Doha • An interesting survey conducted recently among journalists in the Middle East have shown their varying attitudes towards the daily press releases they are getting from public relations agencies in the region.
The online poll, conducted jointly by Insight and MediaSource, canvassed the opinions of 139 journalists working for Arabic and English-language newspapers and magazines in the UAE, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, covering topics ranging from press releases, press conferences, PR practice, the sources journalists use for stories, and the current state of journalism in the region.
The findings provide an insight into the true state of the working relationship between journalists and corporate communication professionals, and makes stark, yet essential, reading for the region's PR community, according to a release issued yesterday.
"We set out to discover the main pressures bearing on journalists throughout the region, and to find out how successfully organisations from all sectors are communicating with them," said James Mullan, joint managing partner of media training consultancy, Insight.
The survey found that nearly two thirds of journalists receive up to 20 press releases a day, yet 55 per cent say they actually use less than 10 per cent of the releases they receive.
Asked to rate the importance of press releases as a news source, 74 per cent of the Arabic-language media believe them to be either 'very' or 'somewhat' important, compared with just 56 per cent of the English-language media.
Eighty per cent of English-language journalists admit to either 'often' or 'sometimes' deleting emails from PR agencies without actually reading them, while a more forgiving 60 per cent of Arabic media confess to the same practice.
'On the record' briefings are the most significant source of stories for the region's journalists with 85 per cent of all respondents rating them as either 'very' or 'somewhat' important.
Asked whether they would be more likely to use a press release if it came with a gift, 41 per cent of Arabic-language journalists and 19 per cent of English-language journalists replied 'yes' or 'maybe'.
When asked 'what is the most irritating practice that PR professionals engage in?', both the Arabic and English-language press were unanimous in the opinion that sending material which has no relevance to their publication was the single greatest annoyance. One editor even confessed to blocking the receipt of emails from PRs with a history of sending irrelevant releases 'despite the risk of missing out on genuinely good material", said the release.
