![\"judyledermanprofile2\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicityhound.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/judyledermanprofile2.jpg\" "\\"judyledermanprofile2\\"")
If a reporter at a magazine interviewed you for a story, reassured you that he wouldn’t present you in a bad light, and the story that was published described you exactly as you had feared,\u00a0would you criticize the reporter\u00a0publicly?<\/p>\nIf a reporter at a magazine interviewed you for a story, reassured you that he wouldn’t present you in a bad light, and the story that was published described you exactly as you had feared,\u00a0would you criticize the reporter\u00a0publicly?<\/p>\n
In the old days, most people wouldn’t.<\/p>\n
“Don’t pick fights with people who buy their ink by the barrel,” we’ve always been told.<\/p>\n
That’s not necessarily the case today, now that blogs and the world of social media let\u00a0anyone be a publisher or broadcaster. We don’t need to rely only on traditional media to communicate\u00a0our message to the masses.\u00a0When they report about us, and\u00a0we want to critique the job they did, we can do it\u00a0in discussion forums, on our own blogs, and on sites like Twitter and Facebook.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Publicity Hound Judith Lederman, a\u00a0former publicity manager for Lord & Taylor who’s unemployed and looking for a PR job, called me recently, concerned. She\u00a0wanted to know if I thought she was committing professional suicide by publicly chastizing a reporter at Forbes magazine for the shoddy treatment she got when he interviewed her for the story titled When Work Doesn’t Pay for the Middle Class.<\/a><\/p>\n The story came about after Judith contacted the reporter in response to a Profnet<\/a> request for someone who has had trouble navigating the “Making Home Affordable” program.\u00a0 The\u00a0subject line on her email read: “Affordable, yeah right!”\u00a0\u00a0The reporter, who said he was doing a story on refinancing options, found Judith a good subject, because a bank rep told her to\u00a0stop making mortgage payments.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the interview was completed, the topic apparently took a turn, and the new focus was on how high-paying jobs don’t pay for people in the middle class because it renders them ineligible for other benefits.\u00a0<\/p>\n Judith,\u00a0who’s looking\u00a0for a job with a six-figure salary,\u00a0said she’s\u00a0not interested in perks.\u00a0 She’s\u00a0much more interested in finding a job and refinancing her home.\u00a0 She asked the reporter to remove her\u00a0from\u00a0the story.\u00a0 He assured her that he wouldn’t portray her\u00a0in a bad light and urged\u00a0her to reconsider, which she did.<\/p>\n When the story appeared, she was dumbfounded.\u00a0 She took to her blog, TheThinClub.com, to\u00a0set the record straight<\/a>:<\/p>\n “The person described in the cleverly-worded article in Forbes is not me!\u00a0Instead of painting me as someone seeking an appropriate salary so she could support herself, it portrays me as someone who is torn between the prospect of being employed and being eligible for tax breaks, college scholarships and other incentives. It simply isn’t so. It never was. In the online story, not a single quote of mine was published. My quotes would have painted a very different picture.”<\/p>\n She also posted this comment at the end of the Forbes’ story:<\/p>\n “Just want to say—since I’ve become the poster child for a middle class single mom who is being advised to work for less—I love my work, I want to go back to work,\u00a0and getting a paycheck (as close to what I was making as possible,\u00a0or even slightly more) is more important to me for PSYCHOLOGICAL reasons, than the perks I would get if I stayed underemployed.\u00a0 I have a work ethic—one that was NOT showcased by this article!\u00a0 I love working and a nice paycheck and good benefits is a reward at the end of the day… Now you know ‘the rest of the story.’ “<\/p>\n Judith said that since she’s job hunting for another PR job, she doesn’t want potential employers to see her as “desperate” or as a “goldigger” or as somebody who is willing to take a much lower paying job because of the tax issue.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I told her that her personal integrity and convictions outweigh whether her blog will anger Forbes. The magazine\u00a0could retaliate by not covering any of her clients. (There’s a clever work-around for that problem, I told her. Just ask another PR friend to pitch the story.) Besides, I said, if Forbes would give her that kind of treatment, they might do the same to her clients.<\/p>\n I encouraged her to call the magazine and complain to the reporter’s supervisor, which she decided not to do.<\/p>\n PR pros are lining up on both sides of the debate. The PRBlogNews.com blog\u00a0<\/a>supports Judith. But a columnist at MediaBistro.com, a subscription site, isn’t as understanding and wrote a column faulting her\u00a0for not managing her own PR.<\/p>\n Where do you stand? Was Judith right or wrong, and how would you have handled it?\u00a0<\/p>\n Do\u00a0people, particularly PR people,\u00a0lose more than they gain by calling reporters on the carpet publicly at their blogs if they feel they were mistreated or maligned?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If a reporter at a magazine interviewed you for a story, reassured you that he wouldn’t present you in a bad light, and the story that was published described you exactly as you had feared,\u00a0would you criticize the reporter\u00a0publicly? In the old days, most people wouldn’t. “Don’t pick fights with people who buy their ink\u2026 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","iawp_total_views":3,"wds_primary_category":606,"footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[29],"class_list":{"0":"post-4837","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-public-relations","7":"tag-media-relations","8":"entry"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Joan Stewart","author_link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/author\/jstewart\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42031,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4837\/revisions\/42031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}