Fast Growth Marketing Live! popped up on the Twitter radar the other day thanks to a flurry of tweets (check out the hashtag #s4stv ) and one that caught my attention was from the very talented and award-winning Amanda Jones of Red Button Design where she states (when talking about press relations):

Umm… am I the only entrepreneur who is successfully self-generating PR & who *demands* copy approval?! ‘Copy Approval’ people!!

Which I read and thought ‘you may demand it, but do you get it?’ To which she claimed she did…but how?

For those wondering: ‘copy approval’ is the process where the journalist writes their article and then the subject gets to see the article before it goes to print. It’s something that’s been on the rise for years and is very common with celebrity interviews (It’s one of the reasons most of them are so dull – the celeb or their PRs remove anything that isn’t overly fawning) and it’s leaked into other parts of journalism and quite frankly, it’s ridiculous and time consuming for a few reasons:

• Most newspaper articles are written just in time for deadline or a day in advance. Even on monthlies time is normally tight. Non-media people don’t often appreciate this and as such, are not always as quick as you need them to be in replying
• The copy that journalists write goes through a number of rewrites/edits – from the section chief (say a news or features editor, then a senior above that and also a sub-editor) – so do you give them the journalist version or the final (normally only ready at the last minute) page proof? And what happens then if they demand huge changes?
• It’s against everything an article should be. Journalism is – amongst other things – meant to be free of influence. Now it rarely is, but it’s still a step too far for subjects to approve what is written. That removes all subjectivity. (I’m told some journalists do offer it as a matter of course but it’s pretty much hushed up as it would remove any integrity said journalist was seen to have and also create precedence.)

Anyway, it’s one of those things that – from a PR point of view – if you say to a journalist ‘oh and the subject of the piece would like copy approval’ they’ll tell you to sod off and probably bin any article they were thinking of doing. And it won’t do anything for your relationship with them either.

And it doesn’t need to be a PR asking for it. The subject asking for the interview would get the exact same response.

So basically, copy approval is a no-no.

Which is why Amanda’s response was so interesting. As was a follow-up tweet:

Press, 90% of the time, & IMHO busy journalists can appreciate not having to do the research pick hook/quotes etc themselves

And a little Twitter debate kicked off which can be found in this thread – and I asked a few reporters if they would give copy approval. Short answer (to quote Simon Pegg as Scotty in the Star Trek film): “Get tae…” So, no then. As Andrew Wheeler pointed out at one point:

If you did, that wouldn’t be journalism, that would be flackery.

Now we’ve all said to reporters “here’s the best quotes” or “this is the good parts”. Heck, sometimes journalists call you and ask “Don’t have time to read a ten page report, what’s the best bits?” And that’s fair enough. The reporter takes the chance of knowing that you will perhaps steer them towards a newsworthy positive instead of a negative that they might have went for, but that’s the risk in asking the PR. So all of that is fair enough. But to get the actual copy approval? That’s a whole new trick.

So how does she do it? And how does she get away with it? To that end, I open the floor to Amanda and her partner James Elliot. Hopefully, one or both of them will drop a comment in the comments box and then I can add it to this post…

(And for those who haven’t thought to yet – go read the hashtag thread and keep tabs on what FGML looks to do.)

UPDATE: Amanda has indeed given a bit more detail on her methods which can be read over at Red Button Design here.