Barbarians at the garden gate
Should you advise your client to allow a journalist unfettered access for a long-form profile piece?
(This is the first of a series of pieces looking at the relationship between PR, their clients, and journalists, based on my 30+ years as a journalist and more recent work consulting for companies and organisations. It’s published to a sub-section of Substack. Thoughts are very welcome)
Should you advise your client to allow a journalist unfettered access for a long-form profile piece?
Not much anticipated, until it's too late, is the long-form profile piece -- the kind woven together by a journalist who has earned the right to spend hours, days, with the subject and deliver a piece that is more akin to a short book than a piece of journalism. They are the journalist's holy grail, an opportunity to unleash the literary flaps and to let fly a grand essay that captures the essence of a subject.
Long-form pieces can mean anything between 2,000 words and 20,000. They're a dying art in this attention-defying world, except ... that they're not. A lot of the print media we thought wouldn't survive the social media era have done quite nicely. They offer an antidote to what Ricky Gervais calls the 'virtual toilet wall' that is X, formerly Twitter.
They're great for journalists, of course. Firstly, if you're commissioned to write one, chances are you've got quite a cushy job somewhere. Secondly, it's as close as journalism gets to narrative non-fiction - fly-on-the-wall, I-was-there type stuff that we all (at least used to) aspire to.
From the other side of the fence
But viewed from the other side of the fence, how does it look? What should the subject of one of these pieces, and his/her PR advisers, think of them?
I was prompted to write this when I heard ex-spin doctor Alistair Campbell and former UK minister Rory Stewart discuss it on their podcast. That latter felt he had fallen into a trap set by the esteemed New Yorker, which produced a piece on him that he didn't like. At all.
His frustration is born out of a misunderstanding, a misalignment of objectives. Despite his long history of rubbing shoulders with journalists he doesn't seem to understand us.
Here's what he should have known.
A journalist is a cold-hearted soul -- has to be, really -- and so their role in this kind of play is quite different to the subject's. The journalist has time on their side, and their only constraint is access. When access to the subject is granted, the journalist must use all their charms to make the subject forget they're there, or at least to forget they're a journalist, taking notes.
That's when the good material will come.
This can be done one of two ways. First is to really try to be that fly on the wall, be as invisible as possible. If everyone forgets you're there, then you'll get as authentic a view of the subject in action as you'd hope for. But that's not always possible. If you're following someone around, and you're often alone in their company, it would be weird to walk two steps behind them murmuring "just pretend I'm not here" all the time.
So the second approach is to talk to the subject, chat with them, relax them enough so they feel comfortable talking as if the microphones were off, as if this was a personal, off-the-record conversation between more formal interviews. Even better, if the subject goes on with their day, forgetting the journalist is there, or at least is a sympathetic observer.
And needless to say that can have unfortunate outcomes. For a journalist the microphones are never off unless the subject explicitly prefaces something with "this is off the record", or "don't use this, this is just for background." Otherwise journalists are, with every word, effectively maintaining a sort of continuous interview, or, even better, watching the subject interact with the world.
This is because the material the journalist is after is not just a few quotes, a few splashes of colour, but they're looking for something that shows, rather than tells whatever angle the journalist is pursuing.
A quick example: I was interviewing the leader of an Islamic group in Indonesia that was training young men to go fight in a part of the country where Christian and Islamic communities were locked in a low-level civil war. The leader told me they were inducting volunteers elsewhere in the complex. For a basic news story that would have been enough - grab a few numbers, a quote, and we're done. But I asked if I could watch the induction, and they agreed. So we moved to another room, and I watched as volunteers were brought in one by one, briefly interviewed by someone at a desk and then beaten up by two toughs. Those who didn't put up a fight were shown the door.
I had my fly-on-the-wall scene which would show how violent sectarian warfare was being ratcheted up in a compelling scene that was as banal as it was shocking.
Journalists will always be looking for that scene, or several scenes -- moments when their subject does something or has something done to them that perfectly illustrates the point the journalist is making.
So don't be naive about what the journalist is after. They have a job to do, and their efforts to make you lower your guard is a hallmark of their professionalism.
This ain't no party invite
So should you avoid these kinds of engagements altogether? I don't think so.
Alastair Campbell, in the same podcast, is right when he says that these kinds of pieces will survive much longer than ordinary journalism (the only format trumping the long-form piece is a long-form TV profile piece.) I think these pieces are medium-risk, high-reward where the risks can be limited by judicious forethought.
First off, you need to stop thinking about these things as a 'media opportunity' to be accepted or turned down like a cocktail party invitation. If a journalist, or publication, is interested enough in you to want to follow you around for a long-form piece that in itself is very significant. It suggests that you, or your client, or your company, is a hot property. If you're Sam Bankman-Fried, or Sam Altman, or Benjamin Netanyahu, you probably knew that already. If you're not, and the request comes as a bit of a surprise then you need to buckle up, as this may only be the first of several requests.
So don't think of this as an invitation you can turn down. The journalist and publication won't stop being interested in you, and may well do a profile of you anyway, based on other sources. So in very few cases should you just say no. You may not have that luxury. So when an invitation like this comes in, best to assemble a team of people to think this through and work out a strategy.
Here's what that should look like.
A strategy
Firstly, scrutinise the journalist's request, and if necessary go back for more information. You need to know what kind of story they have planned, its length, the time-frame, and what kind of access they're looking for. You don't need to, indeed shouldn't, ask what the angle is. They may not know, and they're not going to share it with you, so see that as something you can't control. But it's fair to ask how long the story might be (in words), and how long they expect to spend on it. Then ask them what kind of access they're looking for. Is it just a couple of sit-down interviews with the client, or interviews with the client's colleagues and friends, or do they want to follow the client around, and if so for how long? Promise nothing, just find out what the journalist is looking for. Refuse nothing, but make clear you'll need to get back to them.
Then do some checks on the journalist involved. Even if you think you know them, and know their work, do it anyway. They may do spot stories and features, and those are often quite different beasts. What you need to concentrate on are the stories that look a lot like the one they've requested; what kind of style are the pieces, what kind of access did they get, who else is quoted in the piece (friends, family, enemies, analysts etc). And lastly, do the pieces feel frothy (gushing) or hit jobs (where the subject comes out looking bad - - shifty, arrogant, deluded, narcissistic, criminal etc.)
At this point you could make a decision that you know enough to limit access to this particular journalist, that there's no upside in letting them in. That might be a good call, but it still means you need to engage with them, give them enough to satiate their interest. More of this anon.
Going ahead
In most cases you will, and should, decide to go ahead. This is where you need to plan: what would we like this journalist to say? What do we want them to not say? This is where PR starts talking about 'the narrative' and when I start reaching for my gun. Journalists use the word 'narrative' quite differently -- it can mean either when you're doing fly-on-wall writing and there's a sequence of events that are in themselves a mini-story within the story. These can be called narratives; the other is referring to the piece as a whole. But in no newsroom I know have I come across the term used to mean what PR thinks it to mean.
In PR 'narrative' means what journalist would call 'angle'. And this is where PR and their clients tend to think they have the edge over journalists. As in the Rest is Politics podcast, Rory asks:
How would you deal with something where you have to spend 10-15 hours with someone, how do you control the narrative in that situation?
I think you've got to work out what you want the narrative to be, Campbell replies.
Which is a tad ingenuous on Rory's part, and disingenuous on Alastair's. Rory was disappointed that the journalist didn't tell the story Rory was hoping for -- and apparently expecting when the interviews were done -- but Alastair, who as a once-upon-a-time journalist, must know that forcing a narrative on a journalist is asking for trouble.
What Alastair might have, should have, said is this: Ian Parker is no parvenu. He has been writing profiles for The New Yorker for years -- he contributed his first piece in 1992, and has profiled Elton John, Jonathan Ive, Christopher Hitchens, etc. Oh, and he's a Brit, so he's not going to be bowled over by any Etonian mock humility and self-praise dressed up as self-criticism. And if Rory wanted to get an inkling of how the profile might go, he could have checked out some earlier Parker profiles, like this one of Alec Baldwin ("Why me?") which was published a couple of years earlier, and begins:
Alec Baldwin, who stars in “30 Rock,” the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done nothing to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent clothes from rubbing against sunburned skin.
Ian Parker has one of journalism's nicer jobs, and he deserves it. He's certainly not going to go along with an angle, sorry, "narrative", that the subject or his/her PR advisors are going to suggest. In fact, whatever they suggest to a journalist will by definition be discarded, because no journalist wants to feel they're being fed a line.
And so Alastair's idea that You've got to work out what the narrative is going to be is a bit like a von Moltke's much-worn phrase: No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. You can have an idea of what you would prefer the narrative to be, but if you share that with the journalist, or the journalist feels you're trying to spin a particular line, you'll significantly raise the chances of a less sympathetic piece.
It's not that the journalist already has an angle -- if you're chosen for a proile, chances are you've already been written about elsewhere -- but that they will always resist any attempt to impose one, and they will be looking for something that hasn't been said already. And if the journalist is good, every scene they are able to watch of you will be stored away and evaluated for how much the moment defines you. Don't believe me? Read the last paragraph of the Alec Baldwin piece. If you read none of the rest of the profile, those last few sentences tell you all you need to know:
An hour or so later, he was driving his handsome Mercedes back into East Hampton, for a late lunch. He called his assistant.
“You told him no dice to the event, correct? What else? Saying what?” Pause. “What else? Which is when? What’s on the calendar now? Right? And her event is what? Whenever you see an invitation that says ‘What could be more magical than an evening under the stars in the Hamptons?’ you press delete. What’s going on with my voice-over for Major League Baseball? What’s their deadline? What else?” He banged the steering wheel. “What? Speak more clearly, I can’t hear you. He said what? Satellite broadcast goes where? I’ll look at that. What else? O.K. Take a deep breath. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does their letter say? O.K. What else? O.K. What else? O.K. What else?”
There's no 'narrative' here as PR understands it. Ian Parker is letting the subject tell the story themselves, without realising it. This is not a quote from an interview, carefully thought out messaging: it's Baldwin unplugged, when he forgets for a moment he's being observed -- by a veteran profile writer for The New Yorker, and lets his true self fly. He appears profligate -- driving back to the East Hamptons for lunch, he appears to be a bully -- he treats his assistant badly, he's apparently a bit of snob, he's impatient, he's a little desperate for higher profile work, he's neurotic.
This final scene appears to sum Alec Baldwin up. Of course Parker is going to use that. The only question would be where in the story it might go.
The piece on Rory is built around his almost whimsical, but successful, bid to become a member of parliament. The end goes like this:
The count was held the next morning in a large modern sports hall in Penrith. In the room next door, couples played indoor bowls. “I imagined some old, dusty, timbered hall, and smoke and balloons and cheers,” Stewart said. He moved around with such impatient buoyancy that his body language seemed to be on the point of crossing over into dance. During the long wait, in an effort to entertain a young woman reporter from the Westmorland Gazette, Stewart made a kind of commando’s diving roll—head first—over a low rope that separated the press from the ballot boxes. He became entangled and stumbled. There was one chair in the middle of the hall: Brian Stewart sat there, in a Churchillian pose, knees far apart, his green tweed suit matching his son’s coat. After Rory was elected, with more than half of the vote, he made a short speech—“compassion, community, and common sense”—and then stepped from the stage and kissed his mother on the top of her head.
There, in a few sentences, is Rory distilled. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but it does capture both sides of his personality -- a natural leader, superb mind, enough self-doubt in there to know he has a moral centre -- and the context: his parents, his awkward desire to please, his sense of destiny.
If I were Rory, I would be happy with the profile and move on, and not be using the elevated perch of his podcast to denigrate the writer, the story, and the supposed treachery of someone he thought had become a friend, someone he had allowed into his inner circle -- 13 years after the fact
And this is the thing. Alastair Campbell was right in warning Rory: "So keep control of what you want to keep control of and never assume that they're your friends." A journalist is never your friend if you met them after they became a journalist. We're after a story and we'll do anything to get there. There is a risk in talking to a journalist, always.
For one long Wall Street Journal piece I was offered a chance to talk with the expat head of a water company that had been given as part of a broader privatisation the contract to run the local water utility. I liked the CEO; he was a friendly and helpful guy, sincere in his determination to bring potable water to people's homes. He let me follow him around for a week, presumably hoping I would see who the good guys were in all this. It was clear the contract was a disaster, state employees were barricading the European company from getting into the facilities and everything was at a standstill.
The resulting story did not go down well with the company, him or the public relations firm who connected us together. But I told the story I saw, and I could not let me personal liking for the guy to affect the piece. I heard he was fired a few weeks later. As Graham Greene wrote, "there's a splinter of ice at the heart of a writer."
Forget the message
So lets forget messaging, narratives and the like when we're talking about these pieces. If you let someone as observant as a journalist with no press deadlines and a penchant for skewering into your lair then you have to assume that the profile they paint of you won't be the same your mother might write.
But does that mean they should be avoided? No, absolutely not. However the piece turns out, you will have been added to a small elite of people journalists, and their editors, consider worth spending the time on. Yes, you might come across in ways you don't like, but you're there, in the pantheon. It'll probably be one of the uppermost search results for your name, so better you own it.
The piece is not republished or even referred to on Rory's otherwise exhaustively collated website. Which is a shame. He should wear the story like a badge of pride. Not many people have been profiled in The New Yorker, and truth be told, we're all a bit ridiculous, pompous when we try to sound self-effacing, over-eager when we think we're being statesmanlike. You only have to glance at your LinkedIn feed to see how hard people try to package themselves in one way, but by their drip-feed of humblebrags tell us all we need to know about what they're really like.
So here's my advice. If you're asked if you or your client would be open to a long-form piece, or a profile piece, check first which publication it is (I would argue to forget anything that might appear in a local version of Tatler or Forbes or anything that comes off as fawning and superficial -- and for which it is assumed you paid for), then the journalist, and then not whether you're going to accept but what limits you want to set on the deal.
And do that before the clock starts. No family, say. Or only a limited number of friends, or three interviews and follow-alongs. Setting the logistical parameters is acceptable -- but not necessarily the topics. If there's some elephant in the room you won't get away from willing it not to be there. But you might prefer not to reveal details of funders, deals underway, an ongoing lawsuit. Make all this clear beforehand, but otherwise be helpful and as patient as you can.
Just don't treat them as a friend.