PR-Bridge

On his PR Junkie blog, Mark Ragan highlights a mystifying “challenge” the public relations industry confronts on a daily basis — the consistently poor writing shoveled out at agencies. As a person who teaches ”Writing for Public Relations” at my university, I can certainly understand Ragan’s disgust. “Every once in a while I’ll sit down with a jug of Jack Daniels and a bottle of Advil and dig through old press releases to see if PR agencies have learned how to write,” Ragan says.

And I believe him. Often, I have felt similar alarm as I review industry releases. I ask my students to read 10 releases each week while they take the writing course, which most often exposes more bad than good PR writing.

Ragan believes the problem resides at the feet of young professionals. He explains, “There is a reason for the template, of course. None of the kids hired by the agencies and billed out at $150 an hour have the slightest idea what they’re writing about. They don’t understand the product or the client. They have no background in the industry, and they never learned how to write in college.”

I agree with this statement to a degree. Just like the training lawyers and budding business executives receive, the PR programs at most colleges do not fully prepare students for the real world. Even students who have supplemented their classroom education with several internships still face a steep learning curve in the professional world.

The real problem, however, is the agency structure, not the young professionals forced into cookie cutter training programs.

Here’s my reply to Ragan’s post:

“One area to blame is the school system. I basically have to eliminate all a student’s bad writing habits, THEN figure out a way to get them on the path toward professional writer status. Certainly this is almost impossible in a mere 15 weeks.

The second area of blame falls on the agencies. They are so top-heavy on client teams that they are perpetually understaffed. This results in little hands-on mentoring and pushing off the pitching/writing to new grads who don’t have the experience or skills to do the job adequately.

The templates the firms force their junior people to conform to are horrible, but allow releases to be completed quicker, which saves money. I’ve had fantastic student writers get jobs at agencies, then have their skills beat right out of them because of time restraints, etc.

If agency leadership wanted to put a stop to this poor writing, they could. But, it’s cost effective and, at the end of the day, must prove that they don’t care all that much about writing quality. My hope is that I teach my students the best methods I know and then someday when they are execs, they implement that style at their agencies.”

Basically, my viewpoint is that we could blame young professionals, but it is really a systemic challenge that points to some major flaws in the typical agency structure. Agencies need to pay more than casual lip service to mentoring and training, certainly the writing that is being done is evidence of this point.

That’s my two cents…What do you think we can do to improve PR writing both while students are students and then once they get out into the professional world?