Jun. 22—Before Michael Coleman went to the “dark side” — a term reporters use when other journalists take on government communications jobs — he’d had his fair share of frustrations with public information officers.

Coleman, who worked for more than two decades as a journalist, including 18 years as the Albuquerque Journal’s Washington, D.C., correspondent, said he respected most of the government spokespeople he worked with, “but there were certainly times when it got tense.”

“Sometimes PIOs seemed like they were there more to be in your way than to help,” added Coleman, who became Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham‘s communications director in February. “… I certainly don’t want that to be the perception of this administration.”

After four months on the job, he understands the demands placed on PIOs, he said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of days it feels like you’re drinking from a firehose.”

Journalists rely on communications staff at local governments and state and federal agencies to help dissect complicated subjects, provide data, answer questions and set up interviews with public officials. But just as reporters and members of the public increasingly have faced roadblocks to public records, they also have encountered government information gatekeepers with a goal of restricting access.

Current and former reporters complain of public information officers who don’t return calls on deadline — if they return calls at all — and purposely block access to information and interviews.

Longtime reporters remember the days when they could pick up the phone and speak directly to a Cabinet secretary at a state agency, a high-ranking city official or a school board member. Now, many communications staffers, more beholden to their bosses than the public, are tasked with filtering and funneling information and preventing candid conversations.

Questions are often answered in email exchanges rather than phone calls or in-person talks, resulting in carefully crafted statements, known as “canned” responses.

Colleen Heild, an investigative reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, and Trip Jennings, a longtime journalist who serves as executive director of the nonprofit news organization New Mexico In Depth, both noted PIOs are often exempt government employees.

“What we have here is a tension between the public paying for their positions, but their job security, if you will, basically is controlled by a political, elected official,” Jennings said. “Their livelihoods are controlled by the people who hire them and can fire them.”

The job can come with high pressure and stress.

Gwyneth Doland Parker, a professor at the University of New Mexico’s Department of Communication and Journalism, said a lot of PIOs end up doing crisis communications when the news is bad.

“That’s really stressful because they’re trying to convey the complexity of the situation” and empathy for people who work in government — jobs that can be difficult, she said.

“These PIOs are the person they push out in front to take all the bullets, so I think it is helpful for us to remember that even though in many cases they are prettier than we are and they make more money than we do, their jobs are sometimes harder,” she said, creating a contrast between communications workers and journalists.

Some relationships between reporters and PIOs can even become contentious.

Before Coleman joined the Lujan Grisham administration, for example, the governor’s communications office for a time blacklisted New Mexican reporters from receiving emails about important announcements and ignored repeated requests for explanations.

‘Can you just do it through email?’

“This is not true of every PIO, but my experience has been that there’s been a decrease in access to public officials,” Jennings said.

“Back in the day, it was more common for me to request an interview and have someone set that up,” he said. “My experience now is more, ‘Can you just do it through email?’ “

Heild echoed the sentiment.

“I think there’s a place for public information officers if you need basic facts, but all too often it seems like the price you pay is not getting to talk to the person who really knows the subject matter,” she said.

Steve Terrell, a retired journalist and longtime statehouse reporter for The New Mexican, recalled a lack of response from former Republican Gov. Susana Martinez’s communications team during her second term.

“They’d always just respond to an email with something that looked like it was written by a campaign official,” he said. “It seemed like campaign rhetoric and not really answering your question or commenting on what you wanted.”

Melanie Majors, executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, presented a defense of PIOs who serve as middlemen for high-level public officials: Not everyone is equipped to speak with news media.

“I know you’re going, ‘How can they not know how to talk to the public?’ But sometimes they don’t. Their mouths run amok. They say things they shouldn’t or they go into areas where they get off topic,” she said.

She knows about the issue firsthand after working many years in public relations and public affairs.

“As a public relations official, you have to have two things,” she said. “One is to protect the reputation of the organization you work with, and the other one is to just be responsive to the public, and I never found that to be a conflict. I think sometimes people do, and I think it’s because they don’t sometimes understand their role.”

Majors said she viewed her role as an “extension of the agency” and a “source of assistance for the public.”

‘There is a balance that must be reached’

Doland Parker said the relationship between journalists and public information officers is complicated.

“Members of the news media have their primary loyalty to the public, so our job is to give the people the information they need to be free and self-governing, and the loyalty of a public information officer is not the same,” she said.

“Yes, of course they serve the public, but the nature of that job is that their primary loyalty is to their department, their agency, their governor, and if they’re operating ethically — which I believe most of them are most of the time — then that’s not really a problem,” she said.

“But there’s a tension there because we want the truth, and we don’t care how ugly it is,” she added, “and PIOs care how ugly it is.”

She said, “Lord knows, I don’t envy any PIO at CYFD.”

Doland Parker was referring to the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, which is arguably the most troubled agency in state government. The agency, of course, has one of the toughest jobs in the state, which includes investigating child abuse and neglect cases that occasionally become tragic front-page or TV news.

The agency has had a strained relationship with the press.

KOB-TV recently reported the agency had hired the governor’s former press secretary, Caroline Sweeney, under a nearly $167,000-a-year salary, the fourth-highest paid position at CYFD. Sweeney, who worked for the governor for less than a year, stayed at CYFD only a short time and is now working for U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury.

At one point in recent months, media inquiries to CYFD had to be submitted via email, and the agency didn’t attribute its responses to anyone in particular.

The agency has had a new communications director, Andrew Skobinsky, for about a month.

“I have always been a communicator at heart, having studied and practiced cross-cultural communications in the world of business,” he wrote in an email. “… Providing clear communications that inform, engage, federate and motivate readers around a given subject is what gets me up in the morning.”

It wasn’t until last week that CYFD posted the name and phone number of its media contacts online, which Skobinsky said illustrates his commitment to accessibility.

“There is a balance that must be reached, case by case, between providing the transparency that the public desires and deserves, while maintaining the confidentiality of those who can’t speak for themselves and the integrity of ongoing investigations,” he wrote.

Doland Parker said a good PIO has “friendly, helpful, trusting relationships” with members of the media.

“Often, they establish those relationships and that trust because they used to be journalists, and that’s really helpful, honestly,” she said. “I have had in my 25 years in journalism a lot of friends go from working for newspapers and television stations to working for the government or in the private sector in communications, and we joke that they are going to the dark side.

“But, you know, in most cases, they’re the same people — they just get paid better.”

Follow Daniel J. Chacón on Twitter @danieljchacon.