The journalism brain drain to local councils

The continued cutbacks in local and regional titles and its implications for the reporting of local government is examined by John Slattery in an article in the journalist

It is according to John accelerating the ongoing trend of journalists moving to the relative safety of working in PR in the public sector

There is a danger he says

this editorial brain drain to the public sector will tip the balance, with professional publicly financed PR material filling the vacuum left by under-staffed and poorly paid journalists.

Of course if journalists are writing the stuff then there is much evidence that it is going in to the local press unedited.

But also with all this professional expertise

Councils are not just sending out press releases; they are producing their own papers, which newspaper companies regard as unfair competition and journalists fear will further drive down the standard of reporting.

How the news wire model is benefiting from churnalism

This week's Economist has an interesting article on the opportunities that the news wires are taking as newspapers face crisis management.

Reminding us that much news comes the news wire and that Christoph Pleitgen, a senior Reuters executive,has told them that

the big news wires have been staffing up in the past year.

and whereas Bloomberg have been cutting back on staffing recently

its recent announcement of around 190 job cuts at a foreign-language television venture got more attention than its promise to create 1,000 jobs elsewhere, including in its news bureaus

The reason of course is quite simple.As newsrooms cut back on journalists they rely more and more on the news wire as more people crave for content.

Why PR companies treat journos as car companies treat suppliers

This article by Charles Arthur who is editor of the Guardian's trchnology supplement is worth a read.@(Ht-Adrian Monck)

The subject can be gleaned from the title of this blog post but it states the obvious in the relationship of the PR industry to that of journalism

So who does pay the PRs? The clients. The clients, the clients, the clients. It’s them who pays the PRs. So you should examine how PR works always in the light of that. (This isn’t going to be much news to many PR people, but some journalists might find it enlightening.)

and therefore

clients hire PRs to get the clients’ message out there. The PRs’ job is to get the journalists to manufacture that stuff (call it “coverage”) that the clients can be persuaded to believe is their message “out there”. That’s it.

And that is it-pure and simple.If journalists think otherwise then they are fooling themselves and their audience.