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Okay let’s give this comment some context before I launch into the rant.

I now work in a dual role taking in both public affairs and press office work. I’ve formally been a PR account manager and I’ve also been a journalist.

When I was a journalist I would rage about PRs ringing me up when I was on deadline to ask if I had received X release and when would I use it. Those that bugged me most were the young keen ones that really tried so hard to sell. Personally, I felt I was intelligent enough to spot a half decent story – just send it – if it’s okay the chances are it would be published.

One truly rancid local Newcastle based PR company used to ring up and regularly use the dumbest line – it’s been everywhere else, are you going to use it soon?

There were other times, of course, and journalists to tend to forget this, that I relied on PRs. Ad department sold an eight-page property supplement to be written by tomorrow? Hmmm. Anyone got numbers for housebuilders’ PRs? I need a dozen of them to write 600 words each sharpish.

In truth, I believe the figure is something like 70% of the content of newspapers is PR driven. That’s not just because PRs are overly zealous gatekeepers. Those ever growing newspapers are not going to be filled by an ever dwindling number of staff.

So then, we can agree. We really do need each other. Right…

Later I left papers for PR. Suddenly I was the other side of the fence. I had bosses that requested I ring journalists and ask why they hadn’t used my release. I knew from my own experience what an utter pain in the arse this was. I avoided it where I could.

Likewise I didn’t “sell” every release, though plenty did, and to be fair they enjoyed decent results. Why? Because your average hack is so disorganised that they lose everything and anything. Then they ring you and ask why they didn’t get the story.

Personally though, I still reckoned that if I wrote a decent tale and wrote it well then it would appear. And they did. Quite often, word for word.

Now I work in a press office and local and national media enquiries come in every day. What’s more I read plenty about my region written by people who’ve never even been here.

Bugbears? Look at a f*cking map. No Berwick is not in Newcastle. No we are not in Northumbria. Northumbria hasn’t actually existed for several hundreds of years. There is NO SUCH PLACE now. No the GATESHEAD Sage is not in Newcastle. Neither is the Angel of the North.

The Baltic Arts Centre? No, Gateshead again. The Gateshead Millennium Bridge? Take a guess.

To the national hack that rang the emergency mobile on a Sunday morning to ask: “Where is Clayton Street?” well my contempt is unlimited.

To the major TV news programme who asked a young American work experience kid to ring us for a complex statement that they were never ever going to use – please, find better ways to amuse your interns. This kid had no email address to send information to and when I read out the long statement she quite obviously didn’t even write it down. Several hours work wasted.

Also, some days it feels like the majority of journalists are yet to discover Google.

And now we have bloggers getting in on the act. If this snotty piece is anything to go by then they are the worst of all.

To my mind the trouble with bloggers is that they should be immune from all this. Blogging was punk. It was new, fresh and didn’t just not work for The Man, it gobbed on The Man and gave him a good kicking.

Bloggers shouldn’t be complaining that PRs don’t offer enough cash, as the above link did. Nor should they complain about how they are approached. By all means take the piss. But don’t do it as a result of your own over-inflated importance.

Because the same applies to bloggers as hacks. Use it if you want. Don’t use if it you don’t want to. If it’s of interest to your readers then stick it in. If it’s not then don’t.

We soon get the message.

However if you’re a hack and 70% of editorial comes from PRs, then looking through our emails and taking our occasional calls really IS part of your job.

In the meantime there will continue to be some stupid PRs AND a smattering of ignorant, arrogant journalists.

But can’t the rest of us call a truce?