See http://blog.ravitek.com/?p=48

Which, of course, investors want and will pay for. So bully for Thomson. I find that kind of stuff is just truly neat.

But look: financial reports are just pre-fact check press releases with some governance rules that do apply, but which companies will find ways of finessing in order to downplay the negative and accentuate the positive.

Thou shalt not lie to the investing public, obviously. But you are not obliged to draw them a picture or rend your garments over the abject chaos that reigns, which you might well want to conceal from your competitors, either.

Not good for shareholder value, that.

The real trick, of course — the real journalism — is developing the Kremlinological instincts for reading these boring things and extracting actual newsworthy facts, factoids, and story angles, either for reporting that day or for filing away for future reference.

When Reuters beefed up its financial operations to Bangalore, it was actually imprudent enough to say in a press release, or to a reporter, I forget, that it had previously employed just a few editors there to “take care of rewriting press releases.”

Which is pandemic these days: Recycling the “commodity content.”

I don’t know about you, but if I want to receive the press release, I prefer to get it straight from the source, with the contact numbers and the disclosure and everything. I like those press kits that come on USB pen drives myself.

After all, the corporate communications people went to a lot of trouble to say precisely and clearly what their employer wanted and needed to say, and to gracefully not say what the company did not want to say.

Whereas the rewrite often just garbles the message.

The best PR pros I know are people who do not treat your skepticism as a threat to the brand and do not try to browbeat you into accepting that their version of a given story is the ONLY version.

If you are going to interview a principal, for example, they get the principal ready for your questions rather than trying to shield him or her from them.

That’s what they get paid for. They like doing it. And they are good at it. They are diplomatically guarded rather than crassly defensive. They never stink of fear. They project calm and competence. They would never insult your intelligence with half-baked BS.

You start to trust and respect them. They make your life easier by giving you more signal and less noise.

Whereas using cut-outs to launder the release through a pet “journalist” who will parrot the company line, or other means of “dominating the information environment,” inevitably leads to blowback, I think.

I think it’s just plain intellectual and professional laziness on the part of subpar flacks in many cases. They would rather have you killed than actually have to devise a reasonable answer to your reasonable question.

Which is how it comes to be that good companies can sometime suffer unduly from bad flacking.

And even “bad” ones can suffer more damage than they may deserve just because, so to speak, all they could find to defend themselves with was Simpsons bit player Lionel Hutz, Attorney.