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Thursday, January 20, 2005
As we were saying 
Payola Relations
| | hmmm. it seems to me that you're assuming that all of these PR bloggers want to be PR *journalists*, and that may not be the case. I haven't read any of the weblogs you mention, but it seems entirely plausible to me that their interest--and the purpose of their weblogs--is to promote their firms or to talk about effective PR strategies, not to "cover" the PR beat. |
| | not every blogger wants to be a citizen journalist. |
| | The blogola scandal, as it's being called, also offers a preview, also long overdue in how what's now known as the "blogosphere" is about to fracture. It's going to split between stand alone journalists — and folks who are coming to the web and creating sites with specific agendas: Promoting Howard Dean or Simon Rosenberg, for instance. |
| | Here we have another scandal, and the same kind of split. Read enough of the posts, and you start to see an additional split, between PR bloggers and their trade associations. The same split is happening in many industries, between incumbent organizations on one side and independent practitioners on the other side. Those independent folks operate both within and outside organizations, further complicating the whole thing. |
| | The difference with PR, however, is a more endemic one: PR is a paint-job business. Companies (and government agencies) hire PR professionals to shade, to shill, to spin and to gloss. Not just to "get the truth out there." If there wasn't a pile of money in the former, there wouldn't be a PR business to salute the latter. |
| | Also, like advertising, PR has an unfortunate split between its customers and its consumers. The people who pay for its goods are not the people who recieve them. I know, as a reporter, that even the best PR people are paid in most cases to bullshit me. And I know that's the case, because I worked for years as a PR pro, and a damn good one. |
| | So, it's a screwed-up market. |
| | What sucked about the precipitating story — the Department of Education paying Armstrong Williams, a "prominent black pundit" (I'd never heard of him, but then I hardly watch TV) shill for the department's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program — was 1) that an apparent journalist (qualification: be a talking head on TV) was a paid tool; and 2) that a major PR firm was laundering payola. |
| | But really: Who's surprised? |
| | There's a need for all the high-minded stuff that the best PR professionals stand for. I'm just not sure the old PR business can deliver it. And I have a feeling a lot of people blogging in the business feel the same way. Bravo for them, if they can change the old beast. |
| | Meanwhile, I'm just glad I left its belly a long time ago. |
| | Dishonesty in PR is pro forma. A press release is written as a plainly fake news story, with headline, dateline, quotes, and all the dramatic tension of a phone number. The idea, of course, is to make the story easy for editors to "insert" in their publications. |
| | But an editor would rather insert a crab in his butt than a press release in their publication. The disconnect between supply and demand could hardly be more extreme. No self-respecting editor would let a source -- least of all a biased one -- write a story. And no editor is in the market for a thinly disguised advertisement, which is the actual content of a press release. |
| | Editors hate having to deconstruct press releases to find just the facts, ma¹am. To most editors, press releases are just pretend clothing for emperors best seen naked -- because naked emperors make much better stories than dressed-up ones. |
| | So are PR bloggers going to go into the pants-pulling business (that blogging is also disintermediating by providing for free, by the way)? |
| | Here's a bigger story for ya'll: How is the Bush administration selling us Social Security privatization? Here's your assignment: Look for the commentators who are pushing it — and follow the money, if any, behind them. |
And shortened the work week by several microseconds
| | Science@NASA: NASA scientists studying the Indonesian earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004, have calculated that it slightly changed our planet's shape, shaved almost 3 microseconds from the length of the day, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters. |
| | Seems to be I read something somewhere else disagreeing with that, but NASA seems like a credible source, no? |
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