Analysts and Journalists - Beyond the Press Quote

Interesting post on SageCircle over here entitled 'Why reporters call the wrong analysts' looking at the practice of journalists embedding analyst quotes into their stories. Definitely worth reading for those in AR trying to get a handle on how such interactions work and how to manage or influence what goes on in this area.

Something not mentioned in the post is that journalists don't only call analysts for quotes.

A good investigative reporter writing a more in-depth considered piece will often poll opinions from a number of analysts while researching a topic and looking for interesting angles. They cannot quote all of these sources, but each one will have had an influence on shaping their thoughts and the piece that is eventually published.

There are then those long chats that myself and others have with the more elite group of journalists/editors who are at least as well informed as most analysts, if not more so. I regard these guys as peers in terms of industry insight and understanding. Exchanges with them are trusted in nature (i.e. they would cease if they were abused), and while we are always careful to protect proprietary information, we freely kick around ideas, toy with hypotheses, and generally compare notes on what’s going on in the industry. Conversations of this type might be tacked onto the end of a request for comment on a specific story (2 minutes on the immediate story, half an hour on stuff in general), they can happen opportunistically when chit-chatting at a Web seminar or some other event, or simply come about through periodic pinging (both directions) as we all maintain our valued relationships within the broader ecosystem.

The point is that as an AR person, if you just relied on monitoring quotes, you would run the risk of overlooking this kind of influence. You would also, incidentally, miss some important interactions between analysts and titles having an editorial policy that doesn't revolve around analyst quotes at all (e.g. The Register and some of the more business oriented press). Many of us interact with these guys as a spin-off from other stuff we might be doing with them (research, events, contribution of editorial, etc).

Anyway, I guess over the years, I have learned that analyst/press interaction is, just like so many other things, a lot about relationships. If were in AR, I would therefore be trying to understand which firms/analysts have a proactive approach to press relations in the broader sense. Monitoring quotes is a good starting point for doing this, but is certainly not the whole story.