When snark is the enemy

A public relations worker at PRNewswire was fired recently for tagging a press release describing a march for the mentally ill as a "loony bin march."

An employee of PR Newswire, a service that provides news releases to media outlets nationwide, was fired yesterday after she used the title "loony bin rally" for a regional press release about a mental illness march today in South Philly.

The release touted a rally at noon at Broad and Snyder where demonstrators will ask the state to invest political and financial capital to fund permanent supportive housing, which promotes recovery from mental illnesses.

Susan Rogers, director of special projects for the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania, was furious and offended by the "loony bin" title and was also devastated to learn that the "ignorant" employee responsible was fired.

"This was an error in the very poor judgment of one employee and she has been terminated," PRNewswire spokeswoman Rachel Meranus told us yesterday. A PRNewswire official later told Rogers that the company would re-issue the release this morning with an apology for the insensitive remark.

I've seen this happen many times. Media jobs, such as journalism and public relations, are very attractive to young, bright and talented people, who, while being young, unfortunately are very well aware how bright and talented they are.

PR firms and media outlets need junior staffers who can write. You can get a junior staffer up on industry and market basics and bread-and-butter technology skills in 90 days or so. But you cannot teach someone how to write. They either have a natural ear or they don't.

So PR firms are rather limited in the pool of college graduates and 20-somethings they can pursue. Meanwhile, those creative people with a lively grasp of language that PR firms need to write press releases desperately want to be creatives.

Compounding the problem is the tendency of writers - whether in marketing, PR, journalism, or any other field of professional writing - to fall in love with their own snark.

These young writers -- graduates of English departments all over the world -- come from a cult of savviness that holds cleverness in high esteem. Indeed, some bright young writers hold self-reverential cleverness above all other concerns.

To an extent, this comes with the territory. And the snarky humor around the office is part of what makes working in this field fun. But where it creeps into the deliverables, it is a sign of an undisciplined employee. But PR leaders need to work with their junior employees to control it.

That takes time and training and leadership.

None of that, alas, is free.

The danger, of course, is that with immature junior staffers who are sufficiently bright, you can get away without that mentorship in the short run. And so PR fees are too frequently bid or negotiated down to levels that simply do not allow for active and engaged leadership to work with these young writers and develop them.

In the long run, though, clients get what they pay for. And that immaturity, left unsupervised, can come back to bite the client unexpectedly.

This is not to say that you don't want young people in your PR department, or in your PR or marketing agency. You do. Recent graduates come with fresh ideas, and grasps of new technologies and methods that the old-timers just have not had time to keep up with.

What you need, when looking at a PR firm, is a balance of older, experienced managers who've been around the block a few times, and young, enthusiastic account execs in the first few years of their career who can do the legwork in a cost-efficient manner.

In this case, unless there is more to the case than meets the eye, firing the employee seemed a little extreme.

This kind of snarkiness CAN be controlled, with a skilled and respected mentor. This employee would have learned her lesson. It might have been painful, but these employees are usually salvageable. What is less salvageable is a management team that was so freaked out by the incident that they had to DO SOMETHING and overreact to the mistake.

--Jason Van Steenwyk