Journalists and directors advocate strengthening their relationship with “co-responsibility”, “empathy” and “trust”
The relationship between communications departments and the media is as complex as it is necessary. Both types of professionals are called to coexist in the same ecosystem to achieve mutual benefits. Companies need journalists to more effectively communicate their milestones or highlight their business strengths, while journalists need the contribution of communications teams to receive information.
This particular link has evolved as the working environment of both newsrooms and companies has changed. Renowned communication directors and media representatives analysed this issue yesterday at the World Media Congress 2022, organised by WAN-IFRA, the global organisation of the world’s press, with the collaboration of the Henneo Group, which is being held in Zaragoza until tomorrow.
Enel Group Iberia’s Director of Communications, Nacho Jiménez Soler, recognises that both parties “need a dose of co-responsibility and empathy and we have to know what role we play. We are condemned to understand each other, but we have to take into account the difference between information and commercial interests, which is not always the case”.
Mutual understanding of the roles of professionals is also an essential point for Patricia Colino, Director of Communications at the Santander Group in Spain, who argues that trust must prevail in this relationship. “Those of us who work in communications departments”, she explained, “have to be facilitators for journalists”, but she clarified that “they have to understand that we are spokespersons for the company and that we owe ourselves to their interests”.
On the media side, the editor-in-chief of Heraldo de Aragón, Mikel Iturbe, explained that the link between the two parties is “a normalised relationship as a source of information, which has different degrees of credibility and solvency”. He gave the example that “the credibility of a small company is not the same as that of a large one, because the reputation of the brand determines the day-to-day nature of this relationship”.
Irene Lanzaco, director general of the Asociación de Medios de Información (AMI), stressed that in the communication process between the two actors, “the dircom will transfer the company’s position to the media and the media will contextualise and analyse it. We have to do it out of responsibility”. The representative of 80 media and information agencies stressed that the qualities and position of the dircom in her company – such as, for example, their proximity to the presidency or the management committee – condition their level of reliability in the eyes of journalists.
The toxicity of disinformation in the relationship between journalist and dircom
The pandemic of misinformation has forced departments and media to make new efforts to try to combat it. The editor-in-chief of Heraldo de Aragón explains that “we spend a good part of our day confirming news. We spend more time on that than on generating new information. This speaks of a great informative setback. If we add to this the fact that information is coming in through multiple channels, this leads to a situation of difficulty in the foundations of the profession”.
On the expansion of new players in communication, through the rise of social networks, the head of AMI argues that publishing groups “are legally responsible for the information we publish, so we cannot be in the same position as users on social networks”; and adds that “if we want the media’s information ecosystem to be strong and provide quality information for citizens, we also need very active collaboration from companies. We need them to be on our side”.
According to the Enel Group Dircom, one of the tasks pending in Spain to avoid the effectiveness of disinformation is the promotion of media literacy. Jiménez Soler adds that in this media context, “one of the great tyrannies is the dependence on declarative journalism, which is given a category of fact” and criticises that “it has done a lot of damage to organisations”.
Zaragoza will continue to be the media capital of the world today and tomorrow. In the city’s Palacio de Congresos, hundreds of national and international media professionals will listen to the views of executives from: The Sunday Times (UK), La Nación (Argentina), Agence France-Presse (France), The Washington Post (USA) or The New York Times (USA), among others.
