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Thursday, January 20, 2005
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 Thursday, January 20, 2005
started 1/20/2005; 2:12:28 PM - last post 1/21/2005; 8:56:37 PM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, January 20, 2005 
1/20/2005; 6:12:28 PM (reads: 6219, responses: 6)
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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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Trevor Cook - Re: Thursday, January 20, 2005
1/21/2005; 10:41:14 AM (reads: 756, responses: 3)
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Your characterisations of PR are gratuitous. Journalists criticise media more often than not because they are ashamed of just how much they rely on PR for information and research and story ideas. Its tedious listening to the relentless self-congratulatory tone of journalists.
I'm amazed at Rebecca Blood's comment. She says she has never read any of the weblogs mentioned in Rosen's sloppy reporting yet she goes onto make a sweeping generalisation about what they cover and write about etc and their purpose.
This is a new height scaled in the arrogant disregard for accuracy that is endemic in many blogs.
How you can cite this self-identified nonsense as the best response is beyond me.
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Dan Lyke - Armstrong Williams: Not because he was a paid shill
1/21/2005; 9:17:20 PM (reads: 652, responses: 1)
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Doc, I think you're playing into their hands on the whole Armstrong Williams thing. I was outraged not because he's a paid shill, I expect that of my professional journalists.
I was outraged because he was paid to propagandize with public funds. That's the key thing that separates him from every weblogger who's taken money.
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Doc Searls - Re: Armstrong Williams: Not because he was a paid shill
1/22/2005; 12:56:37 AM (reads: 475, responses: 0)
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Doc Searls - Re: Thursday, January 20, 2005
1/24/2005; 12:15:24 AM (reads: 723, responses: 1)
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Its tedious listening to the relentless self-congratulatory tone of journalists.
For sure.
I'm amazed at Rebecca Blood's comment. She says she has never read any of the weblogs mentioned in Rosen's sloppy reporting yet she goes onto make a sweeping generalisation about what they cover and write about etc and their purpose.
Here's what Rebecca said...
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.
Looking at that again, I'll say you're right that she failed to PR bloggers credit whre due. I should have noticed that, but didn't. Mea culpa. Her final point, however — not every blogger wants to be a citizen journalist — is a good one, and that's one point I tried to enlarge in my post.
This is a new height scaled in the arrogant disregard for accuracy that is endemic in many blogs.
Okay, prove the accuracy in this remark, then:
Journalists criticise media more often than not because they are ashamed of just how much they rely on PR for information and research and story ideas.
I think you mean "criticize PR." Even with that change, the statement rings false to me.
But hey, I'm glad to be wrong. Happens a lot.
Fortunately, as Jay posted 1.5 years ago, Blogging is about making and changing minds. I'd be very surprised if lots of minds aren't being changed by the Armstrong Williams fiasco.
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Jay Rosen - Re: Thursday, January 20, 2005
1/24/2005; 3:15:41 AM (reads: 610, responses: 0)
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I posted this at Trevor Cook's site
Trevor: You might, on the principle of intellectual honesty, have noted that there was follow-up post at PressThink that included all the posts we could find.
You might--if you had not decided to go into full spin mode a few days after my post--that the blog sphere works in just this way. The readers are the editors and wrote in to say: you missed this one, and here's another one. All of which was duly reported at PressThink. Your readers don't know that because you have been spinning since then.
Look over the posts of your fellow PR bloggers since I wrote about the Ketchum manner. One thing you might notice is that there is widespread sentiment that the professional associations in PR have failed their members, and quite a lot of discussion of what to do about it.
If there had been a real response to Ketchum--and PR bloggers had engaged one another, as they did after my post--they might have been able to influence the lame response of those organization.
This was PR's Dan Rather. That's how big it is. And you are running around saying, "we blogged it, we blogged it, Rosen missed this one, Rosen missed that one. It's a scandal!" That is truly pathetic, Trevor. It's not engagement, it's just spin.
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