David Hellier’s stand against the Friday night drop will probably
elicit little more than a ’so what?’ from the financial PR
community.
The Express is hardly the UK’s leading business news outlet, so the drop
masters are not going to lose much sleep if the paper’s City
correspondent refuses to speak to them. And Hellier is not sacrificing a
particularly close relationship with the drop masters. They tend to give
their stories to the Financial Times, or the Sunday Times and the Sunday
Telegraph.
But Hellier’s move should not be ignored. It casts a shadow on the PR
industry’s reputation, coming as it does after Patrick Weever’s attempt
last month to expose what he sees as the overly close relationship
between financial PRs and journalists. And certain financial PR clients
need to reach Express readers. Stories like Marks and Spencer’s
financial health and the takeover of NatWest matter just as much to the
general, Express-reading public as they do to the City.
The practice of favouring certain papers at the expense of others is not
going to stop. But there are times when financial PR agencies will need
to get their client’s message across to the Express and its ilk, so that
making enemies of their journalists can only be bad for business.
