Just as there is more than one type of PR person, there is more than one type of journalist. The casting of the media as one homogenous group that can either do no wrong or get anything right is as incorrect as lumping all PR practitioners into the same pile.
The fact that neither profession has any meaningful barriers to entry is a big reason for this. I know executives and engineers who’ve become journalists who have become PR people. I know waiters who have become PR people and then journalists. I know Columbia School of Journalism grads who’ve worked for elite media brands who’ve then gone to brands as managing editors, essentially PR people, and then gone to agencies. The lack of barriers has enabled poor performers with low or no standards to easily become journalists and consider themselves equals among quality press people.
There are good performers and poor performers in every profession. It’s for this reason the medical malpractice business is so strong and attorneys sometimes get disbarred. Every business has them — the spammers, the plagiarists, the ambulance-chasers — so now that content is so easy to create and publish or broadcast or podcast, let’s not cast all media with the same brush and bunch the strong with the weak.
Not all press create equally because not all press are created equally.
Cut the good ones a break.
