Check out this snippet from the Eavesdropper column in The Financial Express today, entitled ‘Tripping on news‘ -

It’s an open secret that journalists very often attend conferences only to corner the speakers on the sidelines. This penchant led to some trouble for Wipro chief Azim Premji at the recently concluded India Economic Summit.

To confound matters further, print journalists too had joined the race so as not to miss Premji’s comments. The scene became so chaotic that Premji was hastily whisked away into another room, denying the intrepid hacks any ‘big’ news!

How familiar are we all with these kind of situations? I remember handling two events where celebrities had come down. The media wouldn’t leave them for a second. They were surrounded by journalists from all sides, and questions were never-ending for over an hour. The chaos, with all the pullings and shovings, was so sinister that any onlooker would have started feeling pity for the celebrities.

We, as PR professionals, try to manage such situations at our best, mostly playing it by the ear. But are there any set guidelines we can practise so that our clients feel safer with us and hope to get less harrowed by a set of bytes-hungry journalists.

In press conferences, journalists normally do not ask many questions in the Q session, but prefer to talk to the spokespersons privately later. What if we announce something like - ‘no discussion with spokesperson after the Q session’? Will we lose out on possible media stories because some journalists will not get their exclusive bytes that they want?

We seem to be caught in a between the devil and deep blue sea situation. If we don’t allow the media to interact much with the spokespersons, there are possibilities of getting lesser coverage. If we let our spokespersons be free for all, we might get a much irritated and tired client at the end of the day, complaining about our media management skills.

There shouldn’t be much problem if the journalists throw in their questions one-by-one and don’t go on and on, and if the photographers get satisfied after few clicks. The problem comes when the media go berserk whenever there is a high-flying corporate leader or a celebrity.