April 25, 2005

• I like this book. It has a good explanation of how th PR industry gets its agenda publicized.
• I've always thought that less than 10% of a newspaper's content is actually news, and the rest filler. Now I know where the filler comes from.
• Responding as a member of the news media: PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. Possibly, but to be more accurate, PR firms pitch information that furthers their clients' cause. Sometimes the info is valuable to reporters. Usually, it's not. Most reporters and editors are acutely aware of this. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda. This is laughable. Reporters and editors are bugged almost nonstop by PR firms pitching useless, skewed and questionable information -- and sometimes even flat-out lies. Credibility is not a PR man's main concern. Seeing his client's name in print is. Now maybe these aren't the so-called good firms, but I'm still waiting to hear from one of those. If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them. I have been in the newspaper business for more than 10 years, and I can count on one hand the number of good unsolicited story ideas that I have received from a PR firm. Anybody who honestly believes that reporters sit around being lazy while PR firms do all the real work by digging up all the good stories has no idea how either industry works. The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves. If tricking newspapers into writing stories for free publicity is what passes for good, honest PR work, then what does that say about the industry?
• Yea, that latest low carb diet really had people going along.
• Responding as a PR person - if I got paid $10 for every press release I sent out that was then printed word for word by the media I sent it to with the flattering byline from staff reports - I would be a richer monkey than I am. Certainly it would take care of my monthly beer tab (and I drink a LOT of beer.) But then the majority of my career has been spent working for the arts, so YMMV. I have never worked (yet) for a PR firm. When I started doing PR I thought it was evil and horrible, and I still often want to shower after I attend any of those creepy PR/Marketing committee meetings with their skeezy guest speakers. And I was utterly shocked when I first realized just how much of the news is influenced and controlled by PR firms. But I also think that there isn't much at this point to be done about it, so I for one. . . . welcome our new marketing overlords! Bwah!
• Tne elephant has eighteen toes. Those ethnic groups which consume the most cabbage have the highest rates of stomach cancer. Ice cream cones still popular. The above were among my favorite fillers, gleaned back in the days when fillers meant snippets of info/text used to fill in the blank spaces at the end of newsprint columns. there was usually a little line separating them from the column itself, so they just hung there, unheadlined and often inexplicable as insects snatched out of the air. I mean, why cabbage? Who down at the newspaper office counted the elephant's toes?
• Fucking cabbage.
• I think it's more insidious when the President and his administration do it. MUCH more insidious. Do the governments of non-'Merkin monkeys also provide false or misleading news items to news organizations? HawthoreWingo: hehehe
• Having worked in marketing for the past six years, I have also become hypersensitive to how people manipulate each other's opinions. Not just in relatively straightforward ways like the PR firms are handling, but in interpersonal relationships too. The more I recognize it the more it sickens me and the less likely I am to ever work/date/befriend anyone ever again, especially since I've taken to calling people out in public about it. There goes my life.
• Do the governments of non-'Merkin monkeys also provide false or misleading news items to news organizations? No. every other country in the world besides the US is perfect. Bush is worse than Hitler.
• Do the governments of non-'Merkin monkeys also provide false or misleading news items to news organizations? No. every other country in the world besides the US is perfect. Bush is worse than Hitler.
• Damn. I quite like cabbage.
• drjimmy11 provides us yet again with more disinformation. Canada is not perfect, and I can prove it: I stood in Canada and I had a clear view of the United States.
• No. every other country in the world besides the US is perfect. Bush is worse than Hitler. Once again I have failed. I wish to have a brief, friendly chat.
• I certainly have no idea what drjimmy11's point is, but I feel it deserves a response. So: is anyone still surprised that good man Bush soundly trounced that poseur Kerry? Haha, you silly people.
• I used to find it ludicrously easy to get press releases I wrote published verbatim or nearly so in various newspapers and magazines. You just have to know where to place them, laziness and deadlines will do the rest.
• I have seen a press release published as a story that contained totally the wrong information. Fortunately for the journalist, only a few people would have known the article was so wrong it wasn't funny.
• drjimmy11 is being funny. (Or is it Mr. Jim?)
• Wolof, out of curiousity where does one "place them"? Is it a matter of faxing it somewhere on believable letterhead?
• You place them where you know there's a lazy sumbitch under time pressure. I generally found out who these people were through personal contacts, it's not something I could do as a cold call.