That’s right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It’s certainly simple enough to do — plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.

Makes a lot of sense, too. Video is such an incredibly powerful medium, and now, through the evolution of technology, we can all be fast and cheap video producers.

The key thing here is that a “vitch” can’t just be you reading your boring, stilted press release into the camera. You need to show something — the newsmakers, the location, something, anything tangible. This, by itself, takes PR people out of their jargon-filed comfort zone.

I just picked up on this word so I don’t have any good examples of video pitches and their results, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. I plan to try it this month just to see what happens.

I’ve been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people figure out if they had a story for me, and as a PR person, I’ve worked hard to teach PR people how to do a better job interacting with the media.

I’ve mostly considered it a lost cause to try to educate the media about PR, even though that was one of my original goals. Media people generally split into two camps: those who “get” the role of PR and deal with it, and those who “hate” PR and always bitch about it. Sometimes those in the latter group migrate to the former, but they need to do it in their own time. No use trying to teach them — their ears do not hear.

Despite this persistent divide, some people obviously think it can be overcome. At least, that appears to be the gist of the strategy of a new company, Plato’s Forms, which says is mission is:

developing solutions for companies and journalists that help address some of these challenging aspects of communications in the online media environment.

At this time, they say no more. In Silicon Valley-speak, they are in “stealth” mode, meaning they are developing their offering behind closed doors and plan to make a big splash when they unveil it at a later date. For now, they’ve got a half-mil to work with, partly from the pocket of founder Darryl Siry.

Their name, btw, refers to the philosopher Plato, who, their web site says, “held that we could not comprehend the true form of things, and could only grasp the reflections of their true meaning, as if they were shadows reflected on the wall.” At least one philosophy major disputes this reading, however, judging from the comments about the company on a TechCrunch post.

PRSA is a national membership organization based in New York. A staff and Board run the organization, but as a membership body, we have to have an annual meeting to conduct certain business, such as bylaw revisions.

Here’s my take on the bylaw revisions — just do them and vote yes! Then move on to the truly weighty and important issues facing our profession, and not dwell on bureaucratic minutiae.

Almost all nonprofits need to revise their bylaws periodically, as the organization and the external world change. Bylaw changes are almost always overdue, because they are a pain to push through. That’s the case here.

I’ve reviewed the changes a couple of times, looking for nefarious consolidations of power or simply bad ideas, and I can’t find them. The revisions appear to me to both modernize the association and streamline decision-making, two worthy objectives.

I took a second close look because there is a faction that has gotten itself extremely worked up about these revisions, but I can’t find any cause for alarm.

What does alarm me, however, are the things PRSA’s national meeting OUGHT to be dealing with, namely:

• The lack of enforceable professional standards of practice
• The lack of clear and low-cost ways of measuring the effectiveness of PR
• The revolutionary changes roiling the media, communications and the PR industry brought on by the Internet, and how to position and support current practitioners and train the next generation

With delegates across the country representing the best and brightest of the profession sitting in one convention room in San Diego, it would be a perfect time to address and work on these issues. But they won’t be on the agenda. And that’s the real shame here.

Now that I’m older, wiser, and jaded, this seems like, duh, but back in my younger days, this really seemed like an issue to me. It was certainly evident that we journalists were largely steered to cover “acceptable” stories — city hall scandals, urban violence — while understanding that other stories — such as corporate control of the country, for instance — would not be career-building subjects.

So I left the media, did a half-dozen years of community service type work, then trended over to real corporate communications, figuring — seriously — that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Just so you know, I don’t always sleep well with this deal with the devil, but mostly, I’ve found a way to make a living while doing relatively benign “corporate communications.”

Today’s sermonette is prompted by the item in the Times today about the Los Angeles Kings hockey team hiring “their own reporter” to write stories about the team on the Kings’ web site. The story assures us that “reporter” is being given “complete autonomy to post reporting or commentary.”

However, the story goes on to fret: “how sure can readers be of tough, impartial coverage when image-conscious businesses are paying for it?”

As if the Gray Lady herself, the Times, isn’t image conscious.

First of all, this story isn’t news — Major League Baseball has had the same set up for its teams for several years. Secondly, it’s a damn good idea in today’s world. It’s a world of instant publishing on a global communications platform. Why wouldn’t you post your own fresh content?

And this brings us to “credibility.” Every media outlet has a point of view — you just have to figure it out and deal with it, whether you are a media consumer or a PR person. So this is just one more example of a type of media to deal with. Like I said, it’s all just corporate communications.

In the mainstream, there’s probably no more “prominent” spokesman for white supremacy than Pat Buchanan. I put prominent in quotes because the man is self-appointed, having never won election to anything.

In a recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, where he is a regular contributor, Buchanan once again spouted his white supremacy, non-white inferiority line of “reasoning” during a discussion of Sonya Sotomayor, and as usual, played fast and loose with the facts. While Maddow let him get away with it during the original segment, she took him to task in a follow-up segment, and in the process, gave the most eloquent and forceful endorsement of anti-racism I’ve ever heard on national TV.

This is a big subject, but let me summarize, because this is important to me:

• White supremacy means a world dominated by people who pass as white, and seeing the world through the lens of white peoples’ experiences and standards
• There’s a world of non-white people out there, and they have been systematically discriminated against by white people (don’t believe me — read some of these links)
• People like Pat Buchanan are completely bought into defending white supremacy and white privilege
• There is very little in the mainstream media as yet about combating racism and white supremacy, but I’m happy to say that in my personal/religious life, I’m deep at work on it.

I can’t do Maddow’s takedown justice by quoting her. You just have to watch it for yourself.

BTW, the relevance to PR: This country will be majority non-white in my children’s lifetime. If your comms aren’t changing to reflect this reality, you’re falling behind.

Miller

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter’s Notebook, Batman — stop the digital presses!

Hammerling

Among Miller’s other “findings” in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client
• “In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.”
• “Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers … PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.”
• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK — enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling’s expense. What are my takeaways?

• Yes, social media and the Internet have transformed PR and are making mainstream media relations less important and multi-channel PR more important.
• It’s still about a) who you know, b) who trusts you and c) whether you have a good story.
• Reaching out to other influencers in addition to journalists has been a PR tactic since, as a friend used to say, God got her ears pierced. I recall writing PR plans in the 90s chock full of such tactics, only it didn’t involve using Twitter and Facebook, it involved snail mail and in-person events. Tools change, strategies are more permanent.

This has been a boon for PR — the more business media, the more PR people and resources needed to deal with them and pitch them.

It has never been easy to get coverage from the business media, but this year, it has gotten much tougher. Buyouts and closures are sweeping the media, taking out scores of talented and experienced business journalists.

Talking Biz News, a very good blog that follows the business media, reported today that 250 business media jobs were eliminated just during the first six months of 2009. That included the entire staff of Portfolio, the ill-timed new business mag from Conde Nast, and 100 positions throughout Bloomberg Media, which is heavily dependent on sales of its information to the financial services sector. But there have been scores of other jobs lost at national newspapers, regionals, magazines and business journals.

What does this mean for us in PR? It means we have to work ever harder to get stories placed. It means we can’t waste precious time pitching non-stories to over-worked journalists. It means that when we do pitch a story, we need to be ready to provide facts and figures, human interest, quotable quotes, photos, graphics and other sources for the story.

I know it’s hard to do. But that’s reality. So get back to work, people. Break’s over.

First, let me say that I do not ordinarily tout PR tools and technologies, and this is not an endorsement per se. But I was sufficiently impressed by the depth and breadth of dna13’s software that I wanted to write about. If you want to stop reading my drivel and go straight to their site for more information, here’s the link.

dna13’s Enterprise software does the following things:

• It allows you to post and share audience-specific messages across the enterprise (e.g., messages for consumers, investors and government affairs)
• It allows you to set access controls so that only the proper people within the organization can drill all the way into the information
• It allows different communications functions across the enterprise to see what the others are doing — who media contacts are, what has been said in various outlets, the tone of the coverage, etc.
• It gives top-level marketing and communications executives (e.g., the CMO), a comprehensive dashboard to see what’s being said and done throughout the organization in real time.

It of course also includes a media database (provided by PR Newswire) as well as access to media monitoring services (those are table stakes). And it’s a SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering, so it’s hosted by dna13 and doesn’t need to be installed on enterprise servers.

My fascination with this product is that is seems to provide everything the modern Fortune 500 level CMO would need to leverage network computing power to stay on top of communications trends affecting their company.

I’ve known the dna13 folks for awhile but finally got the demo at the recent Media Relations Summit, which draws largely a mid-level PR audience. I don’t think this service is going to sell through this group, though. I think dna13 must pitch this service higher up the communications ladder, to CMOs, CFOs, VPs of governmental relations, and the like.

With journalism under siege and journalism jobs vanishing faster than you can say “Huffington Post,” it does make some sense that these professional communicators would look over the hedge and see public relations as a place to earn some cash in today’s (and tomorrow’s economy).

As I said earlier this week, Abrams’ use of freelancer journalists as PR consultants is not really new. Get a fulltime NY Times staffer to serve as a consultant, and now you’ve got something innovative (if not desirable). But those on the margins have been making a living wearing different hats for a long time.

Anyway, it turns out Abrams as either sparked a debate or just been early to the trend. Via Ragan’s daily email blast, here are some links that also relate to this emerging trend:

• Reason magazine: Will PR pros take the baton of investigative reporting?
• TechNewsWorld: The 21st Century Journalist: PR by Day, Reporter by Night?
• Society of Business Editors and Writers: Keeping it Honest in a Freelance World

Dan is speaking this morning at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit, so I’ve got some fresh insights into his “secret sauce.”

First off, his team: while Abrams says he has a database of 2,500 journalists willing to work on one of his projects, Abrams says that he has only used a tiny fraction of those, and they were people he and his colleague, Rachel Sklar, have recruited.

And they’re not full-time working journalists, naturally — they are freelancers and others on the margins and gray areas between PR and media. This is actually not terribly new — I’ve known people who straddle the line for years.

My other question was clients — who has actually stepped up to take his counsel? Abrams admits that so far, he has gotten litigation crisis work, which makes sense, since he is a trained lawyer. Abrams joked that as a lawyer, journalist and PR person, he may be a “walking, breathing axis of evil.”

Aside from these nuggets, I would say that Abrams came across as a newbie communications professional who has some basic insights into business communications (e.g., “you’ve got to a build a tunnel of trust before the water can flow through it.”). Clearly, with his name recognition, he is getting and is going to get clients, but time will tell if he’s really got anything novel to offer.