Rotten Berlin apples
Column Press spokespersons are like advertisers, only more dangerous: At conventions, they nurse their profile neuroses and produce plenty of hot air, writes Oliver Classen.
Column Press spokespeople are like advertisers, only more dangerous: at conventions, they nurse their profile neuroses and produce plenty of hot air. Recently, I was shocked to discover that my annual subscription to the Migros fitness center, which I had taken out with the usual good intentions, was about to expire. So I had to go there to pay off the stupid non-budget thing at least to some extent. Then, on the torture bench, where I and a dozen other cripples of civilization transferred their daytime frustration and testosterone surplus into monstrous machines, the following question formed in my mind: Why doesn't the otherwise oh-so-environmentally conscious orange giant set a good example and use all this energy to heat the sauna area one floor up? A similar fantasy plagued me at the end of September at the annual congress of the Federal Association of German Press Spokespersons (sic!) in Berlin. Despite my professional double skepticism - as an ex-journo and current non-profit worker - the two-day event initially aroused my curiosity. After all, someone had recognized and occupied a market niche here, which is bizarre, but certainly lucrative in such a vain industry. I still know from my time as editor of Werbewoche what communicators with a structural self-presentation deficit are for a profit-making audience.
In fact, more than 1,500 paying company spokespersons and lobbyists (from ABB to the energy industry association to Wuppertal's city marketing) gathered at the new Congress Centrum on Alexanderplatz. And were taught about the latest in reputation management, corporate identity building and power networking. The resulting mixture of warm words, hectic brainlessness and honest sweat made me speculate about how many kilowatt hours, which could have been elegantly transferred to the various hot buffets, the Berlin electricity companies might have missed out on here.
The real scandal of the congress, however, was the fact that here - in contrast to the hip but harmless advertisers' parties - it did not remain with self-congratulation rituals. The official laudatory speeches for the PR industry came not from the "grasshopper" David Montgomery (Mecom boss and new publisher of the Berliner Zeitung), ZDF editor-in-chief Nikolaus Brender and Michael Ringier, but from journalistic heavyweights. Representatives of the interests of business, politics and also civil society organizations today act more professionally than most editorial offices, said Roger Köppel, for example, who moderated one of the many panels.
Such expressions of respect from a competent source would still be tolerable. What is intolerable, however, is when PR people presume to award "golden apples" to honorable journalists - and don't utter a (self-)critical word about deliberate border blurring or the ever more fragile Chinese wall. This is what happened at the "Speaker's Night" in Berlin's Philharmonie, where the congress danced and ex-Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff seriously asked his press spokesman for permission before he serenaded the gala guests live with the Moonlight Sonata.
In his keynote speech, the current Karstadt CEO then accused the media of "reluctance to investigate" and "lack of skepticism toward informants. The fact that it was precisely such informants who filled the hall in front of him escaped the irony-free manager. Otherwise, he might have made amends to the assembled guild with a few push-ups and used the energy thus gained to ... But wait, enough rambling and off to the next Migros machine.
Oliver Classen is press spokesman for the Berne Declaration, a development policy organization. Before that, he worked as a media journalist for Werbewoche, among others.
In fact, more than 1,500 paying company spokespersons and lobbyists (from ABB to the energy industry association to Wuppertal's city marketing) gathered at the new Congress Centrum on Alexanderplatz. And were taught about the latest in reputation management, corporate identity building and power networking. The resulting mixture of warm words, hectic brainlessness and honest sweat made me speculate about how many kilowatt hours, which could have been elegantly transferred to the various hot buffets, the Berlin electricity companies might have missed out on here.
The real scandal of the congress, however, was the fact that here - in contrast to the hip but harmless advertisers' parties - it did not remain with self-congratulation rituals. The official laudatory speeches for the PR industry came not from the "grasshopper" David Montgomery (Mecom boss and new publisher of the Berliner Zeitung), ZDF editor-in-chief Nikolaus Brender and Michael Ringier, but from journalistic heavyweights. Representatives of the interests of business, politics and also civil society organizations today act more professionally than most editorial offices, said Roger Köppel, for example, who moderated one of the many panels.
Such expressions of respect from a competent source would still be tolerable. What is intolerable, however, is when PR people presume to award "golden apples" to honorable journalists - and don't utter a (self-)critical word about deliberate border blurring or the ever more fragile Chinese wall. This is what happened at the "Speaker's Night" in Berlin's Philharmonie, where the congress danced and ex-Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff seriously asked his press spokesman for permission before he serenaded the gala guests live with the Moonlight Sonata.
In his keynote speech, the current Karstadt CEO then accused the media of "reluctance to investigate" and "lack of skepticism toward informants. The fact that it was precisely such informants who filled the hall in front of him escaped the irony-free manager. Otherwise, he might have made amends to the assembled guild with a few push-ups and used the energy thus gained to ... But wait, enough rambling and off to the next Migros machine.
Oliver Classen is press spokesman for the Berne Declaration, a development policy organization. Before that, he worked as a media journalist for Werbewoche, among others.
