In this post I’ll attempt to answer the questions I posed to myself at the end of “My Experience as a Corporate Blogger.”
What did I do wrong and/or right? I believe I went right by adding my name to posts and showing some personality to give the blog a more credible, human element. I wasn’t just regurgitating PR material. On the other hand, not asking for a blog policy or guidelines earlier or upon starting the job set me up for a clash.
What did they do wrong and/or right? Based on my readings, they made several errors, including deleting something after it’s been posted, prior review and only allowing content related directly to the company (or to themselves). It is failure on my part and theirs by not having a blog policy or guidelines.
How could a situation like this have been avoided? I think it could have been avoided with a BLOG POLICY or GUIDELINES. For example, the policy could say the topic of fatal injuries is off limits. Therefore I would know ahead of time what I could and could not write, they wouldn’t feel the need to delete something I already wrote and I wouldn’t have to get angry and lose my job over it. I guess I could also not start out on a story that I didn’t know the ending to, though I never would have predicted the ending that it had and I think doing it that way allowed for readers to have some fun following along in real time.
How does journalism relate to corporate blogging? At the heart of the issue is that I stood up for journalistic ethics that I was being taught in college and personally believe in. As someone being trained to be a journalist, not a PR writer, did I even fit in writing a corporate blog?
Corporate blogs are an informal type of PR. Posts can tell a story, just like a newspaper article. Journalism and PR share some of the same ethics. For a refresher on blogging ethics, see my post here. The Public Relations Society of America and Society of Professional Journalists each have a code of ethics. Both journalism and PR must tell the truth, but PR material has some additional rules. From an earlier Blog O’ Blogs post – “Because corporate blogs are a form of advertising, they fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates the marketplace in the interest of consumers. Truth-in-advertising laws are in place to ensure advertisers are not deceiving customers.”
Good journalism shows all sides of a story, good and bad. Likewise, good PR acknowledges problems and what the company is doing to fix them, instead of ignoring them and simply writing about the glossy stuff in life.
Though the Internet has made it easier and far more common for journalism outlets to cover up mistakes, the standard has been to leave them and publicly correct them in future publications. This also goes for blogging, as covered at the end of this earlier post. The same goes for PR itself.
Journalists and PR practitioners should both avoid conflicts of interest. There is one conflict of interest, though, that is unavoidable and basically implied with corporate bloggers – they work for the company, so they are likely to write favorably about that company. That is an important difference that sets corporate blogs apart. Blogs, corporate and non-corporate, often contain opinion, something that should be absent in objective journalism.
So there are some differences between PR and journalism, but they share many common ethics and corporate blogs blend the two.
