WSJ “does” PR (A kinder, gentler outing)

Posted on December 21, 2007 by rgeller

My Fusion friend and colleague (and all around brilliant PR pro) Suzanne McGee pointed out a
couple of PR-related WSJ items a little earlier this week.

One was a prominent piece in the print publication (“Are Your Clients Happy Now, Mr. Brabender?”) about an interesting character, who seems to be like the Broadway Danny Rose of PR (for any of you who remember the Woody Allen movie of the same name about the talent agent with poignant and off-the-wall acts.  Actually, I used to joke with my friend and former Fusion PR colleague Emilio Dabul that he was tech PR’s BDR).

Overall a fun and mostly positive piece, although Barry Newman, the reporter points out some numbers that I can’t believe are accurate:

“It’s a crowded [field]…The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts roughly 100,000 Americans in journalism but 235,000 in public relations, most of them in big organizations. But technology has not only given rise to mobs of small shops between the coasts, it has also turned the humdrum news release into a reviled variant of spam.”

It is hard for me to believe that the PR field is so crowded (given how hard it is to find good people), and that there is such as disparity with the number of journalists.  Ah, well, not all PR is media relations, and the definition of “media” is changing, with the advent of social media.

The reporter mentions spam to introduce the idea that a Danny Rose type like the cited Brabender “needs a gimmick”  to rise above all the other pitches.

On the subject of pitch spam, for anyone who followed the Chris Anderson debacle,  in which the author of Long Tail outed so called PR spammers (see my post on the topic, Wrong Tail Fiasco), you might be interested in this item that appear online this week in WSJ Independent Street blog, in Laura Lorber’s post How Not to Pitch a Reporter.

She wrote:

“While email correspondence has become part of a journalist’s job, a pitch that’s personalized and sent with my needs in mind is bound to have a much greater chance of getting consideration. Most unfortunately fall far short of this ideal, and our experience isn’t too far from Mr. Anderson’s. Some even make it to a ‘PR Hall of Shame’ that a reporter’s assistant set up in a visitor cubicle here, a wall plastered with email print-outs of the worst of the worst pitches.”She goes on to cite an example using a real pitch, with the changes the names (to protect the clueless).

She got lots of comments you might want to review.  Also, you might want to check out WSJ Small Business Link – the focus this month is PR.  It looks like they are doing a reader survey on the subject.  Hopefully, they will share the results.

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