Know-Nothing Journalists Give Bad PR Advice (Again)
I almost didn’t even react to this latest example of journalists giving businesspeople bad advice about PR, but I couldn’t help it. I figured it was better to blog about it than to leave a comment on someone else’s blog. Here’s the story: a Boston web trade group held an event on Tuesday called, “An [...]
In the end, it’s all corporate communications
One of the reasons I became disillusioned and left the mainstream media was that while it purports to be “independent” and “objective,” it’s really just corporate communications. That is, the media of today is largely owned by massive corporations who want to make money, and they do so by researching and reporting “news” and delivering [...]
Hooray for frickin’ Carol Bartz of Yahoo!
I’ve decided I’m a big Carol Bartz fan. Note to my contacts at Yahoo: I want to meet her and be her media trainer! The latest Bartz bomb came yesterday in response, again, to one of those “how can Yahoo survive” questions. The Yahoo CEO turned the question around and challenged the media to focus [...]
PR Rule #1: It’s About the Message, Not About the Methods
Generally speaking, it’s a bad sign when your PR strategy becomes the story, rather than the messages you are trying to send. And so it was today, when the New York Times ran five nearly identical pictures on its front page of Obama giving health care reform interviews on five Sunday talk shows, accompanying a [...]
Journalist pokes his head out into the real world, sees his shadow, and goes back
I just can’t get enough of journalists trying to make sense of their relationship to PR. Today’s example comes from Monday’s New York Times, where David Carr relates the story of his friend and neighbor, Thomas Moran, who left his thrilling but insecure newspaper job covering New Jersey politics for the safe but dull-as-dishwater world [...]
3 No-No’s When You Pitch the Media By Email
Almost all journalists say they want to be pitched by email. So guess what — they are deluged with email pitches! And to make matters worse, most of them are bloated, non-news pitches that get deleted faster than you can say, “did you get my email?” How to avoid the trash bin? That’s easy — [...]
More Media Whining About Standard PR Tactics
When will they ever learn? Never, apparently. Today’s story is the breathless coverage in Stars and Stripes and elsewhere that “dossiers” were created by the PR firm Rendon Group on reporters who wanted to embed with U.S. military in Afghanistan. Oh horrors! According to the story, PR professionals are reading the stories published by journalists [...]
Obama is Blowing the Health Care PR Battle
I’m stunned by the amateur approach of Obama and his White House team to the PR aspects of health care insurance reform. While the opponents of the plan have done a masterful job of ginning up opposition to change, the White House has been caught napping and clueless. I kept waiting to see if the [...]
Really helpful guide to the mindset of 18-year-olds
I’m 50. So as hard as I might try, I have no clue what people under 40 think about the world. I remember when Johnson was president. I watched the moon landing. I lived through Vietnam and Watergate. A heck of a lot of people didn’t do any of those things, because they weren’t alive [...]