•Written by Paul Ress• ••Tuesday•, 09 •October• 2007 18:04•
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The United Nations and numerous aid agencies regularly shoot themselves in the foot by failing to understand how journalists work. All too often, press advisories and releases - many of them excruciatingly tedious - are regarded primarily as controlled promotional tools for fund-raising but not for keeping the world-at-large credibly informed about what they are doing. The end result is that potentially good stories are ignored or the organization is not taken seriously. Here are some helpful hints for those aid professionals who are serious – and courageous enough - about getting the real word across.
As I had worked many years as a journalist and, later, as many more years as a press officer for a score of United Nations and non-governmental organizations, I was asked by an NGO to give a talk about what it was like on both sides of the barricades. What was the best way for UN and NGO press attachés to approach journalists?
I began by saying that a span of 28 years as a print press journalist and foreign correspondent in France does not prepare you for the work of a public information officer in the United Nations in Geneva or anywhere else.
That isn’t totally true because in all those years at least you have learned to write a story. That may not seem like much to an ex-journalist, but in the ranks of UN information officers, you encounter surprisingly few who can put to paper a simple feature or press release, much less write their way out of a paper bag.
I found the metamorphosis from a Time Magazine reporter to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) press attaché a painful or, rather, an uncomfortable affair. While distributing UNEP press releases or feature stories to Swiss journalists and foreign correspondents, I found myself saying apologetically, “only last week I was a reporter like you,” or, “just last month I was a journalist, too.”
That went on for about a year until I reconciled myself to the fact that, whatever anyone else called me, I was no longer a journalist. Like so many newspapermen or women, I had thought there was no life after journalism.
Life after journalism might also have led to advertising or public relations. Without even being a wordsmith one could perhaps sell soap or peddle perfume. The idea of becoming a flack for an oil polluting company, for example, was as abhorrent to me as public relations is to most journalists.
I remember an airline public relations flack wandering around the rue de Berri editorial room of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune one Sunday afternoon. Addressing himself to me as I was the travel editor, he said that one of his airline’s trans-Atlantic planes had crashed and he would appreciate it if the headline writer (of the front page story) would mention his airline by its nationality but avoid using its three familiar initials. I shooed him at the news editor who chased him out of the building.
But would the United Nations be a more acceptable employer than a public relations firm? The answer is yes, whatever the very considerable shortcomings and limitations of UN information work are.