For an old school journalist like me, reading Trevor Young's  8 Things I'd Do If I Was a Starting Out in PR Today¹ is like the Poms getting hold of the German's Enigma machine at the start of World War 2.

It means I know what the enemy² is thinking and can stay one step ahead – at least some of the time.

Young has written a road-map for junior public relations professionals. It should be cut out and pinned beside every agency or in-house desk. It shouldn't. That's old school thinking. It should be downloaded and stored on every PR person's iPad or smartphone.

Along the way he writes:

SIX – I would read every newspaper I could get my hands on, hang out at the newsagent and flick through as many magazines as humanly possible (without getting sprung!); read newsletters, swap radio stations, check out the array of cable TV channels on offer.

Traditional media is not going away any time soon; if you can 'join the dots' between traditional and social media, you will become a lot more valuable to your employer!

The advice applies to everyone, but journalists and PR people not reading everything in this way are in the wrong job.

¹. Trevor, the ninth thing I'd do is learn how to write headlines in Australian newspaper style, grammatically correct and without sticking capital letters on everything. Or am I out of touch and this is just old school journo thinking?

². If all PR people were as smart as Young, who cleverly brands himself online as the PR Warrior, we could drop the idea of journalists and PR people being at each others' throats all the time.

Craig McGill's tips telling bloggers how to get the most out of public relations people is an eye-opener. I'm a journalist with 30-odd years experience, so from my point of view most the 15 tips on offer here veer between being bleeding obvious at one extreme and  a heartfelt plea on behalf of an industry needing to deal with inexperienced, paranoid nincompoops at the other.

After reading it I felt sorry for the PR people – which isn't something you'd expect from a journalist.

Nevertheless, if you're rubbing up against paid flacks for the first time, there's some useful advice. I particularly like item 6:

The PR person may be a tech-wizard and be an online guru but if their client doesn't like online and doesn’t want to engage online, don't blame the PR person. The PR person is very much in the middle a lot of the time.

If you're on the other side of the fence, there's also 15 Tips for PRs dealing with bloggers

15 Tips for bloggers dealing with PRs | Contently Managed.

See also:Ten tips to ensure your press release fails

Miriam Cosic writes in The Australian about journalist Nick Davis who says more than half the news in Britain's top five newspapers was generated by public relations companies or taken from wire services.

Davis is in Australia to promote his book Flat Earth News.

While this is a great background piece that makes me want to buy the book – it paints a depressing picture of the state of journalism. I've worked in the industry for almost thirty years and agree with Davis' basic premise that today's journalists are now expected to do a once-over-lightly job and rock the boat as little as possible.

Davis points the finger of blame at the media corporations. This analysis can't be separated from the widely reported decline of traditional news media.

Conventional thinking says people are moving away from newspapers, magazines and broadcast news because of the Internet. I believe the audiences would be declining even without the arrival of online news because the news media is turning off audiences.

One aspect of this  The Australian story overlooked is that public relations companies now massively out-gun newspapers in terms of staff, expertise and experience. This is particularly noticable in New Zealand where the newspapers seem largely staffed by young reporters in their 20s and early 30s while many of the brightest and best of the older generation work for PR companies.

Marketing communications, the business of letting people know about your products and services, has two distinct parts: advertising and publicity. For more about the differences between the two, see Use publicity to get noticed.

Advertising is straightforward. You pay money directly to a media company. In return, you control your message and its presentation. Advertising is a commercial transaction.

Publicity is different. It can still cost you money – there are plenty of businesses who will willingly accept payment for their promotional services – but in general you don’t pay the media to promote your message and you have no say over timing, placement or presentation.

You can’t even be sure it will run.

In theory, you'll get publicity when the story you want to tell is so compelling that journalists and editors will fall over themselves to make sure it appears. Remember their idea of compelling is unlikely to coincide with your opinion.

Editors need to give readers, viewers or listeners the hottest news, up-to-date information, the most relevant background features and the best stories. They may also look for something entertaining to brighten up their pages.

Contrary to what you may think, they generally don’t care at all about whether their stories help you or your business. Or at least they shouldn’t if they are doing their job properly.

However, there are some, less than totally independent publications where this doesn’t apply.

Another common misunderstanding about publicity is that the best way to get it is the press release. This is a pre-written version of the story you’d like to see in print. Press releases are usually written in a highly stylised format, containing the basic facts together with background.

Press releases can work, but in general they don’t.

Many go straight into the bin. And rightly so. That’s the usual place for rubbish. They mainly exist because clients like them – they create an aura of useful media activity.

In fact, there are publicity experts who believe the overwhelming majority of press releases are never read by journalists, let alone used as the basis for an editorial item.

Some of the best communications professionals – they may call themselves public relations consultants, press agents or even something bombastic like media consul – will tell you press releases are only one, not particularly useful strategy and account for a tiny fraction of their work.

We’ll look at the mechanics of press releases another time.

Remember, publicity involves enticing the media to write or broadcast information about your company, product or services because you have something new, important, exciting or otherwise interesting to say.

The best way to do this is to call a journalist and tell them, quickly and concisely, just what your story is and why it may interest their readers. Like everything else in business, this is largely a matter of forming the right relationships.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, get some media training or hire a press agent to call on your behalf. Good public relations professionals know precisely who to call and how to pitch stories in a way that makes them more interesting to journalists or editors. They can introduce you to the right people, set up face-to-face meetings or organise phone interviews and help you prepare for these.

Occasionally when you have something particularly important to announce, you may want to hold a formal press conference or maybe host a less formal gathering of journalists for morning tea, lunch or afternoon cocktails. This kind of event works best when used sparingly, it’s not always the best way of telling a story, but it’s a great way to make or maintain contact.