Every year the New York City Press Corps lampoon the shenanigans of New York’s political elite at the Inner Circle Dinner. You may remember the pictures of Rudy G in a dress. What I remember most are the lyrics of the closing number. The assembled journalists address the audience of New York’s greatest movers and shakers with a rousing chorus along the lines of “You need us, we need you.”
Yep. Journalists telling politicians (and their assembled flacks) that they need each other. Because without the politicians, the journalists would be out of their jobs.
So the latest dust up between A-list bloggers and PR flacks has taken the form of Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker, against a rouge’s gallery of agencies she’s decided to blacklist for the sin of, among others, emailing her directly instead of using the editorial email address.
So for the crimes of a few ACs, she’s blacklisting whole agencies.
Gina, do you honestly believe that nothing good or on topic will ever come from Edelman? Or any of the other agencies you have blacklisted? And is the onslaught of email really so bad that hitting ‘delete’ is too difficult?
What Gina, and most other full-time bloggers, have to learn – assuming they want to be treated like journalists – is that they are always going to need sources for good stories. Those sources don’t grow on trees – some of them might even come from PR agencies.
In the meantime, good luck writing all of those blog posts every day.
all of whom (are) quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people (have) iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology
…if any of them would even know who Kara Swisher is. Or care.
I don’t think the concept of Twitter is quite as foreign as many people make it out to be — and certainly no more foreign than the idea of “instant messaging” was not all that long ago.
Sometimes I wonder if we’ve lost our collective senses of perspective, if not our minds.
Here in the Bedford Central School District (motto “Please, We’ll Put Your Kid In The Gifted Program If You Promise Not To Sue Us”) the high school has been evacuated twice in the past few months owing to various “threats”.
More likely these threats, which turned out to be graffiti on the bathroom walls threatening to blow up the school, were designed to help the perps avoid a test. And of course the perps got what they wanted, plus the added bonus of attention and the gratitude and admiration of their peers.
That gratitude might be short lived owing to a new policy subjecting every child going in or out of Fox Lane Middle and High School is subject to random searchs of their bags, their lockers and their persons. Way to go, teaching children to respect authority and all. Treat them like criminals because of a joke.
When I was in High School we were treated like responsible adults until we stepped out of line. And we made jokes about blowing up the school and watched movies like Rock and Roll High School and somehow ended up alright. Because, news flash, the job of the American Teenager is to flip the bird at authority. Believe it or not, the drinking age was 18 and sometimes during my senior year, I even had a beer, legally. And I survived.
So you spent all last week putting together this amazing press kit. Four color printing and embossed folders.
Well guess what. I’m in the press room right now and no one is reading them.
Next year, try putting out something that gets them out of the press room instead of leaves them trying to figure out what the hell you are talking about.
Josh has called out the fakers, the frauds and the fools in our industry. Especially those who present themselves as experts when their experience is inch deep and not much wider.
Many times recently I’ve been sitting in conferences listening to ‘experts’ talk about various subjects. I’ve always said my definition of expert, especially when it comes to social media, is loosely defined as ‘a few years ahead of you on the learning curve’. It’s funny though that these experts were asking ‘what is social media?’ just a short time ago.
So what do we do, as an industry, about the so-called experts?
For one thing, stop paying to go to conferences that are serving up these experts. And stop patronizing the sponsors of these conferences.
And what about the individual speakers and experts who give out advice like “add content to your company’s Wikipedia entry?” How about naming names? Let’s use our collective Google-juice and make sure the permanent record is corrected.
That’s a start. Let a thousand flowers bloom in the comment section and throughout the marketing-blogosphere.
David Parmet is a New York based PR and social media marketing guru who helps businesses and agencies navigate the seas of social media.
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The opinions expressed in this blog are solely my own and do not reflect those of my clients or employers, past, present or future.
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