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There’s so much stuff out there on the web currently about how to approach bloggers as a PR person that those who it it wrong sometimes deserve the ridicule that bad pitches brings them. But you don’t often get magazines complaining. Chris Anderson, successful blogger, successful author of The Long Tail and Editor in Chief of Wired however seems to have a bigger problem than most as many of the PR emails are coming to him personally instead of to the magazine or to an appropriate journalist. So he’s taken action.
I’ve had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn’t spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it’s PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers
He’s now blocking any offending email addresses after the first offence and publishing all the emails in his blog.
The comments are where the interesting discussion lies. One person, on the blocked list, informs us that he got the address from a bought in list and there is always an unsubscribe option. Chris points out that unsubscribe often just confirms the address is live when receiving spam and that the unsub process is often faulty when using multiple devices and email addresses. PR professionals chime in on both sides of the debate, many finding fault with the email publishing (so open to spam scraping) and there’s even a complaint that Wired is sending out similar spammy mails.
Which side are you on? Did he do right by publishing the email addresses? Are the PR people just hardworking tryign to build up a business? What would you do?
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.
1657 days ago
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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.
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.