Longtime business journalist James Flanigan reflects on good and bad relationships he’s had with PR people.
“Gillespie didn’t gild the lily; there was seldom a direct connection to a story about Mobil, but there was an indirect one in that industry stories were at least knowledgeable. In any event, no story comes from a single source and critical comment is always available – in those days it was from upstarts like Occidental Petroleum or ENI, the Italian state oil company, which were shaking up the solid front of the major oil corporations.
“A contrast is a story about British Petroleum, which has run into horrendous public relations trouble currently. In the late 1990s, after BP had acquired Amoco and was preparing to buy Arco, I interviewed its chief executive John Browne, later Lord Browne. Browne, to be sure, had intelligent perspective about the industry, but he was already preaching the company’s ‘beyond petroleum’ environmental message. I wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times after that interview but in subsequent meetings it seemed to a skeptical reporter that image building grew into hype. I didn’t write and declined later offers of interviews because reporting is not stenography and interviews, even with CEOs, do not necessarily a story make. The point is that business is a human story and the most important quality a company can convey in any PR campaign is integrity.”
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Many thanks for re-posting our agency's 25th Anniversary guest post by James Flanigan.
A Business Journalist on PR: Business is a Human Story http://shar.es/mMCRV.
Stefan Pollack
http://www.pollackblog.com
More about Jim: James Flanigan is a business columnist for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and other publications and has covered national and international business and economics for 46 years. James’ blog and information about his current book can by found at: http://jamesflanigan.com.