Pickle Jar Communications

This week I chaired the CIPR Education and Skills Sector Group’s panel discussion on ‘Building contacts with international media’. Needless to say the subject was popular with universities and we had a turnout of around 80 people. However, the session got me thinking about the varying degrees of ethics in the PR-journalist relationship around the world and how being a member (as I proudly am) of an organisation like the CIPR, signed up to a code of practice, actually sits with being able to manage a successful PR campaign.

Let’s take an obvious example discussed at the event: China. Every university in the UK is interested in China. The largest proportion of overseas students come from there: they arrive in the UK, pay the highest level of fees and go back home after their course and spread the word to other families about their university.

Now, at yesterday’s panel discussion it was made very plain that payment for editorial is commonplace in China. This isn’t advertising, this is actually handing a brown envelope of cash to a journalist to ‘persuade’ them to write about your organisation, product or story. We learned (lots of raised eyebrows in the room) that at Chinese press conferences it is again commonplace to order the room according to a hierarchy of journalists: the most ‘important’ (or influential, perhaps we should say) sit in the front row where they are welcomed by hefty brown envelopes and served tea and coffee to their liking throughout. As the rows go back, the envelopes get smaller and the service gets less attentive.

We also learned that India is increasingly adopting this approach to the PR-journalist relationship.

So, given that we were holding this event under the umbrella of the CIPR who have a very clear code of practice for PR professionals in the UK, and, let’s face it, the raised eyebrows in the room can only mean that most people think the Chinese practice is somewhat unethical, how do we cope with globalisation and the increasing demand for international PR approaches? Is it any different to taking a journalist out for lunch, or to buying advertising space in a newspaper and just ‘by coincidence’ there being a mention of your product, company, service, findings or whatever it might be in the same paper just a few pages later? I think it is. Perhaps the press isn’t always quite as free and fair as we might like to think it is, but they too have ethical standards.

Or is this really a question of ethics at all? Is this just actually a question of business practice and how such practices vary from country to country? Should we engage with such practice in order to get the international coverage for our organisations or clients that we so need, or should we maintain our British PR practices and just hope that they will work? I think some kind of middle-ground needs to be found (yes, I’m sitting on the fence), and a way worked out to engage with media in such countries without compromising our professional or personal integrity.

There’s also part of me, looking back to my student days and thinking about cultural identities and difference, that likes this difference and embraces the challenge that it presents us with. In a globalised society, isn’t it somehow refreshing that such cultural differences still exist and we don’t just have one great homogenised system of working? From an ethical point of view I don’t like it one bit, but from a cultural point of view the difference excites and interests me. I’m not saying the practice is right, but what is right is that different forms of PR practice exist. Difference is good. Without difference in such practice, and different ethical viewpoints, how do we actually continue to test our own values? How do we know what is ‘good’ if we never have any ‘bad’? We can only test and reinforce our own values if we have something to compare them with, and for that reason if for no other, we need to embrace difference.