2 posts tagged “media”
For more than one· year at Economic Observer, a weekly business newspaper whose goal is to be the Financial Times in mainland China, I've met plenty of PR agencies. For some of them, I'm a good private friend, and we often hang out for dinner together and share some ideas about the industries or our daily lives. For others, Steven Lin has become a footy name printed on an rectangular, which has been probably thrown into a recycle box and vanished.
How to judge them? And what kind of relationship should be proper between journalists and the PR agencies? My friends from the western media often told me that they are definitely standing on the opposite sides. Journalists' mission is to discover the truth behind the magnificent scenes glossed by the companies, while the PR agencies will protect you from doing such kind of things in full sail. All of the words from the agencies' mouths are diplomatic and they are only some slippery people who are blindly loyal to their employers. Is it true?
Company A is among the biggest search engines over the world and I‘ve contacted with two PR people who work for it. When I met Ms. B for the first time, she was a business reporter from a leading weekly magazine in China. After less than one year, she joined a PR agent, one of whose clients is Company A. Every time I criticised the company on my blog, she counldn't stop arguing with me and often ask me to publish "something good for them".
On the contrary, Ms. C is the PR specialist of the company and always told me to write "anything objective no matter it's positive or negative" if I feel comfortable. She helped me to get the full permission in their office building for some inside stories, but promised not to modify my articles unless there are some inexact data.
Of course you have gotten aware of my attitutes to each of them, and my answer to the "relationship" quesion. Most PR people i've met in Beijing are unprofessional - they had done tons of things out of their duties, appended too much personal points to their daily jobs and annoyed the journalists. For any PR agency, being tactful or diplomatic is
one thing, making lies or trying to curb media is another.
It has been proved that any actions to provoke the media will cause stronger conterforce. Remember the PR agencies of EMI China who wanted to buy media? The wave of critism on The Flower Band is a good example of what would be brought out by some inconsiderate PR strategies.
What would you suppose to see when opening an envelope with a familiar trademark on the front? A well-printed promoting paperback for the Spring Festival shopping season? Maybe. A fancy invitation to the company's cocktail party? Possibly. But for most Chinese reporters, no matter on whose press conference they got a commercial envelope, it always equals to a Hongbao (Red Package in Mandarine), the most important source of their afterhours income.
How much money has been enclosed by the PR persons? No legible standards. But the amount depends on the scale of the company who hold the press conference, essentiality of the product or project which will be released, status of the speechmaker who attends the conference, and sometimes, type of the media which the reporter is serving for - as you know, a Hollywood Paparazzi, a Silicon Valley Reporter and a Wall Street Journalist are always treated as three totally different careers.
Based on these inexplicable factors, the amount of money in Red Packages ranges from 200 to 500 yuan (USD 25.00 - 62.50), and the average is 300 yuan. It seems not a big deal. But if a reporter keeps the pace of attending more than 20 press conferences per month, the situation will be dramaticly changed. The ordinary monthly salary for a newcome reporter in Beijing is no more than 3000 yuan, but a familiar face on the press conference would earn from the companies 2 to 3 times much as they get paid by the media.
The most interesting story about Red Packages I've heard is about an intern reporter from a national daily newspaper who threw two envelopes she received on a press conference directly to a trash can, unaware of what else could have been put into them besides the boring company backgrounds. When she discovered the truth soon after coming back to office and chitchated with her colleagues, she rushed back for the gold immediatly.
Nowadays, Red-Package reports almost fills every newspaper in mainland China. I don't know how the PR agency build relationships with reporters in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the western countries. But in The Hospital, a Taiwan TV series aired in the autumn 2006, the surgeon played by Leon Dai asked his assistant to "prepare some little gifts for our reporter friends".
Maybe it's the best way to push reporters to copy and paste the PR releases on the newspapers, however, for the reporters who work for the newspapers that don't allow any kind of news release or so-called "soft advertisement" being published, receiving a Red Package would turn out to be a beginning of nightmares. The phone calls, emails, instant messages and instand messages from PR persons to remind you of the article will badly mess your work and daily life.
In the first days of every Chinese lunar year, aged people always hand Red Packages to their grandsons and granddaughters and make some wishes for them like "learn harder and get better grade for the future". When the reporters receive Red Packages from the PR persons, they would probably see a sentence "work harder and make more money for the company" on the meaningful smiling faces.
