Press officers in the UK have come last in a survey that quizzed journalists on their merits and compared them with those from other countries.
Ranier PR claims to have interviewed 200 technology and business journalists from the UK, France, America, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, Holland and Australia for its survey.
It found that 36 per cent of UK journalists, the greatest number of all the countries studied, felt that the average press officer in the UK had little knowledge of either client or journalist needs.
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But PRs in the UK were rated as writing the best press releases with the main news angle appearing fairly early on.
According to Ranier, journalists admitted to some dubious ethical practices. More than half the journalists surveyed in the UK said that they had been influenced by exotic press trips, fancy lunches and pitches from the opposite sex.
But 67 per cent of journalists surveyed from elsewhere in the world said they would never be influenced by anything other than the story.
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An international network of PR agencies called RanierNet was used to conduct the survey.
RanierNet director Paul Allen said: “The UK journalists’ responses were mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it illustrates just how different the approaches can be from one country to another.”
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