When is a press release not a press release?

The term “press release” is a whopper of a misnomer. The public communication we call a “press release” hasn’t simply been a message to the media for a long time. Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in [...]

Long Live New Media

With all the hand-wringing about the decline of metropolitan newspapers and other print media, you’d think that the traditional media was simply drying up and blowing away and leaving us in a media-free society. But that’s hardly the case. For one thing, traditional print and electronic media are far from dead and buried. They may [...]

New York Times Bloggers Dish With PR Pros

Three New York Times writers/bloggers sat down for a lively panel discussion on the second day of the Media Relations Summit in NYC: Andrew Ross Sorkin of DealBook, Saul Hansell of Bits, and Tara Parker-Pope of Well. Following are notes from each: Hansell: Interested in: spot news, little things, debates, interactive features, news analysis and [...]

When You Pitch the Media, It's Not About You

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about PR, it would be this: to make all press releases and PR pronouncements about the interests of readers, users and editors, not about the organization issuing the press release. Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news [...]

Online Media Echo Chamber Tries and Convicts Domino's

I’m skeptical about the supposedly major damage done to the Domino’s brand by a gross YouTube video a couple of its employees made showing them sneezing on a sandwich and doing other inappropriate food-handling things (you can search for the video online if you want). Soon after the video hit YouTube and started to make [...]

"Journalism Online" Revenue-Generating Scheme Is About 10 Years Too Late

Great idea — lousy timing. That’s my assessment of Journalism Online, the new venture that aims to wring some revenue for traditional media out of Internet users accustomed to getting free access. It’s a noble goal, but it’s woefully late. Internet users are WAAY past being willing to pay for stuff they’ve gotten used to [...]

Interesting Peek At What Real "New Media" Might Look Like

You can call things like Facebook and Twitter “social media” all you want, and they are certainly an interesting new societal development, but they aren’t professional media. There will always be professional intermediaries, storytellers if you will, who will seek to get paid to tell you what’s going on in our world. Will the media [...]

All Together Now: Bloggers Are Real Media!

Thank you, City of Long Beach, CA, for giving us all another reminder that the world has changed and that there’s this new thing called the Internet and a new medium called “blogs” and that together they are “new media.” The story: An aviation blog called “The Cranky Flier” got a good little story: that [...]

The Online-Only SeattlePI.com Will Be a Media Relations Challenge

Take a moment and note that this is a landmark day in American journalism, and by extension, American public relations. A major American metropolitan newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has completely dropped its print edition and gone online only. It’s hard to imagine this not being the first of a trend, and perhaps even the beginning [...]

Blogger Research is an Unavoidable Chore

I’m in the midst of creating a fairly important list of bloggers for a client. When completed, this list has the potential to generate key publicity for this client. Yet unlike creating a list of mainstream media targets, I’m finding this process more and more tedious. The reason is implicit in the nature of blogging [...]

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