bachelor’s degree imparts more wisdom and understanding than a PhD. It’s the young person who listens to a seasoned veteran explaining past experience and says derisively “OK, Boomer.” 

As a former colleague of mine used to say about some—not all—students, “they don’t know what they don’t know.”

As I get older, it has been humorous to hear from millennials who used to walk around like they rent the place complain about their new Gen Z employees who seem resistant to feedback, instruction and mentorship. They are getting as little of their own attitude. In one case a mid-career professional told me about a new hire explaining with passion a concept they had just heard about but which was fundamental and already second nature to others in the room.

Perhaps they should have said “OK, Genzie.”

But I also note that the phenomena of Imposter Syndrome or the Dunning-Kruger Effect are not about age, they are simply about change. Individuals at any career stage can change jobs, industries or move to a new city or state. This was expressed in a recent AdAge article about entry level professionals finding a tough job market and seeing their mentors laid off. 

No matter the age or experience, the job market and change makes one “new” in the new context and can generate feelings and manifest behaviors ranging from self-doubt to overconfidence.

In either case, time can “heal” these maladies at either extreme end of a self-perception scale. The one with Imposter Syndrome will soon gain confidence if given good instruction, feedback and support from an employer. Success defeats perception. The individual with the Dunning-Kruger Effect may soon find out they are “not all that” in a performance review, a creative team meeting that doesn’t not rubber stamp an idea, or from some negative client feedback. 

The best attitude for a recent grad and young professional is one of humble confidence, between the extremes. Absolutely they should be willing to speak up and contribute what they know and offer the skills they have. But they also should be open-minded to continual learning and feedback, be respectful of the people who went before them, take advantage of opportunity to try and fail, and expect to be corrected. 

PR at the intersection of corporate and environmental communications

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Consumers Energy is the public utility that provides electricity to my home. But rather than merely monitor my kilowatt hours and send me a bill, Consumers goes above and beyond in its communication.

They have shown this in two power outages in as many months in my small neighborhood in west Michigan. They have prompt text alerts and an up-to-date app confirming they know about the outage, showing the extent of the outage with numbers and maps, updating when crews are on site and have determined the cause, and giving an estimate of time for power restoration, and confirming when power is restored. It gives new meaning to consumer “empowerment.”

Consumers is also a unique organization. It is in a sense a corporation, but it is one that is regulated, in the case of Michigan by the Public Service Commission. So Consumers does what could be seen as typical corporate communication, another name for public relations, to maintain communications with all of its stakeholders. This can often seem weighted toward customer relations and sales.

But a recent communication I received from them included an example of the intersection between traditional communication and environmental communication. Environmental communication is broadly defined as formal communication that has the environment as a primary subject. There is even an academic journal named Environmental Communication. 

What Consumers sent me was a link to an entire section on their website about electronic vehicles (EVs). This makes intuitive sense, since anyone like myself who buys an EV is going to be wondering about how to charge the vehicle, whether at home or out on the road. Installing EV chargesr at homes is one of the products and services Consumers offers. The Consumers web page explains this at length. 

It would make sense they do this in business terms. It is a new market opportunity, a product extension, a B-B integration and more. But that is all corporate communication. Consumers gets into environmental communication as well with a tab called “myths and FAQs” that addresses the hesitance a typical consumer may have about buying and charging an EV. They first have to answer questions about the environmental need for EVs, the environmental benefit of EVs, and address concerns about negative environmental impact of EVs, before they can start serving consumers individually and society at large—via power grid supply—when the purchase of EVs hits critical mass.

As an academic, this brings to mind a bunch of theories that are so practical here. Consumers is applying concepts from these theories, whether they do so consciously or not:

  • Diffusion of Innovation—which means communication needs to address a series of cognitive and experiential stages the public goes through collectively and individually before adopting new ideas. Consumers is addressing the “relative advantage” and “compatibility” stages of this theory directly;
  • Attribution Theory—in which people consider not just what a company says but why they think they are saying it when deciding whether to attend to or believe a message. Consumers goes beyond simply offering product or service information to sell something to show they are considering the total social benefit to the environment;
  • Cognitive Dissonance—in which people avoid ‘cognitive pain’ by simply discounting information or claims that contradict their predisposition or current beliefs; Consumers is clearly addressing current beliefs and concerns of people and trying to move them to a new mindset without discounting their current onel.

I think Consumers did a good job overall. But there are still realities that people experience that negate the arguments Consumers makes. This is especially true in Michigan. 

For example, one argument could be that an EV may not be a household’s only vehicle. If I want to go from where I live in western Michigan up to Mackinac City, I would not be confident I have the range and can find a charging station in northern Michigan. Encouraging one EV on a household of more than one car would be a transition and easier to persuade than a complete change to all EV vehicles. 

I also have read legitimate reports about power reduction in colder climates, as well as batteries exploding. There are concerns about raw materials coming from third-world countries where workers are exploited, and that these raw materials can not be safely disposed of. Here is where the Elaboration Likelihood Model applies—Consumers can’t just make claims to the contrary, it needs to offer some detailed, factual, respectable studies to back up the claims. When people are “highly involved” according to ELM, they are paying significant attention and need more than a reliable source, they need the facts. This is especially true because EVs are really a subset of the much larger climate change social issue.

Most importantly, if we are charged more in the summer for air conditioning in peak hours, what will our rates and even capacity be when everyone is in an EV and charging at night? Consumers makes assurances, but people have heard and experienced differently about the electric grid capacity. 

Maybe some of these additional arguments and facts will come. But for now overall Consumers Energy offers a good example of how corporate and environmental communication co-exist.

Public relations must take an ethical stand against a ‘culture of assertion’

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An online seminar a few months ago gathered CCOs together to talk about advising corporate boards on issues of ESG (environment, social, governance) messaging, corporate purpose and related topics. I was interested because I am doing research on the PR capacity on corporate boards, because so many of the issues in PR—CSR, ESG, DEI etc—are being discussed by PR academics and professionals.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-stop-word-coming-out-of-a-typewriter-5993648/

The outtake from this meeting was that ESG may need a new name because of the pushback being felt from consumers, investors and others in corporate America. An interesting concept was that any time something has three letters and becomes an acronym it is ripe for pejorative connotations. Using two words such as ‘corporate purpose’ is harder to misunderstand or misrepresent, and that is what one participant advocated. In other words, change the nomenclature but consider the practice.

The bottom line for these CCOs advising large corporate boards, beyond ensuring they had and could articulate a corporate purpose, was to consider two things. 

  1. Employee Expectations: How does the board address any disconnects between corporate priorities, or values, and the employee experience? 
  2. CEO Voice: Are protocols in place to ensure that the CEO can speak with authenticity, credibility, and conviction, in real-time, on topics that are germane to the interests of the business and its employees?

I agree with that. Proclaiming a purpose and expecting compliance from all employees is authoritarian, not genuine. CEOs speaking out can backfire or offend or be seen as shameless piggybacking on what is perceived to be the popular sentiment on cultural issues.

I’ve written about this before in a post advocating for neutrality in most cases, and also noting that the emphasis on social branding has led to an anti-woke corporate response to woke corporate messaging. 

 So I was intrigued recently to see an academic journal article addressing the unethical practice of asserting vs dialogue by organizations on social issues. The article was a case study on Larry Fink of Blackrock, an investment services and financial management firm, and his annual letter to CEOs, which leaves everyone trembling to obey because Blackrock owns ⅓ of all outstanding shares of major companies.

I had thought about the appropriateness of the annual Fink letter when I first heard about it at a different conference of CCOs a few years ago. Should so many organizations respond in sync to the opinions asserted by one powerful man or company?

The journal article addressed this directly. “Public relations, activism, and the culture of assertion: The case study of Blackrock’s Larry Fink and the Letter to the CEOs”, written by Joshua Foust and Burton St. John III of the University of Colorado-Boulder, was published in late December in theJournal of Public Relations Inquiry. 

Fundamental PR is about two-way symmetrical relationships, mutual benefit for all publics or stakeholders, dialogue and listening. But in this article the authors note an increase in raw assertion and a disdain for dialogic speech. They conclude that “Fink uses his letter to shape shareholder views and actions, using the power of his position rather than facts either as a result of dialogue or to spark dialogue.”

So an academic article comes to the same conclusion I did when I first heard about the annual letter from Blackrock. 

I then got to thinking that this “culture of assertion” is at the root of a problem I have both as a citizen and a public relations academic. We see an increase in assertive statements in our culture recently. Consider several assertions:

  • “The vaccine is safe and effective.”
  • “Whites need to acknowledge their privilege.”
  • “It was the most fair election in history.”

The above statements, relative to the Covid pandemic, the spread of a specific DEI ideology, and questions about irregularities in the 2020 election are ubiquitous and assertive. But what’s worse is that responses to the contrary have been de-platformed or labeled as “disinformation.” 

But in recent months the problem of assertion has been exposed. Now data is coming out and even Anthony Fauci, who once proclaimed “I am science,” has acknowledged they got things wrong about the origin of covid, the nature of its spread, and the efficacy of the vaccine. A growing chorus of Black intellectuals are opposing the “oppressor-victim” binary in explaining the scope, causes and solutions to racism and equality. Independent journalism and court cases have been showing that there were numerous incidents of fraud and suspicious activity in the last presidential election.

Journalists like Michael Shellenbarger, Matt Taibi, Bari Weiss and others through their work with the Twitter files, FOIA requests and other investigative journalism have been exposing the deception behind this culture of assertion. They have another name for it in their writing and in Congressional testimony: “the censorship industrial complex.”

Being assertive can be seen as laudatory, associated with positive adjectives like strong, confident, certain, competent. But assertion can also violate fundamental ethics of public relations practice and principles of democracy.

Ethicists talk about what makes an occupation a “profession.” The answer is that it has a valuable service to society at large. What is the “role morality” of publics relations? It is simply enabling informed decision-making in a democratic society. And people can not make informed decisions without all the information. 

Asserting one’s own perspective and silencing opposing views is clearly toxic and should be confronted. 

I’ll confront the culture of assertion by re-asserting some long-standing and valuable principles vital to democracy and consonant with ethical public relations practice: pluralism, marketplace of ideas, mutual understanding, discourse ethics, dialogic communications, engagement, empowerment, and listening. 

There is a lot of talk in this election year about “threats to democracy.” Let us not let the public relations profession be one of them.