Another Flare up Between PR and Bloggers

By George

There’s another storm in the blogging world – this time about PR firms and press releases. It started months ago with Chris Anderson of Wired publishing the names and email addresses of PR professionals he accused of spamming his inbox.

A new front opened recently when Gina Trapani of Lifehacker banned the IP addresses of PR firms she said were sending her unsolicited press releases.

And, yes, Racepoint Group was one of the dozens of firms banned.

It’s been the A topic on PR and media blogs for the last week. It’s unfortunate that some PR firms reacted to this news by begging for forgiveness for the sin of pitching clients to media outlets. One such apology came from Shift Communications.

Here’s an excerpt:

“I have written many times about crummy PR practices, and have acknowledged more than one mistake of our own, over the years. I empathize with your frustration and regret that we added to it… If you can dig up offending email from Shiftcomm.com address, I will publish and critique it on my blog, and will include any of your personal comments as well. We’ll gladly fall on the sword if it’s in service to improving our agency and our profession as a whole.”

I’m not sure what Shift is apologizing for (they have a good reputation in the industry). Gina and her blog cover technology companies and PR people respect her coverage and opinion enough to want to inform her about what their companies are doing. So they send her news releases hoping she’ll take notice.

If Gina isn’t interested in the news contained in an email, she can do what everyone else does: hit the delete button. It takes about one second.

As a former journalist of 12 years, I’m constantly amazed by these flare ups by the media. Being approached by PR people is part of the job – and when I was reporting some of my best stories came out of conversations with PR flaks. They could also annoy me, but I understood that PR people are the gateways into companies, politicians and organizations. It’s the way communications works these days.

At his blog, Stowe Boyd proposes something called “MicroPR” and suggests that PR people engage one-on-one with bloggers and journalists. He wants to be pitched on Twitter – so the pitch can be completely open (clearly here’s a journalist not interested in exclusive news and interviews). The goal of all outreach to journalists is for one-on-one conversations. The point of a pitch or a press release is to vet out which journalists are interested in that conversation and which ones are not.

I’m not sure what these journalists are so angry about. It’s not possible for every pitch and news release to be relevant to them – every single time. If they don’t want to work with PR people, don’t want to be pitched story ideas, and don’t want to receive new releases then perhaps these people should consider career changes (maybe in PR? We’re hiring).

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, I was going to suggest that PR agencies and corporate communications departments respond to these media flare-ups by banning journalists who constantly complain about being pitched, write inaccurate news stories, use poor grammar and spelling, and who don’t understand basic technology concepts.

But then I decided that banning people isn’t very nice — or practical.

1 comment May 14th, 2008

TechCrunch vs. WIRED

By Ben

Earlier this month, TechCrunch and the Washington Post announced that they were entering a syndication partnership, where the WashingtonPost.com will add TechCrunch stories to the technology section of their site.

In a move that seems to help both the WashingtonPost.com and TechCrunch, a third party was not so hot about the deal. WIRED writer Betsy Schiffman wrote a story later that day calling out TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington:

We’ve got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about. But what do we know.

Arrington immediately fired back through Twitter, and then followed that up with a call to action:

No one at WIRED is responding to me today about their post yesterday. I’m organizing a WIRED burning party (the mag, not their offices).

Schiffman wrote another story that appeared Tuesday afternoon, pointing out Arrington’s choice words towards WIRED, and posting an unanswered email that she sent to Arrington:

I know that you disclose your investments, which is fine, but the very fact that you invest in companies you may write about goes against the longstanding set of ethical standards that have governed newspapers for decades.

Schiffman also reports that questions to the Washington Post also went unanswered and reiterates her point that “There are some basic ethical standards that should be followed when you are a journalist. And that includes avoiding conflicts of interest.”

Arrington voiced his opinion on WIRED and Schiffman this morning:

I question WIRED’s intentions in posting about this, specifically now that they have posted twice. As a competitor they are clearly conflicted when writing about us, and attacks like these, including the childish tagging issue, appear to be little more than attempts to disrupt our deal with the Washington Post…

I have a lot of respect for many of the writers and editors at WIRED. But as far as I’m concerned WIRED.com, from Editor-In-Chief Evan Hansen on down to Betsy Schiffman, has clearly crossed an ethical line here. Perhaps they are giving up the fight to write relevant content and are resorting to sensationalist trash like this to generate page views. If that’s the case, it is a shame. I used to love that magazine.

As both Arrington and Schiffman seem to be standing firm in their corners, it will be interesting to see if WIRED responds to Arrington’s latest statements which seem to address all of the issues WIRED has with the syndication.

What’s your take?

Add comment May 14th, 2008