A historic charter aiming to improve relations between the PR industry and the media was recently released by the CIPR. Having reviewed the final document, we are pleased to announce that we have now adopted the charter into our terms of business.  The joint charter, the result of consultations between the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), the Investor Relations Society (IRS), the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), aims to reduce the incidents of "media spamming" by PR companies. Media spamming occurs when journalists and editors are inundated with press releases and PR contacts which are intrusive and/or inappropriate for their needs. The problem was highlighted originally in the recent Irrelevent PR Truth campaign (see our blog).
This is a campaign we have been following closely because the relationship between PR and journalist is the essence of what we do. Unlike many other PR companies, we have always worked hard to try and ensure that our communications go only to those who we feel will find them useful. But given the scale of the problem highlighted by the campaign, we felt we should do more. Our first action back in the Summer of this year was to migrate our news circuits to an online server and give journalists the ability to add or remove themselves from any of our circulation lists if they feel they have been poorly targetted.So far, we have had only one such request.
Further to this, we have adopted a change in policy with regard to press release distribution. For most press releases, we now ONLY circulate stories initially to editors and journalists on our lists. This means that stories journalists get from us are still newsworthy - i.e. they aren't already freely available online. At some later stage, we may circulate stories a second time to online portals to help boost search engine visibility and penetration, but our focus remains primarily on the needs of journalists and we will not knowingly undermine their efforts to produce unique, newsworthy content.
As a last step, we will now include the CIPR Media Spamming Charter into our standard Terms of Business, clearly stating the negative effects of engaging in spam-like activities or unprofessional harassment of the media. We will also reserve the right to decline to participte in any such action on the grounds that it is not in the client's best interests and may be damaging to our own business credibility.
Download your own copy of the CIPR Media Spamming Charter by visiting our Free PR & Marketing Guides page
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