A journalist rushes to publish, he doesn’t have the luxury of conducting either PEST or SWOT analysis of what he’s publishing. His essence is being the first to publish, all he checks for are facts, accuracy and impact of what he makes public.
It is the Public Relations expert that has the luxury of not only checking what the journalist has to check but also going far further ahead and checking the long term repercussions of any information on the image of his principal.
A Public Relations expert must conduct PEST, SWOT analysis and even further analysis on any piece of information about his principal before making it public.
That’s why, as a politician, one needs to be careful in making a journalist part of his Public Relations personnel. This is so because for a journalist to function as an effective Public Relations expert, he needs to change, both his aptitude, appetite, approach, practice and even philosophy.
To the journalist, there is no problem tending his camels in a China-shop because he’s looking for the conflict sides of information while to the Public Relations expert, camels belong to the desert while china-shop is where he goes shopping for eatery utensils. To the journalist, camels trampling into china-shop will bring applause for his ability to unearth what’s hidden in the china-shop while to the Public Relations expert, what’s in a China-shop is not meant for free public consumption but would be best released in a controlled piecemeal pieces with lots of euphemistic truths.
The analogy above is well captured by the distributive publicity stunts being daily releasd by one of our presidential media persons, Mr. Bayo Onanuga. Typical of his journalism drives, he drops clinkers that are inimical to the image of the president and he’s always ready to engage in online boasterous banters that are not good for the image of the president.
Check for instance, his recent social media post about the presidential pardon of incarcerated Nigerians. Right from the headline, through to the body of that long post, there was nothing with any semblance of positive communication which should have been the central theme of the message. The release read like a long magazine article written by a tired journalist who has been forced to write at the closing time of his beat. Rather than a piece to extol the virtues of the president, the piece was a damning article that showed a president freeing drug lords and capital offenders.
Indeed, Mr. Bayo is an accomplished journalist but he should appreciate the fact that there is a sharp retinue of differences between journalism and public relations or even media relations. Let him go into introspection and redress his steps far away from journalism for now, and back into the manifold of Public Relations which is all about positive communication, not unnecessary banter and explosive headlines that put the image of his principal to more doubt. Doing this will serve in tripod tranche: the president, Mr. Bayo and the profession he is currently trying to settle into. Doing that will really separate the fact that camels are best kept in desert environments while breakable plates remain unbroken in a China-shop.
Hashim Muhammad Suleiman, PhD
