Why do we bother? As a PR, I work long and hard to give the media what they want – pithy copy delivered on time with a suitable, named photo and our client’s name and job title spelled correctly.

And then, days or weeks later depending on the lead-time, as we flip excitedly through the freshly-delivered publication looking for our client’s moment of fame, our heart sinks. The client’s name is spelled incorrectly or the journalist has got his or her job title wrong; or worse, put someone’s name against the wrong photo. Something clearly went wrong between perfectly delivered information from our end and the publication processes.

As PRs, we’re often told it was a gremlin – you know, the green one that seems to crop up in various titles’ CRM systems and such. Having a former journalist in our fold, we know that said gremlins are a thin cover-up for a lack of properly trained subeditors, or subs and production editors who are just too time-pushed, stressed and underpaid to do their jobs as effectively as they once did. We’re aware that the properly trained sub – that professional wordsmith who’s a stickler for house style, accuracy and grammar as well as a dab hand at honing shoddy copy – is a rare, dying, much-lamented breed.

The slow demise of this unsung hero is devastating not just for the publications themselves (it’s difficult to take seriously a title that gets wrong the one sentence it tweaked from provided copy, or misspells the simplest of names), but also for PRs who have painstakingly done the due diligence that is a prerequisite for perfect copy. As the medium between media and client, we get it in the neck.

Picking up the phone to tell an overworked journalist that there are mistakes in their copy is never enjoyable. And telling a client that his quote has mistakenly been attributed to a competitor is one of the last calls a PR wants to make.

If the mistakes are made in an online piece, they can be quickly rectified. But having those mistakes captured for posterity in a hard copy magazine is at best a nuisance; at worst, it can lose you the client.

It’s yet another example of a situation where the PR has limited power to make things good and to stop them happening in the first place. A good PR will ensure that all the information they submit to a journalist is carefully vetted, but there is little we can do to protect ourselves and our clients against sloppy processes at the media end.

Compound this with a growing trend we’ve spotted, of a new generation of journalists coming into the industry who seem unaware of what makes for a properly constructed sentence, the basics of good grammar and how it can change meaning, and who have little or no historical knowledge of what they’re writing about, and we’re in the line of fire again.

Somehow it’s our fault that the journalist didn’t print exactly what our client intended. Cue client question: why did this happen? Err... because Mr/Mrs/Ms Client, you gave an interview to a young journalist who clearly can’t write very well. In the past, that would have been picked up and corrected by a sub or production editor (our own hack still goes cold at the thought of her first production editor, who had a one-time-only rule: getting it wrong more than once meant a loud, public humiliation across the news desks. Result: you learned your trade and checking everything became second nature.)

Having said all of this, we put a lot of time and effort into the relationships we have with the media. And, on the whole, we think we have great ones that work well for us and them. We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve had to pull favours in over the years, asking for a stat to be corrected (supplied incorrectly by our client) or for a story to be taken down (because a client had signed it off incorrectly). So all in all, we know that everyone is fallible; that we’re all human.

But it would be nice to know that we can depend on the right processes to be in place and for some of today’s journalism to be not quite such a slap-dash affair.

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