To the point: communication preventer
It’s understandable that collaboration between companies and media professionals isn’t always without its challenges, since their respective starting points are simply different.
On the one hand, there is the medium or the journalist who wants to get answers to his questions so that he can publish an interesting article or an exciting contribution. On the other hand, there is the company. Actually, the company would like to answer the questions. But woe betide if the questions are critical. Then panic breaks out. Reporting yes please, but of course only positive. It must be prevented under all circumstances that anything could be written or broadcast that is interesting and would correspond to the truth, but at the same time could scratch the painstakingly built image varnish a little.
But answers are only exciting, dear communication preventers, if they also provide facts. And an article is only interesting if it also highlights critical points. In companies with professional communications managers, cooperation is usually unproblematic. Unfortunately, however, there are still companies that feel that the media should act as the company's mouthpiece. And God knows, these are not just small companies with some PR guy on the side who hasn't understood what his real job is, namely to provide information and not to prevent it. Oh no, there are also big companies that do PR the North Korean way. Companies that either don't even allow critical questions or answer them with such PR jargon and professional jargon that the significance of the answers tends to zero. Or - more subtly - the deadline for authorization is simply missed or repeatedly postponed.
Here is a current example, the company in question is not a media house, mind you! Quotes and facts went to the company for authorization. Now nothing happened, the original deadline passed and the matter was promised to be settled by x o'clock.
Again nothing, and a day later the article came back. Entire paragraphs were missing, figures had been deleted and the journalist's wording had been changed so that the statement was no longer the same. We decided not to publish the article.
I know that my colleagues in the political press often don't fare any better. But that is little consolation.
Pierre C. Meier, Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]
