A media outlet’s writer contacted us, thanking us for helping with one of our clients’ stories. She said the number of companies attempting to include their products in the story got competitive and congratulated us for making the cut.
We thanked her for including our client in the story. However, we asked her if she wanted an opportunity to correct information in the story about our client before we posted the story on social media. The mistakes included:
- typos
- incorrectly referring to a product by the company name itself
- a capitalization problem with the product’s name
When I worked as a television reporter, I learned reporters, companies and PR pros can misunderstand each other despite their best efforts. Companies and PR pros often speak an industry lingo. Reporters without regular beats are attempting to understand an industry they aren’t particularly familiar with. Because of this, I, after an interview, often double checked a story’s most important facts with a company or its representative. Most reporters don’t take this step just prior to sharing their stories with producers and editors. Some reporters may misinterpret later checking the facts with sources as censorship. However, I simply checked facts. I didn’t allow sources an opportunity to sugar coat their words and take out important information.
We recommend companies, after providing media interviews, send a follow-up email to reporters which politely reviews the key points discussed. This is our attempt to help improve reporter accuracy, which too often is absent from journalism. It is not uncommon for us to ask reporters to correct their mistakes after their outlets publish stories. We aren’t referring to subjective corrections that would place our clients in a more positive light. We are referring to clearly incorrect information such as wrong job titles or mistakes about someone’s education.
People may assume reporters are loathe to acknowledge mistakes and take steps to then correct them. However, we believe every reporter we contacted about mistakes moved forward and corrected them. In our latest example, we needed to email the writer twice before hearing back about our request for corrections. And correcting the mistakes included about 12 emails back and forth. Ultimately, most reporters don’t want errors to sully their reputations, especially if those mistakes might indicate a lack of attention to detail. And we infer clients appreciate a PR pro’s efforts to a greater extent when the final piece isn’t tattered with mistakes. Audiences may not recognize these types of errors. But for clients, every word often counts. We can’t always expect objectivity. However, we should expect accuracy.