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Agencies: Here's how not to do your PR

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By Cameron Clarke, Editor

June 12, 2012 | 4 min read

Here’s a tip for anyone looking to build relationships with the media: don’t ring their newsdesks issuing demands.

Tourist shows off its Rita Ora work on its own website

I’d have thought that would have been pretty self-explanatory, but a few unpleasant telephone and email exchanges today have left me wondering.

Yesterday, one of my colleagues at The Drum published a story about a new client win for London digital agency Tourist.

The information in this story was taken from a press release issued by Tourist’s PR agency Chesamel. It was headlined ‘London creative agency designs Rita Ora’s website and new album’ and was edited and then published by one of our reporters in good faith.

This afternoon I received an anxious phone call from Tourist telling me the story was untrue and must be removed from our website immediately.

Asking a journalist to take down news is not an endearing tactic. Demanding that they do so is foolish in the extreme.

That said, I’m not so hubristic to believe that we don’t get things wrong. Like every news publication, there are times when we make mistakes and when that happens we make corrections. I explained to Tourist that if they sent over a quick email explaining what was wrong with the story, we could consider making any necessary corrections.

When the email arrived, it said the story should be removed because “it is not true that we have been appointed to design [Ora’s] album cover”.

Not only does this run contrary to what was said in the press release, it also contradicts a tweet from Tourist’s Twitter account, which reads: “Big news: after the successful pitch to create @RitaOra’s website, we have also been asked to handle her future album cover and campaign!!!”

Perhaps someone at the agency or their PR team had just got a little ahead of themselves, I thought. If it were untrue, I would be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and correct the story to remove the reference to the album cover but keep in the information about the website.

But that wasn’t enough. I received several more increasingly frantic emails and two further phone calls: one from a senior member of Tourist’s team demanding that the story be taken down and another from the PR agency again asking for the story to be removed. As I go to hit publish on this post, we are still receiving phone calls.

The great irony in all this is that, Tourist are still advertising the fact that they are working with Rita Ora on their own website.

Sadly we receive quite a lot of calls like these. Often PRs and agencies ask us to remove stories, despite them being true, because they had released the news prematurely without first seeking the permission of their client to talk about the contract.

I often sympathise with the person who is being asked to make that call, because they are probably as frustrated by the situation as we are. But once a story is online it’s already too late.

We’re in the business of publishing news, not removing it.

Cameron Clarke is The Drum’s Opinion Editor

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