Comments on: PR Blocking

By: Kathleen Fasanella

Kathleen Fasanella — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:41:15 +0000

As someone who gets tons of pitches, I think the issue has become dilution. These days, anybody can start a PR firm, right from their dorm rooms. And many do. Being neophytes, they don’t adhere to professional standards. Probably half the ones I get don’t even have an unsub option. Of the ones that do, probably three quarters ignore my request. I’ll gently asked to be removed a second and third time. After that, I either call their boss (assuming they have one) or file a complaint with their email or hosting account. If that goes nowhere, I’ve been known to make them an object of ridicule on my site so my readers know not to hire that company.

I prefer to keep barriers low because a good PR person can make me look good to my readers. However, they MUST review my site before pitching me! Few of them do. Please don’t tell me my blog is great if you’ve never seen it or have only read the masthead. I get every fashion pitch on the planet but my site is engineering, factory type stuff in the “fashion” world, not consumer products.

It’s happened that I’ve gotten inappropriate pitches from veritable respected firms. In such cases I take the time to explain the kinds of pitches my readers would find interesting and ask them to keep me in the loop.

By: Conducting PR in the Million-channel Blogiverse

Conducting PR in the Million-channel Blogiverse — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:55:24 +0000

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By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:45:37 +0000

I was slightly surprised it was a magazine complaining – but as I see it, his point is that the people sending him these releases are not trying to find out who to send it to, not even the generic address for the mag and just see him as an easy public face. There are a lot of good PR people out there who do try hard – but they are tarred by the bad ones. I agree – it will shake out.

By: Harrison Wise

Harrison Wise — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:25:23 +0000

I’m going to put this out there, because I was just having a similar conversation with a friend and fellow publicist. We’re both seasoned PR vets and pride ourselves on doing PR the right way, however we had shared experiences where we’re finding it’s getting harder than ever to break through the clutter and are finding that nearly every publication (Wired excluded because they always tend to be ahead of the curve) are covering the same 5-10 companies daily.

I’m generalizing to a point, but we’re finding that more often than not most reporters due to the experiences that are outlined in your post, as well as tight deadlines and the speed at which they need to publish to the web leaves them with little choice and/or time to actually do original research, investigative reporting and find the real (smaller) companies and people that are making a difference, and just report on Google, MSFT, AOL, Yahoo and the like and approaching their contacts directly.

Luckily I have good relationships with many reporters and they know I won’t waste their time when I do email/call, but like Chris, they’re inundated with irrelevant pitches and my emails/calls are getting harder to distinguish from the Jr. AE who’s just spamming them.

I don’t want this to sound like a rant, but with a billion Facebook and MySpace widgets and applications being introduced daily reporters are blocking PR pitches and relying on the big news generators, which in my opinion is leading to more generic news experience from NYT, WSJ, Adweek, AdAge, etc.

I think Chris is justified in his response, there’s a bad pitch blog for a reason. My only concern is that non-offenders get lumped in like dolphins in a tuna net and as more reporters and editors take this approach the both journalism and PR will suffer. It’s only a matter of time now before we have another shake-out and things settle down a bit. I survived the last one, I’ll survive this next one and the one after because of the relationships I forge with journalists on behalf of my clients and deliver the information, news, scoops that they need to their jobs.