"Currie's responsiveness and relationships with the media makes them a stand out
in the industry."
Alex Twomey National Manager External Affairs Australia Post
"I've found that Currie combines expertise in media and messaging with real process discipline to help us build and deliver a coherent communications program."
Simon Cowen Managing Director SkyBus
"The standard of work, creativity and ability to get things done were just brilliant. The Currie team were great to work with, kept us in check, and achieved some amazing outcomes and results for a very low involvement product."
Stephanie Arvanitis Communications and Media Manager Metlink
"Currie Communications understood our unique position and worked with us to develop a strategy that, through its elegant clarity, has allowed us to remain focused on what we want to achieve."
Deborah Leake Manager Industry Integrity Communications Meat & Livestock Australia
"Currie impressed us with their flexibility, clear thinking, hard work and attention to detail. They did all they said they would do, and did it with a full appreciation of our communications needs. The brief was changed several times but Currie kept up and always responded with enthusiasm and commitment."
Paul Tierney Manager, Marketing and Communications - Road Safety and Network Access VicRoads
"The communications strategy that Currie developed and implemented for Land Water & Wool enabled us to influence all our target audiences right across the country. Currie staff were innovative, professional, enthusiastic and a pleasure to work with."
Mike Wagg Program Leader Land, Water & Wool

Currie Communications

While press releases make 55% of news, rest are shredded

By Julia Balderstone, Senior Consultant

Is it a surprise that PR generates more than half of our daily news stories in Australia’s newspapers? Hardly!

The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at Sydney’s University of Technology last week released a study examining 2,000 stories across 10 newspapers over five days.

In essence, it found that nearly 55% of stories analysed were driven by some form of public relations and as many as 70% of stories in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph were PR-generated.

The story is familiar with other studies showing similar findings in the past. But understandably, many journalists and editors were defensive when questioned by Crikey.com about the survey. Reasons for the results varied from deadline pressure, resource squeeze to commercial realities.

Yet does it really matter that so many stories emanate from PR? Isn’t the key test of newsworthiness whether it is timely, balanced, relevant, accurate and in the public interest?

Also missing from last week’s analysis of the ACIJ survey were any statistics revealing how many incoming press releases are actually binned.

To a casual observer reading last week’s study findings, it might seem that the time has never been better for PR practitioners attempting to influence the news content in Australia.

The reality is quite different. In the past five years with the growth of the PR profession, many newsrooms have employed forceful assistants to act as “news bouncers” and veto calls from PR practitioners.

As the number of incoming media releases has risen sharply, journalists and editors have also become increasingly discerning about what is worthwhile news. A vast quantity of media releases are weak, generic, self-serving and only ever see the cutting room floor.

The best PR consultants will understand the news cycle and know inherently what makes news and perhaps more importantly, what does not make news. They know that it is only the balanced, targeted news releases with a strong news angle that will be deemed worthy of a journalist’s followup.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 10:51 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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