Guest AuthorI’m thinking of moving back to Tallahassee because I understand there’s a new line of work available for folks like me.
I used to be a public relations professional there, helping clients generate interest in their issues, communicate more effectively with the public and avoid missteps in the dicey world of state politics.
After years of working in that world, I was ready for a different lifestyle. So my family and I moved to Pensacola, where we’ve lived happily since 2003. But after reading Florence Snyder’s column here on Context Florida, I think I want a do-over – a midlife mulligan as it were.
I realize now that I had it all wrong for nearly 20 years. Instead of going to all the trouble of holding press conferences, writing releases and opinion pieces, and responding to media inquiries, I could have been lobbying reporters instead.
According to Snyder, “Lobbying the press is big business and an out-of-control cancer on the body politic.”
I’m in.
She had me at big business. I could always use the money and I’m pretty sure the body politic has suffered through worse than me.
The biggest question I have is how to get started. How does one actually lobby the media and become one of the “expected expenditures” she mentions?
I guess I could start with the old-school approach and buy them dinner and drinks, or maybe take them on a nice trip somewhere. The problem is that the Tallahassee reporters I know wouldn’t go for that. In fact, several wouldn’t take a glass of water if they thought it might compromise them, and a couple might just throw me out of their offices.
No, I just don’t see that idea of gifts and trips panning out.
I don’t think campaign contributions and fundraisers will work either, especially since the media are unelected.
That leaves me in a bind because the only other lobbying techniques I can think of are much more mundane. Things like learning clients’ issues and coming up with creative ways to show how they are relevant to the general public.
Maybe pointing out how a piece of legislation might have unintended consequences or bringing attention to problems that would otherwise go unnoticed.
It’s true that those things do involve speaking with the reporters and I guess you might define them as “shopping” a story around or being a “conduit to the media.” The problem is that they sound less like lobbying and more like the communications profession in which I’ve spent most of my career.
Though I’m not one of them, there are a lot of former reporters in the public relations profession. They help associations, businesses and individuals have a better chance of being successful in the court of public opinion. Snyder can call them whatever she wants, but they are no more a “cancer on the body politic” than lawyers are a cancer on the justice system.
Honest, ethical reporters like Mary Ellen Klas were the rule rather than the exception when I left town a decade ago. If Snyder is suggesting that’s changed, then it’s an insult to the reporters – not the people vying for their attention. I doubt that’s what she intended, but it is where her logic leads.
In any case, it’s a good reminder of how nasty things can get inside Capital Circle and a great incentive to stay where I am.
