Iain MacLean - candid thoughts on public relations

An interesting and vigorous debate has erupted amongst US bloggers and commentators following the announcement by IT news blog TechCrunch that it had been emailed hundreds of documents by a hacker who had cracked a Google Docs account of a Twitter staff member and downloaded their documents (In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents). I first became aware of this from Julie Freeman’s eXchange site post, When is news fit to print? Of course, I heard about Julie’s post as a result of a Tweet.

The TechCrunch editor, Michael Arlington, made a song and dance about it in his original post, told everyone he was going to publish some of it and invited a response from this readers. And, boy, did he get one. There are hundreds of comments on the post, most of them saying they thought he was being despicable to even consider publishing any stolen material (Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post).

Michael Arlington could have saved himself a whole lot of grief if he’d just written a story and said the information came from “confidential documents obtained by TechCrunch”. But instead, he made a big deal of how he got it. That was probably a silly move, but he may have wanted to skite about their big scoop.

If I was a tech journalist and had been sent this information, I’m pretty sure I’d write a story from it, after the appropriate discussions with the editor and our lawyer. When I was a reporter, we would occasionally be given information by people who had obtained it by dubious means. I can’t recall us not broadcasting stories simply because of how our sources got it.

This is how the news business works every day, and this situation is not unusual. Reporters get information from a variety of sources, some of whom are entitled to the information, and some of whom aren’t. Who they are, and how they came by it, isn’t really the reporter’s concern.

When you’re given this information, you have to decide what to do with it. Obviously, the first thing to do is determine whether it is legitimate and correct. If it is, then you have to decide whether to publish it, and how much of it to use. As Shel Holtz put on his post on this, “A reporter or editor would have to evaluate the news value vs. the privacy and potential harm issues” (The ethics of publishing stolen material). Personal information generally isn’t news, even though the bottom feeders in the celebrity media gain their livelihoods from it. But, sometimes it is legitimate news. If I was the head of a country (e.g. North Korea) or a large corporation (e.g. Apple), my health might be relevant to many people, and there might be some wider public interest in disclosing it.

If the reporter respects the natural privacy of individuals and chooses to minimise or eliminate the gratuitous harm that disclosing the information might have, then the story just has to satisfy the news values. For instance, is it about elite organisations or individuals, are they currently in the news, is it novel information, does it involve conflict, what are the effects of their actions on others, is it a new angle? The Twitter information would satisfy many of those tests, and writing stories from it could be justified on those grounds.

Twitter is a high profile organisation. It is engaged in high stakes games with other big companies and what they do affects a lot of people. These things make it newsworthy. But there’s no public interest in it.

There’s a clear difference between “the public interest” and “newsworthy”. They are two different sets of values, and I have often had discussions with journalists about how the public interest is not the same as the public being interested in something. Working in government PR under our Official Information Act, I’m well versed in how to define “public interest”, at least for official information, e.g. maintenance of the law, national security, confidence in the processes of government, etc. (Actually, this cuts both ways and can be used as a justification for either withholding information or releasing it, depending on the situation.)

There’s also a clear distinction between accepted news values and the sort of ethics code we sign up to when we join IABC or PRINZ. In my job, I wouldn’t use information in the same way I was expected to do as a journalist, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t use illegally obtained information like this, unless there was an overwhelming public interest in doing so.

However, I don’t think we should make too big a distinction between the more common leaks of information to the media and the situation Twitter has found itself in. Sure, not many leaks come from a virtual burglary, but they often come from an employee who has obtained information they were not entitled to have, and given it to someone they were not entitled to give it to. That is a form of theft. It might not be illegal, but it would be unethical and would probably breach the terms of their employment.

I think Michael Arlington is probably being responsible in what he is choosing to publish, withholding any personal information and anything to do with security. Talking to Twitter management to verify the authenticity of the documents and clarifying what it the most sensitive before publishing is good journalism practice. However, he seems to have taken the easy route in his story Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet” by just reproducing parts of the documents, rather than doing more analysis and writing a story from that. It might be a result of time pressure, but it’s essentially a narrative, and not a particularly interesting one except in a nosey kind of way, from what I’ve read so far.

I’ve commented on this on TechCruch, and on Julie’s and Shel’s blogs, and I appear to be in the minority in my view that writing a story based on this material is justified by accepted journalistic ethics and news values. Just to be clear, I’m only saying what I think would be generally accepted journalistic practice in this case. I think the ethical judgements vary, depending on the craft. Ethical PR people would handle this information differently to an ethical journalist. The values at work in a newsroom are different to those we would be expected to use when we were looking at confidential or personal information that might be helpful to our clients or employers.

Professional ethics is a code of acceptable practice; if we’re lucky, they coincide with our personal ethics. The formal ethical codes of PR are closer to my personal values than what I understood to be the ones that applied when I was a journalist.

I was never a “publish and be damned” or muckraking type of reporter and was pretty conservative in my approach, but if I was in Michael Arlington’s shoes at TechCrunch, I’d probably go for it, too.

[20/7/09] While we might argue over the ethics of using information that a source has obtained illegally or without authority, the ethics of this case (Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims) are simpler. Journalists at News Group hired private investigators to hack into the mobile phone accounts of public figures. Details of the court cases were supressed, but exposed by The Guardian a couple of weeks ago.

Last week we ran our monthly ‘Be Heard’, where two of our board members who attended the recent world conference in San Francisco—chapter president, Shona Brown, and treasurer, Michael Mead—lead a discussion on evaluation under the title “Measurement—it doesn’t have to be hard or expensive”. They had both attended Angela Sinickas’s presentation and had been mightily impressed by what she had to say, and based the discussion on Angela’s presentation.

The examples they gave were useful, and the ideas were ones that Angela is well-know for. However, I found the reaction of some of our members particularly interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, a couple of people seemed to be suspicious of evaluation and measurement, and didn’t believe it is much more than counting some made-up measure to justify your existence. Secondly, many people seemed to genuinely not know what to measure, or could see only big, difficult-to-measure communication outcomes, such as changes in attitude that could only be tracked with expensive surveys or research. One example we discussed from Angela’s presentation was of a company that saved $20k/month on phone calls as a direct result of an internal communications campaign to remind staff to use special pre-dialling codes to reduce the cost of long-distance phone calls. I was pretty impressed by this, but a few people seemed underwhelmed, and I think this is partly because the idea of measuring things that aren’t “communication” outcomes is a difficult concept. Or perhaps it’s just boring.

I’m currently working for an organisation that is very process orientated. We receive applications for official documents, which we process following set business rules that are determined by legislation. So, our service delivery staff are striving for qualities like accuracy and efficiency in their work. My colleague and I have been looking at how we can make ourselves more useful to the organisation. It’s easy enough to keep busy—there’s always work to do—but, in my view, you’re wasting your time if you don’t know that you are being of any use. We’ve concluded that we have to get deeper into the detail of the day-to-day business, to understand it better so that we can be genuinely useful.

At the same time, most organisations—in both the public and private sector—are looking at what functions are really essential and communications groups are needing to prove their worth in practical ways, which often means the bottom line. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think there are a number of important steps to take when planning communications we are going to evaluate:

• Choose what to measure—sort out what is important and what is possible.
• Align communication objectives with business objectives to see where we can add value that can be measured and that has some value to others, i.e. what is the value to the business of the outcomes of our communication efforts?
• Use research and evaluation to develop objectives—for example, media content analysis or brand health surveys will describe the current situation, which allows us to develop a PR programme to change those results to something more desirable.
• Identify data that is already collected by the organisation—sales volumes, number of transactions or orders processed, productivity statistics, financial data, number and quality of job applications—that we could influence with communications.

Some of this might appear to be easier in the private sector, but all organisations spend money or operate in a wasteful way, and many government organisations do a lot of processing, the throughput and accuracy of which can be measured. The communications around them are often left to service delivery groups, but communications staff could make a valuable contribution to that process. For instance, if a poorly-worded form is resulting in a lot of errors in information sent in, and re-work by staff, we should be able to use our editing and writing-for-clarity skills to reduce that. If this was a serious problem, the business has probably already detected it through measurement and the benefit of our contribution would be measured as part of regular monitoring and reporting.

To me, this reinforces the value of knowing the nitty-gritty business of the organisation and how that knowledge can help us identify the aspects of the day-to-day business that our skills could contribute to (and be evaluated against).

Once it comes to the evaluation, it doesn’t need to be expensive or difficult to do. If the business metrics already exist, use them. If it’s an external PR or social marketing campaign, we can survey proxies of our target audience. For instance, if the organisation is finding it difficult to attract enough high-quality job applications, we could survey recruitment consultants to get their impressions of the organisation and then develop a PR programme to alter that; monitor the quality and number of job applications the business gets (behavioural change), and continue surveying the recruitment consultants (attitudinal change) to see whether we are having any effect. (This is another example of another part of the organisation, i.e. HR, having data that is useful for PR programmes.)

The key point here is that having objectives based on sound research and the understanding of a proven need allows us to focus our actions on the results that will have the greatest obvious benefit, which may be the easiest to measure in the short-term. (Of course, social marketing and other long-term attitudinal change programmes don’t necessarily fit this model.)

One other thing, programmes that use evaluation can be really useful for self-improvement. Our clients or employers might not care too much about our “craft”, but we can use the results of evaluation to guide our professional development.