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.
Bonus link: More smarts on the subject from Geoff Livingstone and Jason Falls.
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Published on
2/20/2008 in
news.
My buddy from my IBM days, Rick Bause, has put back on his sportswriter hat and started the Sportslifer Blog.
It’s about sports, and life and the intersections thereof.
Before working for IBM, Rick was a sportswriter, and it shows.
Here’s the feed.
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How to pitch bloggers seems to be the question of the day among PR people first discovering this wonderful world of social media.
Apart from the obvious (you aren’t going to send out a mass email blast, are you?) I think it’s very important to remember that blogging for most bloggers isn’t a job like journalism is for reporters. It’s a labor of love but for many bloggers, it’s not to pay the rent but to express some inner voice that needs expression.
So it’s not a blogger’s job to respond to you in time, or even care what you have to pitch her. And when she does respond, she’s doing it out of genuine interest, not out of professional obligation.
If you learn the difference, you too can be a social media wizard.
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In the ‘right in my backyard’ department, the Derailed blog by Bobby, a MetroNorth conductor who works the New Haven line.
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It’s all very well and good to tell PR peeps that you need to talk to bloggers. But with 40 million blogs, and more coming online every day, finding the right bloggers in your client’s space is always tricky. And very often the so-called top bloggers can change almost in an instant.
To address this PubSub (disclosure – they are a client) has been quietly rolling out community lists. These are human-edited lists of the top bloggers in any particular field, ranked according to links in and updated daily. So if you are looking to find out who is the most linked-to blogger covering real estate (for example) you can go to PubSub’s real estate list and find out.
The secret sauce here is that the lists are maintened by people in that particular field, and the lists are updated daily according to the most current link activity.
This week PubSub announced some new lists coming in the next few weeks. The literature blog list is already up. Next week a couple more come on line. Stay tuned to this space for the news.
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