I’ve suddenly become very popular with India’s public relations companies. This is astounding to me because I have not worked in a newsroom since 2010. This means for 14 years I have not held a position of mild influence, let alone any kind of importance.
And yet, my inbox is flooded with press releases and various kinds of offers to collaborate with me, help me with inputs and give me “exclusive authored content/articles” which it has taken me ages to decipher as a readymade article written by a PR person which I am then supposed to carry in my publication. I still have not figured whether I use my own name or the name of the PR person as the byline.
The range of products and services which I am being urged to promote is wide. Several make no sense to me – these are usually to do with gaming, AI and some kind of internet-related things. Then there is anything from health to education to films to TV to real estate to corporate stuff. At a huge risk to my claims to modesty, I googled myself (gosh, google does not even require a capital G according to Microsoft Word’s spellcheck!) to find out if I have ever written about any of these things for the past 14 years. Or as long as internet searches can go back. In case my memory had dimmed. The answer was a dismal “no”. Any regular readers of this column know that I usually bang on about the cowardice of the media in the face of a fascist onslaught. However no press release relates to this aspect of my work.
If I set aside my annoyance (and block all these senders), I have to consider what this onslaught tells me about the relationship between journalism and PR since I stopped working in a newsroom. And it is glaringly obvious: that the laziness of some journalists is through the roof. A PR company, I would posit, will only offer “exclusive authored” content, if such articles are regularly used. So also with all these inputs, the offered guidance and the constant bombardment.
It is not that PR companies are not needed or not useful. Often, they are your only recourse, as a journalist, to get information, especially from those who are wary/chary about sharing information. The glamour world has long hidden itself from journalists. So no option there, unless you are old enough to have made your own personal contacts.
I have interacted with some great PR people, some of whom became friends. But these were consummate professionals, who knew who you were, what sort of information you wanted and understood that praise or a positive story was not a given. And they had always done their homework.
What I see now is no homework and this speaks unprofessionalism to me. The outcome however, professional or not, as it stands today still means that I will mark all such messages as spam. I write my own “content”, I rant by myself without outside assistance, I don’t interview film people (I can count them on my fingers, pretty much, the ones I have), I don’t write for a living about films or TV, or real estate, or gaming, or bitcoin. Funnily, I do review books but I get very little from the publishing world!
And aren’t you glad that I didn’t do my normal rant?
Happy Voting everyone. I did that by myself too, minus any exclusive authored help…
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Dehradun. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal.