Palisades Park and Clifton are the latest in a trend of local governments that have hired professional publicity companies to handle their municipal communications.
Clifton hired a communication manager earlier this month for a salary between $80,000 to $100,000. The goal, councilmembers said, was to more effectively get information out to city residents.
Palisades Park hired Vision Media in November for $3,500 per month through the end of the year, with a plan to move forward with a longer-term agreement, said Philip Swibinski, the chief operating officer for Vision Media Marketing.
The trend to hire professionals to do the talking began at the state level and has spread to counties and municipalities to better control their message, said Marc Pfeiffer, assistant director at the Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University…
Why are local governments hiring public relations companies?
Public officials and government employees have become increasingly wary of speaking to the media and to constituents privately and publicly.
Comments, Pfeiffer said, can become skewed by political opponents or taken out of context. The ability of misinformation to spread widely on social media, the partisan slant of some publications, journalists who look for “gotcha stories” and the concept of “fake news” have all contributed to a deterioration of trust between public officials and reporters, said Pfeiffer, a local government employee in New Jersey for 37 years…
Professional firms can help local governments craft a message and get a statement out without an employee taking time to deal with a reporter, and without the concern of saying the wrong thing, Pfeiffer said.
“It has become more difficult for responsible and caring elected officials to have trustworthy relationships with the press,” he said. “The degradation of that relationship has contributed to the decisions made by some government agencies to have third-party representatives or communications professionals to face the press.”
“It’s really a sad state of affairs,” Pfeiffer said. “The wariness that public employees and officials have with the press is incredibly unfortunate, but it’s the price we’ve paid for how political and media environments have evolved over the last 15 years.”