Measuring The Overall Satisfaction of Filipino Journalists on Public Information Officers

Abstract

The Philippine public relations industry’s close connection with journalism has been one of the many riveting subjects’ local researchers want to investigate. On the other hand, the government-run public information office (PIO), an industry functioning almost similarly to public relations, is slowly attracting scholars’ attention. In recent years, they have seen the PIO’s growing relevance in studying the Philippine press. However, the Public Information Office remains a blind spot in journalism studies, with previous studies focusing on the satisfaction of journalists on public relations practitioners. This paper is an attempt to look at the satisfaction of journalists reporting in department/ministry news beats on the public information officers who circulate news on their mother departments. This satisfaction survey of daily journalists from 12 news beats was based on the SERVQUAL model on service quality of service providers. General findings revealed that journalist-respondents are satisfied with the PIOs’ overall efficiency. Journalists surveyed were more satisfied with their work relationship with PIOs than their provided services. This indicates that the working environment, the amount of press releases and facilities in the public information office, as well as the ways that PIOs interact with journalists, were the strong points of the information offices. Meanwhile, the reliability and empathy dimensions appeared to have lesser influence in journalists’ overall satisfaction. Keywords: Public information officers, journalist-source relationship, beat reporting, Philippines, satisfaction.