You are a journalist. A press release from a PR company telling you about a new survey arrives in your inbox. Do you:
a) Press Delete?
b) Read it, and try to get hold of the survey data to use it in your output?
c) Rewrite what you've been sent and press Publish (or whatever works in your medium)?
The people behind Farmhouse Breakfast Week - yes, last week, did you miss it? - discovered that plenty of journalists answered 'c'.
FBW had done a survey which revealed the ignorance of young people about where breakfast foods come from. The press release, headed Oats Don't Grow on Trees, included tit-bits like:
- Over a quarter of children under the age of 16 believe oats come from trees
- Twenty-six per cent of children thought that bacon came from sheep.
The release was used by the Mirror, the Mail and the Telegraph, among others, highlighting the line about bacon and sheep, and the story featured in the review of the papers on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
I decided to see what was behind the coverage, and contacted Ceres, the public relations company which had issued the release.
Since it only included three rather chatty paragraphs about the survey, I asked for the original data - so I could look at the figures.
Getting the data turned out to be more difficult than I had expected - and after nagging Ceres for a week I was finally told that the client was "not happy to distribute the raw data should they plan to use it for something else".
The press release did include the numbers in the survey (792 under-16s) and the polling company (YoungPoll, an online pollster that pays people from 10p to £1 to complete surveys), but it wasn't possible to see either the questions or the answers.
The PR company did well in publicising Farmhouse Breakfast Week. The only disappointment for it must have been that journalists picked up on the line about bacon rather than the one it headlined about oats: its client, the organiser of FBW, was the Home Grown Cereals Association, which "aims to improve the production and marketing of cereals".
But what about the journalists? According to the PR company, nobody who wrote up the story asked for the figures on which the press release was based. So the journalists didn't know how the conclusions had been drawn: they just took the PR company's lines on trust.
And of course the people behind the survey had something to publicise - breakfast foods - which made them want to pull something newsworthy from it.
Building on the success of its survey, FBW came up with another one last Monday. It showed, only according to the press release, that "Seven out of ten Brits start the day in a bad mood." This time there was no mention of the source of the research, but the Times of India still took the bait.
Farmhouse Breakfast Week is just one example of a genre. This morning, Cornish Mutual, a rural insurance company, announced the results of its own survey of 1,000 children, which reveals, according to the Press Association, that children 'believe sheep lay eggs'. No figures at all are offered on this one but, reassuringly, 98% of children could recognise carrots.
And what's that got to do with selling insurance? Well, the survey is to publicise a campaign called Dig Down South West, which encourages children to grow their own food and, in the process, make everyone feel good about Cornish Mutual.
So, be wary of PR companies bearing startling stats. All the above may be perfectly true: but we aren't in a position to know.
* Based on representative interview with self
