June 22 – Before Michael Coleman went to the “dark side” – a term reporters use when other journalists take jobs in government communications – he had had his fair share of frustrations with public information officers.
Coleman, who worked as a journalist for more than 20 years, including 18 years as a correspondent for the Albuquerque Journal in Washington, D.C., said he respected most of the government spokespeople he worked with, “but there were certainly moments when things got tense .”
“Sometimes it seemed like PIOs were there more to get in your way than to help,” added Coleman, who became governor. Michelle Lujan Grisham‘s communications director in February. “…I certainly don’t want that to be the perception of this administration.”
After four months on the job, he understands the demands placed on PIOs, he said. “There are a lot of moving parts and many days it feels like you’re drinking from a fire hose.”
Journalists rely on communications staff in local governments and state and federal agencies to break down complicated topics, provide data, answer questions and arrange interviews with government officials. But just as reporters and members of the public increasingly encounter roadblocks to public records, they have also encountered gatekeepers of government information whose goal is to limit access.
Current and former reporters complain about public information officers who fail to return calls within deadlines — if they return calls at all — and purposefully block access to information and interviews.
Long-time journalists remember the days when they could pick up the phone and speak directly to a government agency’s cabinet secretary, a top city official or a school board member. Now many communications workers, who rely more on their bosses than on the public, are tasked with filtering and funneling information and preventing frank conversations.
Questions are often answered via email exchanges rather than phone calls or in-person conversations, resulting in carefully crafted statements known as “canned responses.”
Colleen Heild, investigative reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, and Trip Jennings, longtime journalist and executive director of the nonprofit news organization New Mexico In Depth, both noted that PIOs are often exempt government officials.
“What we have here is a tension between the public paying for their positions, but their job security is basically controlled by a political, elected official,” Jennings said. “Their livelihoods are controlled by the people they hire and can fire.”
The work can involve high pressure and stress.
Gwyneth Doland Parker, a professor in the University of New Mexico’s Department of Communication and Journalism, said many PIOs end up doing crisis communications when the news is bad.
“That’s really stressful because they’re trying to convey the complexity of the situation” and empathy for people who work in government — jobs that can be difficult, she said.
“These PIOs are the people they’re pushing forward to take all the bullets, so I think it’s helpful for us to remember that even though in many cases they’re prettier than us and they make more money than we do, their jobs are sometimes more difficult,” she said, creating a contrast between communications workers and journalists.
Some relationships between reporters and PIOs can even become contentious.
For example, before Coleman joined the Lujan Grisham administration, the governor’s communications office for a time blacklisted New Mexican reporters from receiving emails about major announcements and ignored repeated requests for explanations.
“Can you just do that via email?”
“This is not true for every PIO, but in my experience, access to government officials has decreased,” Jennings said.
“It used to be more common for me to ask for an interview and someone to arrange it,” he said. “My experience now is more, ‘Can you just do it via email?’ “
Heild echoed the sentiment.
“I think there is a place for public information officers when you need basic facts, but too often it seems like the price you pay is not talking to the person who really knows the subject,” she said.
Steve Terrell, a retired journalist and former state House reporter for The New Mexican, recalled a lack of response from former Republican Gov. Susana Martinez’s communications team during her second term.
“They always just responded to an email with something that looked like it was written by a campaign official,” he said. “It seemed like campaign rhetoric and didn’t really answer your question or comment on what you wanted.”
Melanie Majors, executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, presented a defense of PIOs who serve as go-betweens for senior government officials: Not everyone is equipped to speak to the news media.
“I know you’re thinking, ‘How can they not know how to talk to the public?’ But sometimes they don’t. Their mouths run wild. They say things they shouldn’t, or they go into areas where they go off topic,” she said.
She knows the issue firsthand, having worked in public relations and public affairs for many years.
“As a public relations officer you have to have two things,” she said. “One is protecting the reputation of the organization you’re working with, and the other is just responding to the public, and I’ve never experienced that as a conflict. I think people do that sometimes, and I think it comes because they don’t. I don’t understand their role sometimes.”
Majors said she saw her role as an “extension of the agency” and a “source of assistance to the public.”
‘There is a balance that needs to be achieved’
Doland Parker said the relationship between journalists and public information officers is complicated.
“Members of the news media have their primary loyalty to the public, so our job is to give the people the information they need to be free and self-governing, and the loyalty of a public information officer is not the same,” she said . .
“Yes, of course they serve the public, but the nature of that job is that their primary loyalty is to their department, their agency, their governor, and if they are ethical – which I think most of them are . time – then that’s not really a problem,” she said.
“But there is tension because we want the truth, and we don’t care how ugly it is,” she added, “and PIOs care how ugly it is.”
She said, “God knows, I don’t envy any PIO at CYFD.”
Doland Parker was referring to the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, which is perhaps the most troubled agency in state government. The agency obviously has one of the toughest jobs in the state, including investigating cases of child abuse and neglect that occasionally tragically become front-page or TV news.
The agency has a tense relationship with the press.
KOB-TV recently reported that the agency had hired the governor’s former press secretary, Caroline Sweeney, at a salary of nearly $167,000 per year, the fourth highest-paid position at CYFD. Sweeney, who worked for the governor for less than a year, spent only a short time at CYFD and now works for U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury.
At one point in recent months, media inquiries to CYFD had to be submitted via email, and the agency attributed its responses to no one in particular.
The agency has had a new communications director, Andrew Skobinsky, for about a month.
“I have always been a communicator at heart, having studied and practiced intercultural communication in the business world,” he wrote in an email. “…Providing clear communications that inform, engage, connect and motivate readers around a particular topic is what keeps me up in the morning.”
Just last week, CYFD posted the name and phone number of its media contacts online, which Skobinsky said illustrates its commitment to accessibility.
“A balance must be struck on a case-by-case basis between providing the transparency the public wants and deserves, while maintaining the confidentiality of those who cannot speak for themselves, and the integrity of ongoing investigations,” he wrote.
Doland Parker said a good PIO maintains “friendly, helpful and trusting relationships” with members of the media.
“A lot of times they establish those relationships and that trust because they used to be journalists, and that’s honestly very helpful,” she said. “I’ve had many friends in my 25 years in journalism who went from working for newspapers and television stations to working for the government or in the private sector in communications, and we joke that they’re going to the dark side.
“But you know, in most cases it’s the same people, they just get paid better.”
Follow Daniel J. Chacón on Twitter @danieljchacon.
