Do public relations and advertising really belong in journalism schools whose emphasis ought to be on objectivity and hence, the news?
     Chances are you have heard that question if you teach in or recruit from a journalism school. Ask it, and you come across as a no-nonsense hard-news standard bearer—or as an elitist.
     Depends on who’s listening, and it’s usually the students.
     As far as I know, no hard-news journalism prof has been given permission, let alone tenure, for eroding dreams of advertising and PR students—especially with subjective opinions.
     When I started teaching in the 1970s, “fresh” (read arrogant) out of United Press International, I asked that very same question—often—and was immediately inducted into the No-nonsense Hard-news Hall of Fame.
     I was an elitist. Now I’m an educator.
     Fact is, answering that question is a lot less controversial and a lot more educational than you might imagine. The old consensual arguments—focus on writing, reporting, editing and design—still apply, of course. But they seldom change opinions that center primarily on objectivity, or the lack of it, in typical PR and advertising campaigns.
     The PR/ad process can be just as objective (or subjective) as the news process.  By emphasizing objectivity and process, rather than sequence, teachers will be training graduates for the electronic marketplace requiring expertise across many media disciplines rather than specialization in any one.

News Process
     The process starts with an idea and ends with a published or broadcast report. Simple enough. But the beginning of the process usually is more subjective than the end. For instance, a reporter might investigate a source or public official on mostly objective grounds—public records, say—or on completely subjective grounds: suspicion about agenda, say.
     Of course, unethical journalists target sources or officials because of personal concerns or even self-interest.
     Whatever the case, the front-end of the process typically involves a reporter's individual perception. That’s subjective and only half the story. Concerning objectivity, initial stages of the news process are even more subjective when ideas are based on motives of outside sources—political or business rivals, say—mean-mouthing the competition.
     Most reporters feel obliged to check  (if not report) gossip that comes into the newsroom as “anonymous tips.”
     Sure, the beginning phase is messy. But seasoned reporters trust the editorial process, knowing standards of objectivity will kick in as the story progresses from idea to fact-checkable story. If not, the editor spikes the story (or should). That’s why the back-end of the process is supposed to be failsafe. Reporters and editors put the focus there to avoid editorializing or libel; otherwise, thousands of dollars may be lost and credibility, damaged.
      Melanie Rigney, former UPI division editor and Ad Age managing editor—now editor of Writer’s Digest—applauds news professors who are standard-bearers of objectivity. Rather than questioning PR and advertising, however, she says teachers ought to re-emphasize the back-end of the news process because there, especially in the magazine industry, cuts are being made.
     “It’s not uncommon these days even at medium-size publications for just one person other than the writer to read the story and ask the hard, objective questions before it’s published,” Rigney says.
     Fewer gatekeepers at the end of the process (depicted below) harm the credibility of the news industry, especially in a tabloid age.

News Process

*Goal=sufficiently fact-checkable story

     As the above table shows, successful reporters increasingly become more objective as the news process nears completion, following the facts like bloodhounds tracking the truth.
     In the beginning, though, reporters place a premium on the subjective proboscis.

PR/Ad Process
     In public relations and advertising, the process usually begins with a high degree of objectivity.  Practitioners must gather sufficient data and/or market research to analyze a situation, identify publics or markets, develop a strategy, or target channels of communication—newspapers to new media.
     “It’s absolutely necessary to begin the PR process objectively,” says Bojinka Bishop, former director of public affairs for the American Water Works Association and a named professor of public relations now at Ohio University.
     According to Bishop, the PR process begins by thoroughly researching three fundamental components of any situation: the client, organization, product, service, or issue; the publics involved; and the necessary media to reach those publics. “Only then can you begin to be subjective or creative in developing communication strategies and tactics to connect the players in positive ways,” she adds.
     Objectivity is especially critical during crisis management. Bishop points to high-profile crises involving product tampering of Johnson & Johnson Tylenol in 1982 and a product-tampering hoax at Pepsi in 1993, noting “strong proof of truth and positive actions are necessary to repair damage and that hiding facts and using ‘spin’ never solve a crisis of confidence.”
     When it comes to objectivity, the advertising process is similar to the PR process. One way to  illustrate that is to compare headlines to slogans.
     By the time a copy editor composes a headline for a story, the news process is all but finished. In fact, headlines are slapped on stories digitally now between pizza bites—which used to be more adventurous when editors counted words on one hand and wielded pica poles in the other. Slogans, on the other hand, usually come early in the advertising paradigm because an entire marketing strategy might rest on a single operative word.
      Cassandra Reese, former advertising executive at Kraft Foods and now an advertising professor and another colleague at Ohio University, described the objective process in my text, Living Ethics. Reese says advertisers test words and align slogans with products using scientific research, consumer panels, taste-test kitchens, focus groups and telephone surveys. “Sometimes research will lead marketers to a word if a product is really ‘whiter’ or ‘fluffier.’ Then you can say, ‘Our brand is whiter’ or ‘Our brand is fluffier.’ You would give those words to your copywriters and then they would have to test those words in a slogan.”
     Jan Slater, who teaches advertising at OU with Reese and owned an Omaha-area agency, notes the advertising process “obviously entails objectivity that stems from understanding the consumer’s wants, needs and desires and then determining how Crest, a Big Mac, Diet Coke or Tide can meet those wants, needs and desires.” After all, Slater observes, the foundation of all brand strategy is repeat purchase, and that has to be based on objective data and information.
     “The greatest advertising control is from the consumer. If advertisers lie, exaggerate benefits, make promises the brand cannot keep, the consumer will not purchase the brand again.”
     In general, a practitioner’s or a client’s subjective opinion—about the feasibility of a political strategy, say, or the salability of a new toothpaste—is of little consequence. As the process continues, however, facts can get in the way of product publicity where parity, rather than superiority, usually is the rule. So strategy is important in promoting one brand over an otherwise worthy competitor, says Saul Bennett, former president of Robert Marston Marketing Communications, Inc., and now CEO of the Bennett Group.
     Nonetheless, Bennett admits, lack of front-end objectivity can undermine the best strategy.
     He recalls yielding to a “hard-sell” client by holding a national press conference to publicize a toothpaste—“a ‘flanker’ product, an existing brand with a new formula. The media played the story as merely ‘another battle in the toothpaste marketing wars.’”
     “I should have seen that coming and advised the client that there really wasn’t enough real news in the story,” he says, wishing he had remained more “journalist objective” initially during that particular campaign.
     According to Bojinka Bishop, “The challenge in public relations is always to create balance between the real and the hoped for.” The “real” is emphasized in the beginning of the process via standard avenues of objectivity (i.e. fact-gathering, expert interviews, field and library research, etc.). “Without knowing what’s real,” Bishop says, “you might send a computer story to the city editor or promote the benefits of holistic medicine to surgeons.
     “You can’t afford not to examine all facts objectively.”
      When the initial phases of a campaign are too subjective, thousands of dollars may be lost and credibility, damaged—just as in the news paradigm—only at a different point in the process.
     The bottom-line? PR and advertising practitioners have to trust the front-end objective process to achieve their subjective goals, from positioning a candidate for office or a product in the marketplace.
     Here’s a depiction of that process:

PR/Ad Process

 *Goal=sufficiently targeted campaign

     The goal—a successful political fundraiser, for example, or another Nike commercial—may not appear as objective as the news story about the candidate appearing in space provided by the commercial. But they are all part of the collective process and objectively targeted at readers via one fact-gathering method or another.
     Which is why news-editorial students ought to be required to take a PR or an advertising class, just as PR and ad students usually are required to take newswriting and editing classes.  As Melanie Rigney at Writer’s Digest puts it, “A publication that doesn’t know its readers and provide information useful to them eventually won’t be there.” Thus, she believes, journalism and the reading community at large might be better served “if J-students were required to take some of those market-defining and solution-finding ad and PR courses.”
     That said, you might acknowledge a few wee points about process:

• The news and PR/ad processes are inherently opposite, which is why a good PR campaign can combine objectivity and strategy to nullify a mediocre news story (and vice versa).
• The more successful public relations becomes, the sharper reporters have to become to offset the opposite processes; the more successful advertisers become, the more space or air time editors earn to inform the public.
• Objectivity is as important to the PR/ad paradigm as it is to the news paradigm. It just happens at a different point in the process.

     That’s also why public relations and advertising sequences belong in J-schools and why you as a standard bearer ought to reaffirm that.

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