A Threat to Real Journalism
When communicating with your buyers directly, a “news release” is a popular and convenient way to reach your audience. As the media landscape rapidly and constantly evolves, your company is bound to deal with both successes and challenges, and communicating these to both the public and the press will benefit your credibility and reputation tremendously. Creating trusted relationships between your consumers as well as media establishments will increase your success with cultivating a profitable community. But doing so through manipulation, under the guise of “journalism” and “newsrooms”, goes a step further to take even more money from the consumer while eroding the journalistic landscape. We must abandon these harmful attitudes and practices; they do nothing but decrease the quality of information and products while taking more and more from consumers, exacerbating the cycle of the exploitation of the working class. Our businesses and economy cannot be built on lies and deception, on shiny objects and loud noises lacking any real substance. It has left our culture hollow and soulless.
Companies that create “newsrooms” don’t do so in the interest of promoting transparency and truth within their company or industry, they do so in the interest of shifting media narratives to protect profit margins. In this sense, they are antithetical to the functions of journalism and actual newsrooms, to report on the truth of events without fear or favor, on a basis of objectivity. Yet, corporate society has created their own meaning of journalism, of news, and even of the truth itself. There is encouragement in corporate culture for executives to form relationships with journalists, to lobby journalists, to consolidate information selectively in order to fit their narrative, in an attempt to gain influence over which narrative is reported. Most companies treat this like a game in which you can "score" good public perception by using manipulative tactics on journalists, with the end goal of owning the media landscape itself, such as with Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post in 2013.
However, therein lies a major problem in how the modern business culture utilizes “news releases”. There seems to be a major misunderstanding of the role of a “press release” as opposed to a “news release”, with them often dangerously conflated for being one in the same. A “press release” is meant for correspondence with the press or media outlets, so that they may take into account the information in their reporting when covering stories related to the company. A “news release” is meant for communicating directly with the general audience if needed, in order to convey the views and information the company may have. Most problematically, using the term “news” to title your direct-to-consumer information is misleading and manipulative, relying on deception due to the fact that the word "news" holds a heavy connotation with a newspaper or a journalistic outlet, therefore increasing the likelihood that an average media consumer will believe the information to be factual. You should not be relying on wordplay or framing to trick your audience into believing you are truly correct and factual, that you truly have their best interests at heart. The dominant marketing strategy is just that, and it is leading to an erosion of journalistic perception and integrity.
Companies succeed when the average media consumer is unable to distinguish between fact and opinion, objectivity and paid-for “truth”. The push to create “newsrooms” that send company information and form perception without oversight or regulation is in the effort to destroy entities that have the ability to enact corporate accountability and negatively impact public perception, such as journalistic outlets. These “newsrooms” are created for the sole intention of making a profit, of benefiting investors and shareholders, not actually benefiting the products, services, and information for their consumers. In efforts to further erode confidence in journalists, corporations promote bloggers or third-party sources to act as mouthpieces of information without objective verification. Yes, bloggers can be influential, but that does not mean that you should treat them as being associated with established/reputable media outlets. This is an extremely dangerous opinion to have; it creates a slippery slope for what is even considered fact, what is considered to be reputable, what is even considered to be journalism. It threatens the work and efforts of actual journalism.