By Gail Farrell
I’ve been in PR for ages, but I never studied PR. Instead, I learned my first PR lessons on my first job as an editorial assistant for Business Week and the now-defunct Electronics. One early lesson was “Poorly written press releases can be both subjects of derision and sources of entertainment.” Particularly dreadful examples of mangled grammar and scrambled thought were read aloud to hoots of laughter. Simultaneously I learned “Know your publications.” Why did a ball bearing manufacturer keep sending press releases to Electronics?
Another lesson was “Never whine to a reporter or threaten to pull your company’s advertising when your completely un-newsworthy story doesn’t make it into the publication.” I didn’t actually tell the PR guy he had wasted my time with a worthless story, and I resisted the very strong temptation to tell him to stop whining and grow up. I just said that the magazine had more important stories to run that cycle. As for advertising, I said that pulling it was his company’s business decision and that advertising didn’t influence editorial decisions.
Then there were the two lessons learned for the price of one; “PR people should understand their clients” and “Not understanding your clients can dash your career hopes.” These came courtesy of a guy who ran a small PR agency and had an extremely technical client. I interviewed the client for an hour, trying to clarify the disorganized presentation in my mind, find out what was new and different about the technology, and figure out how it was used and what its benefits were, while the PR guy sat there looking bewildered. It took me two days to digest and unscramble the information before I could write the story.
Months later, I ran into the PR guy again, when he was interviewing for the job of Electronics Boston bureau chief—a job I also wanted. He saw me, and in the presence of the managing editor said, “Gail! I haven’t seen you since you wrote that great story about my client. I don’t know how you did it; I didn’t understand anything they were saying.” I think you can guess who got the job—I owe this guy a big thank you.
Finally, there was the “Use your terminology correctly” lesson, derived from an interview with an MIT professor who had developed a cheap experimental way to generate hydrogen gas (for fuel) from water. All I remember now is that it involved ions and cations and anions, and that after reading my notes and his (mercifully brief) research paper nothing made sense the way it had in his lab when he demonstrated the experiment. I kept trying to write the story, and all those ions kept getting mixed up. When I called him for clarification, the professor said everyone else who’d read the paper was also confused; he tended to be pretty sloppy about using the right term in the right place.
Of course I experienced the positive side of PR as well. There were plenty of PR people who knew their stuff and their publications; cultivated their contacts; provided well-written, informative material; understood about the separation of church and state (i.e., editorial and advertising); made sure the people I interviewed were at least coherent; and were unfailingly pleasant to work with. But these people didn’t provide entertaining war stories. And it’s those war stories—and their PR lessons—that I remember best.
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