It's not something you hear every day

"There's no future in media databases"

Those were the words of a chap I spoke to on a conference call earlier this week. I was a bit surprised, mind: he works at a media database company.

The call was actually an opportunity to chat with the company's developers, who are working on a new platform that will provide a range of online services to journalists and PRs. 

It was a fascinating conversation and I think there's some really good ideas being discussed. At the very least, I liked that the developers were taking the time to talk to journalists about what they called our "Key business processes", and what information we wanted to provide to PRs, and receive in return.

For me, I said the ideal online service would provide me with:

• a quick way to find press contacts, so I don't waste hours every week Googling various combinations of Company Name + Press Office + UK
• a central place to store bookmarks, articles, contacts and interview details, so I'm not printing everything out or constantly flicking between Google Reader, Word, Entourage, Firefox and Excel.
• the ability to dynamically update the sort of topics I'm interested in, or a way to specify cut-off dates, like "I'm interested in HR, but only until the 25th, then I'm interested in corporate finance."

Anything else? 

I'm actually lunching with another media database company next week, so it will be interesting to see if the market generally is moving in the same direction.

Comments

[Francis Moran]

I've been expressing this very sentiment for years, Sally, and I think the sort of attention the PR trade has been receiving from the blogosphere all this past week makes the final convincing argument that there really is no future in media databases.

A colleague of mine wrote about our standard list-building practices. http://inmedialog.com/index.php/archives/theres-no-shortcut-for-building-a-great-media-list

Putting aside the lousy economic model of media databases -- one that has armies of poorly paid drones frantically scrabbling to stay current with the ultimate game of musical chairs that is every newsroom, and the masses of data-entry errors this process guarantees -- running a search on a massive database so you can mail-merge the results with your news release or pitch letter and broadcast it to hundreds of so-called "contacts" has always been, in my view, the worst sort of professional PR malpractice, nonetheless so for being terribly ingrained.

The extended PR industry navel-gazing that Robert Scoble seems to have kicked off this week (http://scobleizer.com/2008/08/11/pr-less-launch-kicks-off-a-stack-overflow-of-praise/) had an important central theme: That the bad old days of scatter-shot media relations are completely unacceptable. The new PR religion -- in worship of which we have always been high priests -- that says you need to really know the person you're pitching dynamites the very foundation of the media database.