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# Economic “Incentives” Favors PR Career Over Journalism
- URL: https://capitolcommunicator.com/economic-incentives-favors-pr-career-over-journalism/
- Published: 2018-09-01T12:09:03.000Z
- Updated: 2018-09-02T12:47:26.000Z
- Author: Capitol Communicator
- Tags: PR, Media, Insights, #Import 2026-10-08 18:49

**“PR people are good at plenty of things; news reporting is not one of them”,** states an article in the Diamondback, the University of Maryland’s student newspaper, which added that this should be “self-evident: PR professionals are tasked with promoting the image of a person, company or institution. That role is fundamentally incompatible with the values — skepticism, curiosity, and transparency — of journalism.

“But the economic incentives favor a PR career over a journalism one. According to [Bureau of Labor Statistics data](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/11/the-growing-pay-gap-between-journalism-and-public-relations/?ref=capitolcommunicator.com) from 2013, there are nearly five times as many public relations specialists as news reporters. And there’s also a pay gap between the two professions that has widened — the average journalist makes only 65 cents for every dollar their PR counterpart gets.

“It’s entirely reasonable for journalists to leave the profession in search of greater economic security — and many have done just that. When Ryan Kelly won a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of chaos at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, [he had already left his newspaper](https://www.newsweek.com/2018/05/04/pulitzer-prize-ryan-kelly-charlottesville-photographer-890034.html?ref=capitolcommunicator.com) for a more stable job in PR.

“So as PR grows and journalism hollows out, news content becomes more, well, PR-y. With reduced information-collecting capacity, journalists must increasingly rely on PR folks with a vested interest in how information is spun. Robert McChesney and John Nichols, the authors of *The Death and Life of American Journalism*, have noted, “As editorial staffs shrink, there is less ability for news media to interrogate and counter the claims in press releases.””

More [here.](http://www.dbknews.com/2018/08/31/maryland-today-umd-news-journalism-public-relations/?ref=capitolcommunicator.com)