The Good, The Bad, The Spin

If the average person knew how much of what they consume of daily news originates from or is influenced in some way by a public relations effort, it would likely blow minds. But such is the nature of the news (and PR) business. There’s an uncomfortable symbiosis between reporters and PR people that is both mutually beneficial and mutually unappreciated. And it is what is.

So it’s not without some sense of irony when much of the background work done by both reporters and PR people never sees the light of day. One noted occurrence from my past: A reporter, hounding our organization for months on end, was convinced of inappropriate hiring practices based on the allegations of one individual. The story had promised to be published at any day until, one day, a barrage of questions in one email was passed on to me.

Answering each one of the reporter’s questions would have certainly been an exercise in writing one’s own headline in the next day’s newspaper. Instead, the response was short, direct and truthful, something along the lines of: “The individual was hired by a committee of his peers. You will have to ask the committee members why they chose this candidate.” (more…)

In case the point has not been drilled home enough, those on the receiving end of public relations ineptitude are fed up. It started last fall when an editor for Wired publicly posted PR people’s email address–those he deemed guilty of overly annoying PR spam. My favorite comment to this post:

“As a VP in the PR industry, I’d like to suggest a few things to these journalists who like to throw a hissy fit….”

The point missing in this statement is the precedent behavior: PR folks spending a good amount of time and effort spamming journalists. The antecedent behavior is the journalists striking back. Rightfully so.

PR people have long been objects of derision, and now they are being publicly outed. This past week, Lifehacker went a step further by not only naming names in a new PR Spammers Wiki, but showing us how to block a very specific list of PR agencies–a lot of the big dogs are on the list–using my favorite email tool, Gmail. The irony is that Lifehacker is a site devoted to efficiently getting things done.

Here are a few responses. Overall some came out as being defensive, some apologetic and one hedged on being threatening.

• PR Squared
• socialTNT
• Stowe Boyd.

I don’t follow sports, so I apologize for being behind the curve on Mike Grundy, football coach for Oklahoma State, who thew a temper tartrum at a press conference about a column written about one of his players. Here’s the original tirade:

Here’s the response by the columnist and her editor:
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