Wired Editor's PR Bashing on His Blog Ignites Debate on the "Hack vs. Flack" Battlefield
The gloves came off last week in the perpetual "hacks vs. flacks" battle after Chris Anderson, the executive editor of Wired magazine, chided "lazy flacks" who deluge him with news releases "because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested" in what they're pitching. "I've had it," Anderson wrote on his blog on Oct. 29. "I get more than 300 e-mails a day and my problem isn't spam ... it's P.R. people," he wrote, the NY Times reports.
After picking the fight, he then made it personal, posting the addresses of 329 unsolicited email messages he had received and telling the senders that he had permanently blocked them. The list included people from some of the leading public relations firms who, in Anderson's view, should have known better: Edelman, 5W Public Relations, Fleishman-Hillard, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and Weber Shandwick, reports Times writer Andrew Adam Martin. Beyond the public shaming, they soon received unwelcome email themselves because computer programs called spam bots collect addresses from websites, which pleased Anderson, who wrote, "turnabout is fair play."
It hardly seemed fair to others, though. Susan S. Bratton, chief executive of Personal Life Media, an ad network of Internet programs, commented on the blog that it was "appalling" to list addresses and called the post "mean-spirited." Many of the 350 responses echoed Bratton's.
Predictably, journalists tended to take Anderson's side, but some publicists did, too. Peter Shankman, author of "Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work," wrote that rather than spraying buckshot, PR people should research beats and specify a single reporter. "Don't want to do that?" he asked. "Get the hell out of my industry."
Others suggested that Wired—which itself sends unsolicited email—is hardly beyond reproach. Anderson acknowledged this in a follow-up post and wrote, "we're trying to minimize these practices."
Anderson also wrote that many people had written to apologize, promising to reform their ways, and asked to be taken off the list. "I've written to all of them to thank them for their commitment to change, but I'm not going to undo history."
Anderson is the author of a book, "The Long Tail," and the website where he keeps one of his blogs, thelongtail.com. One post links to an item on a site called the Silicon Alley Insider that purports to show an email exchange in which one PR shop tries to poach a client from another based on Anderson's complaints.
Roy Peter Clark, vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said that the hostilities Mr. Anderson had stirred up were less about technology than about territory. "I grew up in this business 30 years ago learning that flacks were your enemies, with an asterisk," Clark told the Times. "The asterisk was unless you really needed them, when you were on a tough deadline and couldn't get around them or through them."
Comments:
Wednesday, November 07, 2007 11:34:16 AM by Linda VandeVrede
It's time to show the other side of the coin and stick up for PR people. Check out http://www.valleyprblog.com/?p624 It would be great if PR people and journalists could switch jobs for a day and walk in each other's shoes.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007 12:33:16 PM by Peggy Duncan
I understand why Chris has had it. But when you get in front of the problem and think it through, you'll come up with better ways to deal with it.
I train editors/journalists how to manage email overload. One suggestion: each person should have a page on the company's Website that they can update on the backend...without going through the Webmaster. They let PR people know exactly what they work on, what they're currently doing, upcoming stories, the best way to contact them, etc. It's also a good idea to create a special email address just for PR with an autoresponder that directs them to this same Webpage (don't use autoresponders for other purposes because you'll start to contribute to other people's email overload and you'll autorespond to spammers).
Don't put your live email address on the Web. Write it with (at) instead of @.
Also change your voicemail message to NOT say "...I'll call you back as soon as I can..." because you're not. The new message lets people know that "due to the volume of messages I receive, I may not be able to return the call..." It also directs them to the Webpage.
PR people have been spraying and praying since the beginning of time, and they probably will go on because it's easier. So knowing that, what can you do?
Thursday, November 08, 2007 4:30:45 PM by Debbie Stock
As I PR person, I would take that blacklist posting of my name and company as an honor, and use it to show that I had been working on a client's behalf. If you are not confined by box thinking and your client is willing to pay for creative approaches, launch your own Wired style website with your client's stories that will be picked up by the search engines and found by editors seeking information. Thus you get to Anderson and other editors in the manner they prefer, through organic search. They may see you as a source or a threat. But either way, you attract their attention and oftentimes your client's message is spread across the world, well beyond one coveted publication. Such efforts are results driven, less metered, more difficult to charge for and not favored by many PR firms.
Thursday, November 15, 2007 7:12:32 PM by Anonymous
Back in the old days publications used to publish editorial calendars. Then the magazines stop following their own editorial calendars and now most don't even publish an editorial calendar.
Just did a search on Wired site and Google to find Wired's editorial calendar and guess what? Not published.
I work for a global networking company and getting Wired to cover anything is near to impossible and that is with talking to a specific editor that covers a specific topic as reported by Wired.
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