Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
Jim Lukaszewski: When I give this lecture, all the questions are media-related questions and I keep saying, “Hey, trying to get the message out is way beyond what the media does,” and in fact, is one of the difficulties for the communicator. In this book, I have a mixture of examples and stories from all these areas because I don’t want this to be just about communicators.
When the boss hears this impassioned defense of the news media, of reporters, when a PR guy leaves and I’m the room, the boss looks at me and says, “Who is he working for today? I know he’s getting a paycheck from me, but who’s he working for today. Is he working for the television station or is he working for me?”
This is part of the concept of being a trusted advisor. You have to sort out where your allegiances are. You have to sort out what you’re really about and what is in the best interest of this individual, and it’s well beyond what reporters are doing. In fact, news reporters, for example, are becoming less and less important to us every day.
Other mediums and other kinds of journalists like public citizens are becoming more important because not only do they have more clout, all the studies are demonstrating that people believe more of what’s on the Web than they believe coming from the local newspaper, television station or radio.
This is a seismic shift for the communicator to absorb and most communicators still—70 percent—come from journalism. This is really tough. I was in a conversation just the other day with a bunch of people saying we have to defend the journalism, they’re under assault, and I’m saying, “Why do we have to do that? They own the ink barrel—they can defend themselves.”
The issue for us is how to serve our clients in ways that help them relate to society better, because society is changing in terms of what it believes and who it believes. I don’t see how we’re going to recover the credibility of newspapers. It’s collapsing. The public believes that they make this stuff up, that they lie, that they actually are even unpatriotic, to be pleasant about it, and radio and television are not far behind.
We’re calling them legacy media—they’re old. The new public is moving beyond these media, so as a profession, just looking at it from a professional standpoint, things are changing dramatically and it’s the public that’s forcing these changes. The big thing that’s happening is that everybody gets to be a journalist these days. The definition of that has gone completely hazy.
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Jim’s new book, Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor
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