Prangle.ie (this urban dictionary definition notwithstanding) is a press release service recently launched by a former Sunday Times journalist, Douglas Dalby. It promises to make sense of the hundreds of press releases that daily issue forth from agencies, and target them specifically to the needs of the each journo’s particular beat. This is good for the agencies and their clients, good for journalists and good for Prangle. It is highly questionable whether it’s good for newspapers or their readers (see more or less every Paper Round post for more on the journo/PR relationship).
That a journalist’s job is to write up what the PR companies tell him to do is taken as a given in Prangle’s material. Outlining the advantages of their services to PR agencies, they tell us
“Journalists can be hard to get to. But they love Prangle, because they are lazy it’s a trusted, central, one-stop resource???.
Apart from the amusing but probably all-too-accurate assumption that journalists will be delighted by having to make only one stop in order to research a story, it’s interesting to note that no possibility is acknowledged that a journalist might not want to print what the agency feeds him. No, there’s no need to worry about him having critical faculties of his own – merely “getting to him” will suffice. Again, this assumption is probably depressingly on-the-money. Still, this is sales material and must be read as such. If you’re selling a service to agencies, you will obviously do your best to reassure them that it is the key to unlimited news coverage for their clients. But what are they saying to journalists?
The key selling point is that journalists will receive more targeted, less plentiful press releases, but the assumption remains that PR material is essential to the journalist’s job. In this vision of the press, journalists provide a service to PR firms (free publicity) and vice versa (effort-free stories). As I suggested above, everyone’s a winner except the reader. Why not let Prangle write the whole paper? Better, let’s just abolish the papers and subscribe to Prangle ourselves. As a very occasionally published writer, I thought I might just squeak into Prangle’s definition of freelance journalist and thus be considered eligible for a subscription. At present my application is awaiting moderation. If all goes well, I may never buy a paper again. After all, why would I need to? We all know that any really important news comes from a PR agency, not from journalism.
I have no real problem with PR people or with Prangle. My problem is with the environment that makes Prangle’s product such an indispensible one. The villains here are not the PR people, who are just doing their job, but the papers, which are not.
20 Comments
Hi Fergal,
Thanks for your interest in our new service. I would be as depressed as you would appear to be if, having earned my crust for over 20 years as a journalist, I had spent all of my working life regurgitating press releases!
I think this says more about your pejorative view of the media than it does about the reality of working in a newsroom.
Prangle is not intended to be a one-stop shop for lazy hacks. On the contrary, it should free journalists up from the amount of time they have to spend searching through spam for legitimate news releases, on which they can build stories. What they choose to do with the releases is up to themselves. Personally, I was always taught that the only thing useful about press releases were the contact details at the bottom!
To infer that there is no place for news releases as an indispensible informational tool for media is to display incredible arrogance towards the professionalism of journalists and considerable naivety.
Regards,
Douglas Dalby
I think the site itself declares that it does intend to be a one-stop shop. Those words are yours, not mine.
I happen to think the site is a very good business idea, and have no gripe with it. But there are stories that are nothing more than press releases re-written (or not re-written), and I see examples every single day, in every paper. I saw two or three in yesterdays Times alone. This isn’t to say that every journalist is at it, all the time. But when it does happen, I think (and none of this is anything other than my opinion, by the way) it’s lazy and in bad faith.
Anyway, thanks for your comments, and good luck with your service. Perversely, it will help me to compare the text of press releases to newspaper stories, so it might help prove me wrong, or right in the long term.
Some praise from journalists for Prangle. My favourite quote is from the Irish Sun’s Editor.
“A service devised and operated by professionals who know how newsrooms work”
Frank Fitzgibbon, Editor, The Sunday Times (Ireland)
“Prangle is an excellent idea and should prove an extremely useful service for professional journalists.”
Cliff Taylor, Editor, The Sunday Business Post
“This seems like one of those services which you imagine should be available already. I expect it will prove very useful to anybody putting together newslists on a daily or weekly basis.”
Tom McEnaney, Business Editor, The Irish Independent
“A service that saves vital time, while delivering the information you really need — Prangle should become a must-use for journalists.”
Ted Harding, presenter, The Sunday Business Show, Today FM
“I would expect newsdesks across the country to check this service all day, every day”
Michael McNiffe, Editor, The Irish Sun
“Someone needs to cut through the chaotic blizzard of press releases and Prangle could be just the job to do it in an intelligent and manageable fashion.”
Ronan Price, Editor, Herald AM
Fergal,
One stop shop are indeed my words but a media critic in particular should be very careful about using something devoid of context to try to prove a point.
Even given the caveat about your missive merely being your opinion rather than something that would stand up to scrutiny in any news pages of what you might consider a reputable newspaper, you leave yourself open to be dismissed quickly out of hand.
Prangle is not intended as a prop for lazy journalists and I certainly don’t buy your argument that it fits into some kind of giant media/PR conspiracy designed to defraud gullible readers.
I also think it is facile to brand journalists as lazy on the basis of the use of news releases.
Finally, I would dearly love to have as much time on my hands as you appear to have but I hope I would use it more productively than to compare news releases with written articles.
Thanks for your good wishes – now I have to go back to trying to get my new business up and running.
Regards,
Douglas
Well, a man tries to be polite and this is what he gets. Name calling, patronising, and having words put into his mouth. I never said my opinion wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, that’s just something you made up, in fine journalistic fashion. Despite your comments to the contrary, you’ve had enough time on your hands to post two comments, so why not take a visit to the paper round wiki where we have plenty of statistical analysis of what kind of stories appear in papers. I think they stand up rather well to scrutiny.
By all means get back to running your business, but please don’t act as if it was me who tore you away from it in the first place. If blogging is for people with too much time on my hands, where does that leave people who get angry with bloggers?
Fergal,
I apologise if you feel I stepped over the mark of robust debate. However, I reject your assertion that I engaged in name-calling, taunting or distortion.
Having endured as a journalist decades of taunts from hurlers on ditches, I tend to get defensive when I have the rare opportunity of engaging one, even in cyber person.
I have no wish to offend, engage in a slanging match nor to suggest that you are keeping me from running my business.
The success of the blog should be measured by the fact that it was brought to my attention in the first place.
By all means keep on blogging but don’t be surprised if with democratisation of media comes the power of reply.
Regards,
Douglas Dalby
Paper Round isn’t on the ditch, it’s down there on the pitch, fielding ball and clashing sticks to bate the band.
The mind boggles, frankly, that a journalist would characterise non-journalist critics as hurlers on the ditch, that is mere spectators, when it is non-journalists, also known as the general public, at whom journalistic output is aimed.
Let’s not forget, Douglas, that many of us ABC1s out here have tertiary and graduate degrees, professional qualifications and a sophistication of understanding born of long years of media consumption.
The notion that the opinions of consumers of media product aren’t entitled to respect is, I suspect, one which informs the proposition that the practice of prangling isn’t simply a potentially lucrative one, but also, somehow a “good”. Let’s not get carried away, like.
As the reams of Paper Round statistics demonstrate, it’s bad, M’kay?
“The notion that the opinions of consumers of media product aren’t entitled to respect is, I suspect, one which informs the proposition that the practice of prangling isn’t simply a potentially lucrative one, but also, somehow a “good???. Let’s not get carried away, like.
As the reams of Paper Round statistics demonstrate, it’s bad, M’kay?”
And your point is?
Prangling violates the newspapers’ duty to their readership not to present as “news” and unvarnished fact what is actually planted material from narrow interests.
It’s not like the papers actually flag prangled material as PR, which is, frankly dishonest.
And bad, M’kay?
“Prangling violates the newspapers’ duty to their readership not to present as “news??? and unvarnished fact what is actually planted material from narrow interests.”
A bold statement, one that presumes that any information put out by PR firms is automatically not of any value (nearly all organisations, be they private firms, lobby groups or NGOs, covering a wide range of interests, use PR), and that journalists automatically regurgitate these press releases unquestioningly (some do, but that does not equate to the idea of ‘prangling’ being a violation of journalistic integrity). It’s simply a pragmatic starting point.
I think Douglas’ first reply was on the money, and he should have left it at that.
It’s also amusing to hear Fergal rebuke somebody for being patronising.
Niall! Great to have you back with us. On behalf of all at Paper Round, I’d like to thank you for so reliably rising to our bait.
I’d like to thank Niall for helping Paper Round to get the ball rolling on having the term “prangling” enter the language.
I’d also like to thank him for constructing a strawman out of my argument. Ditto to Douglas who ignored my substantive point and even implied that my use of the words
“The notion that the opinions of consumers of media product aren’t entitled to respect is, I suspect, one which informs the proposition that the practice of prangling isn’t simply a potentially lucrative one, but also, somehow a “good???. Let’s not get carried away, like.
As the reams of Paper Round statistics demonstrate, it’s bad, M’kay????
aren’t a) crystal clear and b) don’t point those in search of enlightenment in the direction of the Paper Round distributive textual analysis and the stats derived therefrom.
Oh lordy, why can’t we all be friends? Prangle is, and I do hope Douglas doesn’t take offence at this description, a TOOL which can be used for effective informed journalism or lazy hack regurgitation of spin. Hopefully it will be a tool that promotes the former and will help diminsh the latter – which PaperRound demonstrated was a distinct risk/trend in Irish print media.
As a Press officer for an international professional organisation working in a niche area of business and IT management practices I have submitted a number of press releases to Irish media over the past year or so – the most recent being last week in relation to the data quality issues that arose in the High Court trial of Kevin Henevy. To date I have received exactly ZERO responses from print media. I had considered getting an uncle who is a copper to submit the last one as, coming from a ‘garda source’ it might have made The Evening Herald.
The topics that we have submitted releases and content (including submissions from international experts) on include:
*Electoral Register
*Information Quality in Healthcare and the costs to the Irish economy (comparing the State Claims Agency’s report on medication errors in Ireland with a similar study from the US Institute of Medicine and mapping the costs over to Ireland – costs us a pretty penny).
*The importance of Information Quality in the legal process.
When PPARS broke as a story we even had two of the project managers presenting at one of our conferences about the root causes of the problem – media were invited well in advance but no-one came. Press release issued afterwards… no response.
Perhaps Prangle will help prioritise/filter or declutter the pitch for small organisations trying to get a toe-hold in the PR stakes and provide an alternate view of stories by allowing journos breathing space to look for and find those new angles.
If that is the case, well done Douglas. If not….
(by the way, I’m in the process of putting up the text of all releases or article submissions that were submitted over the past few months on the website of the Irish branch of our association – http://www.iqnetwork.org.)
“Niall! Great to have you back with us. On behalf of all at Paper Round, I’d like to thank you for so reliably rising to our bait.”
Well, nobody else seemed to be paying much attention lately. Always happy to oblige.
“Well, nobody else seemed to be paying much attention lately. Always happy to oblige.”
Miaow. They were quoted in the Irish Times today and should be picking up an award or two tomorrow at the blog awards and Simon was on the telly last week. So they’re not doing too bad for a bunch of bloggers.
I also applied for a prangle account and am awaiting a response with interest. It will certainly be a useful resource for anybody working in, or interested in, the media, if it works that is.
From looking around the site, one of the interesting problems that I see with it is the fact that it promises that press releases will be kept confidential from other PR agencies – that’s just not going to work. The login vetting, access control and security mechanisms required for such confidentiality would be very difficult to enforce within an organisation, never mind across multiple organisations and freelancers.
On the bigger picture, if it works, it will amount to a formalisation of the information conveyer belt from company -> PR agency -> journo -> media which is more or less how most information reaches the public already. It would just organise it better and properly exclude all those who want to contact journalists and don’t employ PR agencies.
“Miaow. They were quoted in the Irish Times today and should be picking up an award or two tomorrow at the blog awards and Simon was on the telly last week.”
So success is determined by appearing in the mainstream press. Slightly ironic, you’ll have to agree.
“It would just organise it better and properly exclude all those who want to contact journalists and don’t employ PR agencies.”
So if you can’t afford a PR company you shouldn’t contact a journalist. Hmmm.
“So success is determined by appearing in the mainstream press. Slightly ironic, you’ll have to agree.”
Let’s go through it again.
You said that nobody was paying much attention to them.
I pointed out that several media outlets with large audiences had paid attention recently.
You replied by claiming that I was, thus, saying that success was measured by appearances in the mainstream press.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to identify the non-sequitur in your argument.
“So if you can’t afford a PR company you shouldn’t contact a journalist. Hmmm.”
Nope, another invalid and incorrect inference that you’ve drawn. If there is a single “one-stop shop” source of authoritative press releases, tailored to the needs of journalists, those press releases which do not come from that source are likely to receive less attention. If this was not the case, the service would be a failure. Simple really.
I was looking at the dearth of comments as more of an indication of whether people were paying attention or not. You’d still have to say its slightly ironic, though.
“It would just organise it better and properly exclude all those who want to contact journalists and don’t employ PR agencies.”
I can only make inferences from what you write – correct, invalid or otherwise.
“I can only make inferences from what you write – correct, invalid or otherwise.”
gah!
Starting trouble again Mr. Dalby? The more things change…
Anyways, good luck in your endeavor. Jingle us sometime.