THE LAWYER AND THE REPORTER:
HOW TO BUILD SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS

By James E. Lukaszewski, APR, Fellow PRSA

As Published in the New York State Bar Journal, December 1989 (Revised June 2000)

Copyright © 1989, 2000, James E. Lukaszewski.  All rights reserved.

For the lawyer, relationships with the news media, especially when built before a high-profile situation occurs, is a professional option well worth considering. Going about the process of building relationships with reporters needs to occur within both the context of the lawyers' professional responsibility and the environment within which the media operates. The place to begin is to understand what news is and why that understanding is important.

What News Is

News from the perspective of reporting organizations has some or all of three essential components. Something is news if it can respond to these questions:

• Is it unusual?
• Does it affect people?
• How does it affect people?

News is that which is unusual, affects people, and describes how the unusual affects people. There are some other criteria by which ideas and topics and people are judged newsworthy. News is also that which is:

• Accessible: If a reporter can't get to the subject, topic, or idea, stories cannot be generated.
• Interesting: Not every legal issue, trial, or lawsuit fits this criterion.
• Timely: If it happened a month ago, or sometimes even yesterday, it's not necessarily going to be newsworthy. The media must know today about tomorrow's event.
• Understandable: Reporters are merely an extension of the audience. If they cannot understand what we are talking about, if the issues are explained so technically and in such a cold fashion that they become unintelligible, neither adequate nor accurate reporting may be possible.
• Topical: The story may relate to another current story in the news, whether local or national.
• Chronological: The story may relate to something that happens each year, each month, or every few years.
• Leverageable: Does the story relate to a non-competing interest that is highly visible such as the work of a non-profit organization, a major public figure, or other organization whose visibility helps the situation gain public attention?

Understanding what constitutes news is crucial because news is the product of the newsperson and the news organization. No matter how important you feel an issue or case is, it must meet newsworthy criteria. There's absolutely no sense in pursuing something that's not newsworthy. It would be like trying to sell sailboats in a desert. The product just won't float.

Next, determine why or if you want to have relationships with the media. Why do lawyers need or want relationships with reporters? Here are several of the most common reasons:

• To learn what kinds of stories reporters are interested in and to be ready to provide such stories where appropriate.
• To suggest stories, sources, and people the attorney would like reporters to interview.
• To serve as a resource for legal stories to help reporters add "balance" (if lawyers would do more of this, perhaps the media would quit using law school professors so much).
• To add emphasis, clarity, or color to important stories involving the bench and bar.
• To foster or trigger additional coverage of issues and ideas of interest to lawyers.
• To take advantage of reporters as excellent sources for what's going on in the community or for political information.

All of these reasons make sense and follow the guidelines for professional responsibility. But when it comes to the practical matter of establishing the relationship and making it work for you and your clients, there are strategic steps to be aware of:

Commitment to the Story

The reporter's occupation, craft, and commitment are to the story - not to you, not to your client, not to the bench or bar, not even to society as a whole, but to the story. No matter how good your relationship with the reporter, no matter how important you feel you might become as a resource to the reporter or the news organization, the story is the driving force. Friendship, confidentiality, even the entire relationship can and will be sacrificed if the story is worth it.

Both Serve Society

Lawyers and reporters both serve society in similar ways. Reporters and lawyers serve many of the same interests in society by watching out for the underdog, protecting the small in our society against the giant institutions of our society, fostering and even forcing compensation for injury and damage. Lawyers and the media suffer from some of the same public criticisms: your professional objective is to hurt others for your own personal benefit; the world has to be the way you see it rather than the way the general public and society see it; the world owes you and not the reverse; and when it comes to your motivations, no one's privacy is safe until you have achieved your objective.

Establishing the Relationship

Relationships with reporters are reasonably simple to establish but require just a few preliminary steps:

1. Set an objective. Do you want to learn something? Do you want to share something? What action do you want the reporter to take following your interaction with them?

2. Do your homework about the reporter. What have they written or broadcast before? Where were they educated? What are their interests? Who are they married to? What is their experience?

3. Do your homework on the medium. Does it reach audiences you are interested in talking to? What are the publics that it serves? Are there other news outlets that might be better than this one?

4. Understand the nature of the relationship. What are the questions a reporter will always want to ask you? What are the questions you would like the reporter to ask you? Have you generated lists of both as well as the answers so that you are prepared and that the relationship can be purposeful and professional?

5. Establish your own internal ground rules. What topics will you talk about? What topics can you talk about? How will you relate those if the reporter is interested in things about which you cannot speak?

Two Special Rules

Building relationships with reporters must be done with full knowledge of the environment in which news organizations operate. There are two remaining concepts you must understand before you begin the process of establishing relationships with reporters. They are "off-the-record" and "not-for-attribution." "Off-the-record" means providing information to the media that will neither be used nor attributed to you as the source. It remains a mystery to me why individuals provide information to the media that is not to be used. Because news organizations exist to develop news stories, virtually all information they acquire will be used in some way. Giving news organizations something off-the-record is merely giving them a license to put the material on-the-record in some form or fashion in the future.

"Not-for-attribution" is providing information to the news media to be used in news stories but with identification of the news source withheld by the media. This is a very common practice in government and one that is often abused by the media.

The difficulty for lawyers is that the media sets all of the rules of these two special games. Frequently, these rules are neither written nor spoken but are matters of custom and corporate media policy. The revelation for many in the 1988 decision against The Minneapolis Star & Tribune was that no reporter had the authority to grant anonymity to news sources without approval of his or her supervisor. But why would The Minneapolis Star & Tribune, or any multi-million dollar media conglomerate, put its organization at risk of lawsuit by some $20,000-a-year rookie street reporter in the name of a journalistic principle. They can't, they don't, and they won't.

Should you feel your information is valuable enough to merit publication without attribution, most media organizations have procedures in place to obtain management's guarantee of anonymity that require reporters to share your identity and the substance of your information with at least one other person. If your information is potentially libelous or scandalous, or injurious in other ways, several senior managers including the owner may be involved in the decision to protect your identity. That's not a confidential relationship. The bottom line is stay on-the-record. It will save a great deal of time, trouble, effort, energy, and worry.

The final question is, "Do lawyers need good relationships with reporters?" The answer is yes, without reservation. As long as both recognize the purpose of each other's activities in society, as long as both recognize the limitations each has to serve the other's needs, and as long as the purposes of both serve the higher interest of society, lawyers must develop good relationships with the media. It is in everyone's best interest, the public, the bench, the bar, and society.

Copyright © 2000, James E. Lukaszewski. Permission granted to reprint with attribution.