An article I wrote yesterday called “Are Women In PR Just Grown Up Mean Girls?” has been getting a lot of attention from both women and men who work in the public relations industry. But one person in particular, DKNY PR Girl, is offering to help fix the problem:
“I am offering my services here and now as the PR Person FOR Public Relations. “
With all of the varied responses we’ve been getting to this article, we think this is a good question:
Does Public Relations Need A PR REP?
In the response, which is being tweeted as BREAKING NEWS: PR GIRLS ARE NOT MEAN GIRLS, the writer (who isn’t identified, but we assume is either DKNY rep Aliza Licht or someone on her team) politely said she loved the movie Mean Girls (I mean, who didn’t?) but would not want to have a reputation like that in real life. Because she doesn’t think that Public Relations is a field filled with catty women.
While she agrees that PR jobs are often unfairly glamorized (thank you pop culture), she thinks that all of the tiresome slander and lack of knowledge about PR needs to be fought against and she nominates herself for the task. We agree that the position is desperately needed. As she wrote:
Because just like I am sure there are many less than stellar people who work in banking, law or the restaurant business for example, there are some people who work in PR that we would rather forget. Breaking News: PR is no different than any other industry – we have good eggs and bad eggs; hard working people and fluffy people that add no value. Big surprise? I think not.”
In all seriousness Licht or one of her colleagues may be right. For an industry that revolves around helping to control and promote reputations, it gets a pretty bad rep. Robin Caldwell, of the J Standard Media Group, tells The Grindstone:
“The industry has a catty reputation because there is no one managing PR’s reputation, namely the professionals. We can follow a code of ethics that governs our dealings with clients, the public and media but we don’t have a professional code of conduct or ethics that governs how we deal with one another. The respect level of the profession has diminished with the overly-romanticized depictions of publicists and PR practitioners in entertainment media, especially reality TV.”
The PR industry is in need of someone to come in and show all the different facets of the industry and maybe the grittier, edgier and stressful side that we obviously don’t get to see at all on shows like Sex & the City and Entourage and even “reality” shows like The Hills. With Kelly Cutrone’s Kell On Earth we probably got the most accurate depiction of the non-glamorous and very stressful (I recall a lot of crying on that show) day to day life of the people who put on events for the extremely glamorous fashion industry.
I’m not saying every PR agency needs a hard-core documentary to be made about it but perhaps a PR rep would help so alas no one makes the tragic mistake of bucketing together the extremely different PR people who work for agencies and the PR people who work in-house. I mean they are as different as night and….later that night. And we certainly don’t want anyone thinking that “holding a clipboard at a door” is more prestigious than it actually is. Anyway, just something to consider and DKNY PR Girl shouldn’t have any trouble filling the spot. She should have some connections in that area…
Photo: Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock.com
