Why I chose City over champagne

As newspaper circulations continue to slip and a chilly winter sets in on Fleet Street, it’s not surprising that increasing numbers of hard-up hacks are moving over to the “dark side”: public relations. Never one to go with the flow, I have done exactly the opposite, and packed in a PR position for the life of a trainee journalist at City University.

During the year I spent in a graduate position at a PR agency, I often considered writing a City Boy-esque series about the ins and outs of my job, but the company was so idiosyncratic that there didn’t seem to be any way to do it both anonymously and honestly. (There can’t be too many London agencies where the boss has such a strong aversion to the colour yellow that yellow flowers, birthday cards and clothes are all banned from the office.)

Behind the scenes, PR is nothing like it appears to outsiders. Frequently, it is harder: the hours longer, the clients more demanding and the standards higher than most journalists would assume when yet another irrelevant press release lands on their desk. The only thing chilled about my job was the champagne (which, admittedly, did flow in plentiful quantities, largely because the boss refused to drink anything else).

The main problem for me was that, working in lifestyle PR, I felt painfully detached from politics, current affairs, culture and news – at least, anything other than the artificial, sales-driven, packaged kind of news. PR is about promoting your client’s version of truth, no matter how arbitrary that may be. For all the flaws of modern journalism, most hacks still enter the profession with a desire to find and pass on a more objective version of the truth.

And if the truth be told now, I hated the corporate churnalism and the grating PR parlance (my personal bugbears included “bespoke” things that were actually produced en masse and more “very unique” offerings than I could count – surely something is either unique or it isn’t?). I missed writing, I missed interviewing, I missed editing and I missed criticising. And so here I am now – minus the salary, the free hotel stays and the PR perks, and instead struggling with shorthand, learning about law and grappling with government.

Give me culture over champagne any day.