By Rick Borchelt
Health and science journalism today is a complex ecosystem of journals and their publicity machines, public information/press officers at universities, scientists, talking heads that function as quote machines, and the journalists, bloggers and freelance writers who cover the enterprise. None of these parts of the ecosystem really can get along without the others in our complex sound-bite driven part of the world. Yet the relationship between institutional press officers and the reporters who cover their scientists and research findings can sometimes become strained, partly because of changes in the university research occurs in recent years.
Yet good PR people are just that: Our main concern is with cultivating, establishing, and maintaining good relations with our critical publics, journalists and other science writers included. It is in none of our best interests that we antagonize reporters by being unresponsive or actively thwarting their access to key researchers or research findings. A good public relations practitioner will help guide you to the source(s) you need and will be a gateway, not a gatekeeper. And a good PR person wants to manage the portfolio of goodwill and satisfaction even if ultimately you don’t see eye to eye about a particular interview or information request and will do a lot to retain a trusting work relationship with a reporter.
But even in good press-PIO interactions there are a couple of things that drive us to distraction and will slow down or put a chokehold on your request. Here are the top five:
Avoid sending fishing emails to a dozen people at an agency or an institution with the same or similar request.
It’s not like we don’t talk to each other. And it makes it clear you really don’t know what or whom you want. This shotgun approach only succeeds in adding a layer of coordination and consultation with everyone you’ve pulsed and adds layers of bureaucracy you really don’t want to invoke. Go serially through your rolodex of everyone at our institution if you wish, but don’t keep asking the same question hoping for a different answer or expecting to catch someone off guard.
Avoid providing unrealistic time frames for answers to complex issues.
We all understand that you work on a 24/7 news cycle these days (so do we), that embargoes are rapidly becoming as effective as patent medicine, and that even the most prepared reporters get caught against the Scylla of deadline and the Charybdis of a cold call you need returned in an hour. Realistically, getting that call back on that kind of time frame in the current frenetic environment is not likely to happen—experts have lives too, and if it’s a popular paper or study, you probably aren’t the only one on the line. Often, these are stories that were advanced by the respective press offices of the journals that carried the papers a week or more in advance under embargo. Use this embargo as it was intended, to give yourself and your source a chance to have a more relaxed iteration of questions and answers. And don’t give us 15 minutes to respond and then write “phone calls to the university were not returned by press time.”
Avoid playing bait-and-switch with the questions you posed in the interview request and the questions you actually ask.
Better you should be up front and tell the source (and the press officer, if involved) what it is you’re actually driving at. It may end up costing you the interview if it touches on things your expert doesn’t feel qualified or empowered to answer, but if you mix it up after being granted an interview it can be the last time you get a call returned. The goal here is a trust relationship: Both parties are invested in telling an accurate, compelling story, and both sides trust that the other won’t manipulate the interview or frame the story in ways that seem disingenuous given the initial line of questioning. It also helps tremendously if you tell us at the outset the context for your story. No scientist wants to find out after the fact that they’re actually been commenting on a close colleague’s findings or even a competing institution’s paper.
Avoid badgering a scientist who clearly does not want to do an interview.
No scientist is required to talk to the press if she doesn’t want to, and the press office will respect and enforce that – even as we may try very hard to get the interview to happen. And truthfully, an unwilling interviewee is unlikely to give you a good story in the first place. But if the source isn’t interested in being interviewed, ask if there is someone else she could recommend, or ask the press officer if there is someone else at their institution (or another institution) who could provide the same kind of information.
Avoid going around the press office to the prospective interviewee if you get turned down by the PIO.
No, there’s nothing we can do about that in the news office except fume, and make a mental note for next time you call. This isn’t to say you can’t start with the scientist, who may or may not say she’d like to confer with her press officer first: You should honor that. And sometimes – sometimes – it works when you short-circuit the system, but the damage you wreak to the relationship with the press officer and even to the scientist is almost never worth it. Happily, counseled by good PR folks, some institutions are enlightened enough to let their scientists speak first and inform them after so the press office can look for the story when it comes out, or triage other calls on the same topic. But most still require consultation first, and if that’s the case, it seldom ends well for the scientist if the process isn’t followed.
Despite the heated discussion we often see in online and panel discussions of PR-press issues, many of us on the PR side feel our most important job is to promote free exchange between reporters and our scientists, where we act as brokers only when there is an issue of differing expectations. But when these different expectations arise, allow us do our jobs, for you and for our scientists.
Rick Borchelt is a veteran press officer for universities (U of Maryland College Park, The Johns Hopkins U), industry (Lockheed Martin), agencies (NASA, NIH, USDA), The White House (as science public affairs specialist) and the US House of Representatives (as a committee press secretary). He is the director of communications and public affairs for the Department of Energy’s science portfolio.
