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2003 will go down as the Year of Ethical Breaches in Journalism, thanks to Jayson Blair, Rick Marin and several other media people (rightly or wrongly) accused of plagiarism, theft of Iraqi art treasures and various other offenses. Which raises the question: Is this the best time to send a holiday gift to your favorite media contacts?
Media relations professionals annually wrestle with this problem: They want to send good wishes to the journalists with whom they have a good working relationship, but they don’t want to run afoul of newsroom ethics laws about accepting gifts. Given the sensitivities that newsroom managers will exhibit this year (no one wants to be the subject of the next ethics story), it’s wise to be careful.
Opinions from PR people polled by MRR range from “no gifts, ever” to “something consumable” or “gifts under $10.” In the “no gifts, ever” category is Karen Friedman, a media trainer in the Philadelphia area.
“Journalists are not your customers,” says Friedman, a former TV news reporter, most recently for the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia. “Send your customers gifts. You do not need to thank us for doing our jobs. When we cover a story about you, we cover it to the best of our ability. If you happen to like the way it turns out, that’s great and we’re happy that you’re happy.”
“This is going to sound Scrooge-y, but unless you can be very clever about it, don’t do it,” says Thomas Madden, chairman of TransMedia Group, a PR firm in southern Florida. “The media receive enough stuff from us without our pitching them even holiday cheer.”
Adds Madden, “We have an odd role with the press. They’re not really our clients. We work with the press, but we’re not part of the press. We shouldn’t look at them in the same way we look at our customers.”
Michael Prichinello, vice president at RLM Public Relations in New York City, agrees that great story ideas are the best gift you can give a reporter—all year ’round.
“I personally never send gifts,” says Prichinello. “I feel that the journalists I’ve spent years growing a relationship with would find it odd. “We go out to lunch, dinner or drinks and we’re always very careful to split or trade off on who pays. You develop good contacts by just pitching great stories and following through with them, so if you have great contacts, adding a gift into the equation just brings a bit of complexity to everything.”
Part of the problem with “gifting” is that journalists don’t always know where to draw the line either. Gary Hill, chairman of the ethics committee for the Society of Professional Journalists (and director of investigations for Minneapolis station KSTP-TV), points out that reporters need to police themselves more effectively.
“There are no official standards in journalism,” Hill says, noting that while the SPJ offers guidelines, they’re only as enforceable as the newsroom managers who understand and promulgate them. “There are many newsrooms that don’t make their ethics policies clear to their staff.”
Hill doesn’t think PR people should be held responsible if reporters mistakenly accept gifts that get them into hot water. “The ethical breach happens if the reporter accepts it,” Hill says, since they’re the ones who are supposed to know their newsroom rules.
If fancy Waterford crystal vases or Montblanc pens—or the “Front Page”-style bottle of Scotch—don’t work as newsroom gifts, do you ignore the holidays completely? While it sounds trite, many PR pros say a thoughtful greeting card is enough—or at most, a very low-priced goodie.
“As a former reporter and editor, I can tell you that freebies around the holidays are absolutely seen as gifts to encourage favor and consideration,” says Christine Rowett, media relations manager at The Enterprise Foundation in Columbia, Md. “On the other hand, reporters and editors—especially at low-paying smaller publications—make very little money. So a basket of cookies to share in the newsroom can be a nice perk.”
Rowett says she sticks to cards. “Now that I’m on the other side of the game, I may send a holiday card to a reporter and/or news organization that I’ve come to know well, especially if we’ve collaborated on a series of stories or events. But I don’t send anything. I’ve done a lot of work with media in Baltimore, and The Baltimore Sun is painfully adamant about not accepting any type of gratuity from news sources.”
Laura Noss, founder and principal of Social Planets, a communications firm in Menlo Park, Calif., gives a limited number of holiday gifts, but only to those reporters who are friends, not just business colleagues.
“For those ‘close’ reporters, and by close I mean I know their home numbers, or birthday, or something more uniquely personal or special about them, I choose something more personal and meaningful that goes in a box,” Noss says. “I only consider a handful of reporters to be at this level so it never feels like I am bribing.”
“For the ‘B’ list, or those reporters who I deal with regularly but don’t hold close to the chest, I do handmade cards,” Noss continues. “The reason? In the spirit of building authentic relationships, you never know when the relationship with a regular card-getting reporter could escalate into something more useful and meaningful. I think that for the months of calls they receive and releases they read from me and my team, a handmade card is worth it.”
David Shank, president and CEO of Shank PR in Indianapolis, sticks to a rule he learned a while back. “We go by a guideline an old reporter at the Indianapolis Star once gave me: ‘Nothing over $25 or that can be consumed in 24 hours!’” Says Shank, “It’s not a bad guideline to use when you’re trying to think things through.”
At his firm, Shank says reporters are given high-quality chocolates, or gourmet coffee or tea. “We try to make an impression on journalists not by dollar value but by being unique, tasteful and distinctive,” he says. “We want reporters to remember us by our quality, not by the magnitude.”
Phil Nourie, president of Nourie PR in New York, says his staff has wrestled with how to offer holiday cheer to reporters without appearing overbearing. “We send holiday cards, handwritten and personalized, even if it takes us three weeks,” Nourie says. “Everyone can get a impersonal card, but rarely do PR people actually sit down and think about what that reporter did to help their goals.”
Kris Brown, director at Lavidge & Baumayr PR in Scottsdale, says her firm has come up with a great way to give a fun gift, while spending just about no money, nor teetering on an ethical precipice.
“Last year, we put together a music CD with a compilation of our favorite holiday songs, Brown says. “Each staff member selects a song, and we include a brief mention of why that’s his or her favorite song on the CD cover flap. We put our logo on the CD itself and on the cover and send it out to clients/reporters along with a holiday greeting.”
The cost was minimal: A stack of blank CDs, plus some staff time to download songs and burn the CDs. Voila: A cheap, fun holiday gift.
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