Twit-pitching is the future of PR

What’s “Twit-pitching?” It’s using Twitter or other social networks to reach out to the media to pitch stories. But you can’t really pitch them the old-fashioned way — that’s the beauty of it. In a nutshell, Twit-pitching involves two things: relationships and concision. In other words, you have to have some sort of relationship with [...]

This Week on Catching Flack

I’ve decided that it’s dumb to just let 21st Century Media Relations wither while I write a blog over on BNET.com. On the other hand, my deal with them is that I’ll mostly blog over there instead of here. So what to do? How about a weekly digest of what I’m talking about over on [...]

What Were They Thinking?!?

This blog is called “21st Century Media Relations” — that is, how to do PR and media relations in the fast-changing Internet-enabled environment of the 21st century. Here’s an example of 20th Century media relations, or maybe 19th century if they did PR back then: From the TV column on the web site of the [...]

Get Real: PR Isn't Going Anywhere

Raging debate over at and around Silicon Valley Watcher, a blog run by former Financial Times writer Tom Foremski. Tom contends that PR is a dying industry, headed down the same rat hole as the dead-tree media business. A sampling from Tom: I’ve long warned the PR industry that it is on borrowed time. The [...]

Online Ethics Panel Coming Up

The PRSA Silicon Valley panel on online ethics for journalists and PR professionals, rescheduled from September, is coming up: it’s scheduled for October 30, 8-9:30 am at the offices of Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto. If you can make it, I hope you will join us. Here’s the reg form and here’s the description [...]

Burson-Marsteller Outed as Microsoft's Sock Puppet

The Wall Street Journal and the U.K.’s Observer both outed Burson-Marsteller today as the “sock puppet” of Microsoft’s effort to create an Internet industry group to oppose Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick. Seems B-M has sent emails to players in the Internet space urging them to join a new industry group, Initiative for Competitive Online [...]

Timeless Advice: Working with Wire Services

Today I hosted a Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference with four top editors of major wire services (see post below for details). We had a lively discussion about how the wires work and what they are looking for. I’ll share some highlights below. But what I want to say first and foremost is that [...]

Press Release Via LinkedIn: Another Wrinkle to Manage

Dan Primack of Private Equity Week alerts us today to another 21st Century Media Relations issue we need to manage: making an unintentional personnel announcement via LinkedIn (or any other online contact management/social networking site). Here’s what Dan wrote: Polaris Venture Partners today announced that it has hired MarketWatch founder Larry Kramer as a senior [...]

Must Reads About the Media

I wanted to pass along to you some of my favorite information sources for keeping up on the media. They’re all free and available, of course, online. Poynter Institute: The entire site of the Poynter Institute is a huge window into the world of journalism for any PR pro who pokes their head in. It’s [...]

Pitching in Public?

Here’s another new development for PR people to ponder: pitching stories to journalists on their public web sites. This innovation is being spearheaded, as best I can tell, by Robert Scoble, the iconic blogger who many consider to be a leading voice of the social media revolution. In this post on the PR Squared blog, [...]

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