Frankie Flack: We need more biz reporters, not more flacks

If it feels like there are more and more of us flacks out there, you’re not imaging things. The Bureau of Labor Statistics made it official last month: PR professionals outnumber journalists 4.2 to 1.

I’m not celebrating those stats. I don’t see communication as some sort of zero-sum death match between flacks and hacks. There is — or should be — a necessarily symbiosis between my people and yours. In fact, as a PR guy, I see these numbers and despair.

The official line for why the number of PR professionals is growing (while journalism shrinks) is that flacks now have a much broader range of responsibilities in the digital age. Sure, we have to get our client’s name in the paper. But a huge number of other roles have also fallen to PR.

Companies have a much larger communications footprint nowadays. I don’t know how much paper got pushed at General Motors back in the 1980s, but a quick Google search suggests there are 600,000-plus webpages housed at GM.com right now. That’s a lot of communications.

But that’s too pat an explanation. Part of the reason that we’re packing on employees is that public relations is trying to do a lot of the jobs that journalists do. We’ve taken the push-button, self-publishing ethos to heart, and it’s a rare company that isn’t cranking out blog posts or tweets or infographics.

But it’s an even rarer company that’s doing that well. Despite being massively outgunned, the public still turns to journalists when they want information. And while this seems like it should be a truism, it’s not necessarily purely logical. After all, there’s a lot of subject matter expertise floating around corporate America.

You could certainly make an argument that Staples should run the world’s best office productivity and entrepreneurship sites or that Kimberly-Clarke could bankroll some excellent parenting publications. It’s not that flacks have an intrinsic conflict of interest that turns away an audience (though that is, in a lot of cases, partially true).

And it’s not that we can’t do quality work. We can. Instead, we’re hampered by our superior numbers. Journalists remain nimble: a reporter or a graphic artist can realize their vision with a minimal amount of interference (editor jokes aside). Whereas most of my clients want boss upon boss to weigh in and sign off, all leading to “content” (rarely “journalism”) that has been robbed of any spark.

So, secretly, I’m hoping that next year at this time, there will be more of you and fewer of us. Because more journalists generally means more good journalism. I’m not sure the same can be said of more flacks.