Research

A survey of journalists reveals a disconnect between the way information is communicated in legal cases and how it gets reported. The results also elude to a deterioration in coverage as newsrooms cull their staffs: sixty percent of respondents have covered more litigation over the past two years.

The Montieth & Company agency found broadly that journalists struggle for access, for clarity, and disclosure when covering litigation. Although there are reasons for legalese, the results point to a need for an informed public relations role in the process as only 31% said plaintiffs' or defense lawyers are effective in helping them understand the cases and the legal issues involved.

Despite the opportunity to bridge this gap, PR firms didn't fare well: half were "somewhat helpful" in communicating on behalf of plaintiffs or defendants, 28.6% were "not helpful at all." Nineteen percent were categorized as "very helpful."

Other key findings include:

Over 70% of reporters said if they could change anything about the litigation process, they would make it easier for the news media to access court documents. One respondent suggested making PACER searches national, instead of by venue (PACER provides public access to online case and docket information from Federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts, and from the U.S. Party/Case Index.)

Only 2.4% believed that court pleadings "clearly communicate" the facts and arguments.

When asked which side in a case was more helpful, lawyers for the plaintiff or the defense, not a single reporter named the defense. More than 38% said plaintiffs' counsel were "more helpful" and 9.5% said "neither."

A PDF of the graphs of the results can be found here.

In a blow to flackery and stereotyping, a study funded by Penn State's Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication discovered that PR people are near the top in ethical thinking compared to other professionals.

The Center's Johnson Legacy Scholars Renita Coleman and Lee Wilkins used the O'Dwyer's database of firms as a sample and something called the Defining Issues Test (DIT) to empirically measure the moral development of working PR pros.

Coleman and Wilkins are J-school professors at U.T. Austin, and University of Missouri-Columbia respectively.

The DIT posed six ethical dilemmas and looked at reasoning in five areas: business concerns, internal motives, truth and respect, religious influences and external influences.

While seminarians and philosophers kicked all-comer ass, PR ranked alongside journalists, nurses and dental students, and beat out orthopedic surgeons, business professionals, accounting students and veterinary students.

Devil took the hindmost with junior high school students scoring even lower than prison inmates, in case you're curious. Funny but not surprising since age and education are key factors in ethical development.

The researchers explain the built-in aspects of the work that account for PR's surprising ethics:

"To accomplish this function (PR), they need to maintain the trust of both parties, but particularly the trust of journalists who are already skeptical of their institutional role and their individual motives.

Consequently, honesty and a lack of willingness to deceive those who receive information are critical in effective public relations practice."

The full paper is published in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of Public Relations Research.

Dick Jones of Dick Jones Communications ethically pitched the results of the study on behalf of the Page Center.

[Unrelated photo via JordanH's Flickr]

Ketchum surveyed the attendees of the recent BlogHer conference to find out what makes them tick, what makes them upset, and why there's still an opportunity for marketers and PR pros to play nice.

First and foremost, just because a woman blogs, it doesn't make her a mommy blogger. The top takeaway--as is the case with all how-to-pitch-a-blogger piece--is know what it is you're pitching.

The results found that 40% provided feedback collected on their blogs to marketers to help them understand women and mothers, while 53% said they would do so if asked.

About half said they heard from PR people once a week, while 30% are contacted daily. Ketchum lists the lessons of the study as:

Read their blogs and understand their areas of focus. Many women bloggers said they would like to hear about news and products that better match their specific interests.

Know where they live. A number of respondents said they receive pitches about products and events not available in their regions or even their countries.

They're more than just their blog, they have other roles in addition to being a mom or a blogger, including jobs outside the home.

Don't assume all women bloggers are mommy bloggers.

More after the jump:

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According to an analysis conducted by Video Monitoring Services (VMS), Twitter enjoyed 2.73 billion impressions last month, valued at $48 million. Fifty-seven percent of the value is attributed to TV mentions, and it makes sense, since soliciting viewer feedback on Twitter is no longer just Rick Sanchez's thing anymore. It's massive amount of impressions by any standard, drawn out in AdAge's coverage by comparing Twitter to Microsoft's Bing, and even Google as a whole:

"This is huge. It's very, very high," said Gary Getto, VP-integrated media intelligence at VMS. "In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn't think anything was more popular than Google."

In contrast, the media value of the coverage given to Microsoft's Bing was just $573,834, and the reach of its free media came in at just 63 million impressions.

There's no credit-grabbing to be done here, since Twitter doesn't even have representation.

Related: Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone: We Have Not Hired "Any PR Company"

[image via MaximumPC by way of TechCrunch]

U.K.-headquartered bigmouthmedia has the results of their 2009 Digital PR survey live today. After talking to the top 100 firms they found that while there is was a 90% increase in the number of shops with online and social media offerings, the overall number is still just 40%.

Also, the number of firms publishing their own blogs doubled to 22% over the past year.

London led the way with London with 48% of firms offering online PR, 30% publishing their own blogs.

Related: U.K. PR Firms Missing Out on New Media, According to Survey

Half of PR People See Print as More Valuable Than Online, According to Survey