Journal of Public Relations Research

Serini, Shirley A.

1993 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1207/s1532754xjprr0501_01

For many years, public relations practitioners have aspired to and worked to- ward professional status for their work. Public relations scholars, in turn, have examined the literature on professionalism in the social sciences to determine the requisites of that status and to evaluate the extent to which public relations meets them. The literature suggests that power and autonomy in organizations are among the most important characteristics of a profession. This participant observation study of a high-tech firm examined the process by which public relations practitioners sought autonomy in making decisions about the content of an employee newsletter. I found that professionalism did not provide the practitioners with total autonomy. Rather, professionalism provided them with the credibility needed to negotiate for autonomy. As a result, professionalism also helped the practitioners to change the management of the firm slowly from a closed system to a more open and symmetrical system.

Pincus, J. David; Rimmer, Tony; Rayfield, Robert E.; Cropp, Fritz

1993 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1207/s1532754xjprr0501_02

Central to practicing public relations and the process of creating the media's news agenda is a productive working relationship between journalists and public relations professionals. A deterrent to that relationship, according to research spanning 15 years, is journalists' negative views of public relations. As both professions mature, however, we wonder whether this relationship is changing. Have editors' views grown more positive or more negative? Do editors of different departments view public relations similarly? These questions were among those investigated here. We used a mail survey of 166 business, news, and sports editors at daily newspapers throughout California. Findings confirmed journalists' persistent negative perceptions of practitioners and of public relations-supplied materials. On a more encouraging note, signs surfaced that the media—public relations relationship may be improving. In addition, results pinpointed some significant differences among editors. For instance, sports editors hold the most favorable impressions of public relations and business editors the lrast favorable; editors who completed a college course in public relations view the profession significantly more positively than those who had not. We analyze our findings as they are influenced by and influence extant public relations and journalism theories, such as agenda building and Grunig's (Grunig & Hunt, 1984) situational theory of publics.

Spicer, Christopher H.

1993 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1207/s1532754xjprr0501_03

Twenty years of research indicates that journalists hold a negative, often antagonistic, attitude toward the public relations field and public relations practitioners. The research reported herein examines how those attitudes influence print re- porters' connotative use of the terms public relations and PR in their stories. Eighty-four published examples containing the term public relations or PR were analyzed revealing seven different connotative themes or definitions: distraction, disaster, challenge, hype, merely, war, and schmooze. In over 80% of the cases, the journalist used the terms in a negatively embedded context, thus supporting recent research indicating that journalists are far from being objective in their use of linguistic descriptors.