A reporter answers the question: "Why Don't You Cover Us?"

Dan Primack, Editor-at-Large for Private Equity Week and author of the daily and free PE Week Wire email newsletter, devoted the top of his column today to providing guidance to PR people (must have been a slow news day). Here’s his post:
“Why Don’t You Cover Us?”
I get asked that question all the time, and the [...]

Social Media News Release

There’s a new breed of news release being developed called the Social Media News Release. As you can imagine, it re-invents the classic news release (written in a quasi journalistic style) into a more bullet-point-and-link style that may be more useful in the online world.
I’ll be watching this trend closely as well, but in the [...]

A Milestone of Sorts

As you can read in on my About page, and as you will hear from me time and again on this blog and in other venues, making a living in the media is hard. And it’s hard whether that’s traditional print/broadcast or online. In fact, the online revolution is making it harder than ever to [...]

Nikon and MWW try blogola

Another version of the blogola story: the MWW agency sent out $1000 Nikon cameras for bloggers to “try” for 6-12 months, after which they technically have to return them. Needless to say, this is another attempt to score positive publicity by showering blogger/journalists with goodies that the traditional media won’t accept.
Some links:
An Indiana-based blogger jumping [...]

Blog PR Tips and Comments

Of course, there’s always a bevy of items out there on how PR should work with bloggers. Here’s a brief rundown of some recent things:
Vocus has issued a white paper, 5 Golden Rules for Blogger PR: I’d say these are fairly self-evident: customize, participate in the blogosphere yourself, ‘bring something to the party,’ be honest [...]

More on blogola

Nice post over at Deep Jive Interests on blogola. Check it out — this subject is not going away.
In fact, it’s just starting. The only reason why blogola is even happening is that blogs have gained enough clout to make it worthwhile to try to influence them. But blogola does flag a key difference between [...]

A bit of learning from a pitch session today

I had to pitch a story today about 3 executives joining an investment bank. Personnel releases are never easy to pitch, because unless they are about very well known people, they tend to get covered in the standard “people” column.
I found today’s pitch even a little harder than in the past, in part because I [...]

Across the media-PR divide

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post had a funny and illuminating piece on PR jargon on Sunday.
Once again (but in a funny way), it drives home the point that we need to provide media-friendly information and no jargon. ‘Nuff said.

Assignment Zero: Pro-Am Journalism

I’ll be following the trend of “volunteers” doing journalism as this blog matures, but for now I just wanted to post a link to Assignment Zero, an experiment in “pro-am journalism.” It’s a fascinating experiment in using a small team of paid editors and an infinite number of volunteers to do research and, essentially, journalism. [...]

Interviews by email

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has a whole story today about the trend toward sources agreeing to be interviewed by email only.
Kurtz quotes Jason Calcanis on the subject this way: “Calcanis says on his blog that ‘journalists have been burning subjects for so long with paraphrased quotes, half quotes, and misquotes that I [...]

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