I APPRECIATE that as conflicts go, this isn‘t nearly as serious as Northern Ireland, Palestine or even whether Starbusts should be renamed Opal Fruits, but it’s worth asking anyway. Can journalists ever get on with PR people?

This is the question Sarah Park, a PR person, has just tried to answer, after “meeting journalists for coffee, hanging out in their newsroom and going out for beers”. Predictably, she found journalists don’t like PR people very much, although I imagine it’s because in recession-ravaged 2010 most reporters don’t have time to have a publicity woman on a fact-finding mission hanging around the newsroom and offering to go to the pub with them.

PR agencies, in case you haven’t worked in a newsroom, are part ‘n’ parcel of every journalist’s typical day, and email and ring you with whatever stories they’re keen to get in newspapers like The Champion for their clients. I'm not talking about press offices - which largely do a useful job in responding to our requests for comments - but agencies in Manchester, Birmingham and London with strange names and stranger stories.

Some of the tales are genuinely newsworthy or interesting, so we’ll use them. But others - and it is a vast, depressing, relentless majority - get binned almost instantly.

Anyway, Sarah’s research has actually proved pretty accurate, because what the journalists she quizzed told her is pretty much what most of us at The Champion are dying to tell the dozens of PR people who ring us every day with yet another completely irrelevant crumb of “news”:

“When sending press releases provide information such as date, time, people’s names, it’s basic stuff!

Under no circumstances include us in a group email along with all our competitor media

Don’t send us research that you’ve made up - yes we can spot it

Please learn our deadline times and don’t phone us during this time, especially with an “Our client’s business has won an award” story

Know who you’re calling (as in the paper and what is our news agenda)

Know who you’re calling (as in the media’s boundaries)

Don’t read the whole story to us as soon as we pick up the phone and refuse to let us speak - we don’t know what you’re talking about and you have the wrong person anyway

Don’t phone us to ask if we received the press release – if you haven’t heard from us, we aren’t interested

Don’t be so cheerful when you call us – it sounds insincere.”

There are lots of PR people who are genuinely nice, normal people - I used to work with some of them - but it’s far too easy to imagine most of them ringing in from the same shiny skyscraper in central London with the same monotonous and yet irritatingly cheery voice, insisting that we can cover stories from Manchester or Harrogate because they’re both in The North, the generic area which all newspapers in’t North clearly cover. We’re not interested if Nick Clegg has endorsed a weight loss programme somewhere in Kent, or if Yorkshire’s fourth biggest fishery is 25 years old. WE DON’T CARE.

I long for the day when all PR people are like the one I spoke to earlier today, who not only knew my name and what I cover, but that I used to work for the North Wales Weekly News from when he called me this time last year. Some journalists, of course, get on fabulously with some PR people. But it's the exception rather than the rule.

But, annoying as the glut of pointless press releases are, it’s important not to lose context of the things in life that matter. Like Opal Fruits.

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