All the PR That’s Fit to Print

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by John Sullivan, from Columbia Journalism Review
September-October 2011

The Gulf oil spill was 2010’s biggest story, so when David Barstow walked into a Houston hotel for last December’s hearings on the disaster, he wasn’t surprised to see that the conference room was packed. But Barstow realized as he glanced across the crowd that most of the people busily scribbling notes were not there to ask questions. They were there to answer them.

“You would go into these hearings and there would be more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three,” Barstow says. “There were platoons of PR people.”

A New York Times reporter, Barstow has written several stories about the shoving match between the media and public relations in what eventually becomes the national dialogue. As the crowd at the hearing showed, the game is changing.

“The muscles of journalism are weakening and the muscles of public relations are bulking up—as if they were on steroids,” he says.



Read more: http://www.utne.com/Media/All-The-PR-Thats-Fit-To-Print.aspx