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Nice post from Charles Arthur, editor of the Guardian Technology Section, on why he says no to Public Relations (PR) e-mails: “And I’m saying NO to any more emails from you, thanks very much. You clearly have no idea what I write about, and that is a cardinal sin in a PR company.”
PR needs to start using RSS! Like Charles writes, nowadays I read my aggregator for what’s interesting, and get emails from journalists with ideas which I’ll either go for or try to shape into something that will work. PR just hasn’t entered the picture so far. Early days yet, of course, but there’s definitely no room for press releases that are so badly (via conversationblog).
Yes, the extract is sort of eye-catching, but my argument more generally – as the title of the post suggests – is that the things I find interesting to commission don’t come from announcement-style PR emails.
The key difference, I think, is that I’m looking for “stories”, which have up and down and give and take and back and forth; whereas sooooo many PR emails are announcements. That’s an element of a story, not the story; and the blogweb is the place where those elements get chewed over and *turn into stories*. Hence the use of the aggregator.