Still selling stories? Time to close the chequebook.

Ethical communications - at what cost?

Some time ago, my good friend and fellow trainer Tony Charlesworth and I found ourselves in Sarajevo at the request of the UNHCR to give tips on media work to lawyers working with people trying to recover their property as they returned to their homes after the war. The lawyers, quite rightly, needed to know how to attract journalists to their story, with the benign aim of reaching out through the newspapers, radio and television screens to their prospective clients.

Prepping before the visit, I asked what the best media channel was in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and got the unsurprising answer that it was television. I protested that radio was usually a quicker route (these were definitely the days Before Facebook), but they explained that as a vast majority of the population was unemployed and stuck in front of the screen for most of the day, then the goggle box was definitely the best way to go.

Then they shocked me. How, they asked, could they afford the price they had to pay to get a story on TV?

Hold on a minute, are we talking advertising? No, they replied, we need to pay journalists to carry stories.

Two days of media training later, I was pretty sure that the lawyers would have good enough material to attract the hacks. They’d learnt how to create a message, how to find a human story, and how to get a reporter to respond.

I never did learn how they fared after the second session, but I left with the assumption that the journalists of Bosnia and Herzegovina were in the same learning curve as others in South East Europe, and that as the people with the stories became wiser about how to present themselves, then the journalists too would start to professionalise. BBC, Thompson, Reuters and Deutschwelle were beginning their outreach into the area, and my hopes for change were high.

This week, joining the PRO.PR conference in Maribor, and finding myself back on the Balkans Beat after a gap of nearly seven years, I was taken aback to hear my early experiences echoed from the conference floor. B & H is now seeing its own wave of young PR professionals coming to the fore, and they too are bemoaning the need to pay journalist to run stories.

So much has changed in the country: the independent Communications Regulatory Agency is now in place; a press code has been adopted, along with a press council; libel and defamation has been decriminalised; a Freedom of Access to Information Law has been passed and what was once a state-owned broadcaster is now a public service broadcasting system. Many of the people who want to work with journalists now know how to present a story so that it appeals, and would never dream of using money as a bargaining chip.Yet the tradition of stories for favours still remains, and partisan journalism is still in evidence.

But hang on a minute, who am I to judge? My own country, once happy to preach to the countries of south east Europe, is now mired in phone-tapping revelations; the Germans are just recovering from a scandal involving the media that brought down their president;  and there are almost daily exposes into the antics of political spin doctors all over Europe. 

Who can take the moral high ground? It looks like communications ethics is really ripe for review in Europe!