Getting Ink

Would you hire a reporter?

I had a conversation this week with a veteran IT journalist who’s looking for a job in PR. He’s worked in journalism for almost 20 years as a reporter, news editor and editor, and has been freelancing for too long – now he wants a regular salary, a nice office and company during the day.

Honestly? I’m not sure how quickly he’s going to be snapped up.

I think there’s a tendency sometimes to assume that journalists can waltz over to a cushy PR job when it gets too much, but I think there’s always been a lack of understanding about exactly what it is PRs do when you’re not pitching the likes of me (for proof of that, see the roasting this reporter got at Bad Pitch Blog). I’m sure it’s not all about sipping lattes and cutting little articles out of magazines.

I also wonder whether the skills involved in PR in 2009 are such a good match with old-school hacks. The journo in question doesn’t blog, doesn’t have a Twitter account, doesn’t understand the basics of SEO.

Then I saw this NY Times story (which has also been written up on the PR Media blog) about a US sports team hiring its own reporter. I wonder if this isn’t a better career option for the disillusioned, experienced technology journalist? Not to be a sports writer, but to become an on-staff writer for a technology vendor, PR agency or similar.

I reckon there are plenty of mid-market vendors who don’t get the coverage they’d like from their target publications. Bringing on an experienced technology writer to cover their events, products and announcements could reap huge benefits.

The company could have their own blog, which could carry dynamic, independent content that’s written by a professional. The journalist would also be able to submit content to press release and news wires on the vendor’s behalf.

I know that there are obvious questions around objectivity and conflicts of interest, so I think this is a career route to be explored with caution. Contracts and rules would need to be in place to protect all parties. But I wonder if this isn’t a smart way for journalists to market their skills (writing, research, industry knowledge) rather than assuming they’re a dead-cert for that senior PR job? 

Props to the PR: all pitches should be *this* good

Further to yesterday's rant about PRs who send generic email pitches to hundreds of journalists, I got an email from Phil Corfan at Octopus that made me laugh a lot, especially the postscript. Genius. 

Hi Sally,

So you know this is an individually tailored pitch, not just some spam we send to everyone, your name is spelt down the side.

An announcement today by Cisco revealed Smart Connected Buildings, the company’s latest emerging technology. Smart+Connected Communities addresses the growing need for sustainable energy to meet the demand of increasingly urbanised populations by providing a network-enabled blueprint for successful smart cities of the future that run on networked information. 

Like other components of the Smart+Connected Communities vision, Cisco’s Smart Connected Buildings solution provides the intelligence to interconnect and enable building systems such as heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC), lighting, electrical, security, and renewables over the IP network to build smart and energy-efficient buildings of the future.

Linked to this sentence is the full release, complete with images, video and supporting quotes. <http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_070109b.html>

You may be interested in discussing this news with a Cisco spokesperson. If so, please do get in touch on the details below.

Kind regards,
Phil

(Apologies for the slightly wooden prose. This was harder than I expected it to be.)

Things I have said to PR execs today...

I know, I know. Someone could do an even funnier version from the PR's perspective, I bet.

• Yes, it’s Sally Whittle. Can I speak to Clare?
• Whittle. W-H-I-T-T-L-E
• I’m writing a story about the XXXXX server
• The XXXXX server? I think I got a release about it today. Yes, it came from your agency.
• Yes, it’s from today.
• It’s for ZDNet.
• ZDNet
• It’s an IT website.
• ZDNet-dot-co-dot-uk
• I’d like to have a quick chat with the client if I can, please.
• Just a bit more background, why customers should care, improvements in the product, that sort of thing.
• I can put that in an email if it’s easier, sure.
• As soon as possible, please, I need to file by 4pm.
• Yeah, it would probably need to be today. 
• No, I think tomorrow would be too late.
• Yes, I’ve got the press release. We just can’t use quotes from press releases.
• Because I need someone who can explain why my readers should care about hyper-threading in a dual socket server.
• Well, not off the top of my head, no.
• No thanks, I don’t need a photo.
• Sure, you can email it to me.
• It’s mail at sallywhittle.co.uk
• Not Little, Whittle.
• Yeah, Whittle. W-H-I-T-T-L-E
• Do you know if the client’s available?
• Oh, he's in a meeting?
• A meeting at a trade show?
• On the West Coast?
• Fantastic.

PR and journalism: almost exactly the same. Only different.

So Wadds told me via Twitter yesterday that too much social media is making me lose my "sparky edge" (though can I just say how much I adore the idea that I used to have one) when I could only muster mild irritation at the PR who sent me a 7MB attachment to accompany a press release titled "Official Opening of New Church Shop", so I thought it was time for a good old "PRs, aren't they rubbish, eh?" blog post.

Luckily, there's never a shortage of material for that kind of post.

Jed Hallam reckons that PR and journalism are pretty much the same job. I can see where he's coming from: both hacks and flacks are about communicating, about building stories and making them interesting to the intended audience. However, scratch a little deeper and you'll find actually, PR and journalism have five fundamental differences:

1. PRs have to be nice to people. It's in the job description. This is why my career ambitions have never included "public relations". I like being a journalist and reserving the right to tell particularly annoying people that I hope Dante comes up with another circle of Hell with their name on it.
2. When you're a PR, your job is ultimately to further your client's business goals - usually to sell stuff. If you're a journalist, your job is generally to provide information that is useful to the reader. Sometimes those two goals align, sometimes not. But, within certain constraints, my job is to serve the reader. Your job is to serve The Man.
3. As a PR person you always have the option to play the 'no comment' card. Strikes aside, journalists have to come up with something to write about for any story. Although I have to say, when it's writing a hard-hitting expose of the flawed introduction of the Euro symbol on printers, it's a challenge.
4. We can sneak out of press conferences and nobody minds. Try doing THAT if you're a PR attending your client's boring product announcement.
5. Being good at PR needs interpersonal skills. Success in journalism is (to the best of my knowledge) not a problem for those with borderline personality disorders. I remember once sitting in an interview where my editor actually questioned whether the chap we'd just met might be a serial killer. Seriously - it was a definite possibility. But that was NO reason whatsoever not to hire him to work on a major weekly magazine.

How low would you go?

As some of you may know, in a truly weird turn of events, I ended up doing some PR recently for a local company.

Basically, they use me because I'm cheap. I'd like to think it's my natural abiltiies, but I think we all know I'm not one of nature's born PR people. But for a few hundred quid, they get X hours of my time, and I write their website, update their blog and get them quoted in the right sorts of magazines.

This morning though, I realised I'm not cheap. What's cheap is the new PR agency launching with a portfolio of services for clients including producing press releases at £25, full copywriting services at £100 a day, and - my favourite - rewriting an ENTIRE website for £40*.

My first instinct is this must be an enterprising student. But no, in fact it's a PR firm headed by two very experienced PR types.

I am TOTALLY confused. How does this work? How on earth can any professional hope to survive at rates that equate to less than minimum wage. Rewriting a website is a big undertaking - I'd expect to spend at least three days on even a small website, including meetings with the client, competitor analysis, SEO analysis and so on.

I know it's a recession but under-cutting quite so brutally has to be counter-productive, doesn't it? Or is it just a sign of the times?

* For reference, I do all of these things. Not for 40 quid, though.

If you don't blow your own trumpet, who will?

Just a short note to say how much I am LOVING the PR executive who's emailed me with a story idea this morning.

Her email address is "PR Superstar".

Fortunately, it was a cracking story, or the irony might just have been too much for me.

Visits on the other side of the fence Pt 201

As regular readers will know, I've done the odd spot of PR this year and it's been character-building, as my mother would put it.

I recently found myself being schmoozed by press release distribution services. I’ve issued two press releases for the client with Response Source and it’s pretty simple. Upload the release, pay £65, and the release has been picked up by some local papers and niche websites I wouldn’t have bothered to pitch myself.

The first release I put out did well – it got picked up by quite a lot of local papers, some quarterly regional mags and a couple of radio stations. My pitching had also got the client covered in a couple of national newspapers, and the major websites in the client’s sector. All good.

The second release? Not quite so good. It got picked up by the websites, but not the papers. They got a couple of BBC radio interviews out of it. Still, the client said, it was only £65 and they’d have paid a lot more than that for advertising on those sites and stations.

Except then the client gets a call from PR Newswire. The salesman tells them he saw their release, that he’s just been in a meeting with PA and the guy there really liked their press release! He thinks it should have got a lot more coverage than it did. And for just 10 times the price of the Response Source distribution, he can ensure their release is sent to PA, every national newspaper, plus thousands of ACCREDITED journalists. They will QUALITY CHECK the release to make sure it’s exactly what those journalists need.

The client asks me what I think. “Hmm,” I say (I like to say hmm, I think it makes me sound thoughtful when in reality I’m usually just covering gaps in my knowledge). “I sent the release to PA and it didn’t get picked up. Perhaps it’s just the wrong angle. And I sent it to the papers. I just wonder if it’s too similar to other stories they’ve run.”

So I go back to the salesman and say no thanks, we sent it to PA already. “Oh no,” says the salesman. “You sent it to one person at PA. We send it to everyone, all the desks. Also, it’s a really good press release. Very well written. I can definitely see it going into Metro and that sort of thing.”

I talk to the salesman some more and when he tells me the price of distribution, I seriously nearly fall off my chair. The first figure was the starting price - since our release is 700 words it costs even more. Blimey. Fortunately, turns out PR Newswire is quite flexible on price, so we negotiate a sensible discount and agree they can send out the release on the basis that we don’t have a lot to lose by trying it out.

At 8.30am the next morning, once the accounts people have taken the fee from my debit card because the client doesn’t have the required three years of audited company accounts to be considered worthy of credit, the release goes out. The result? A big, fat nothing. Nothing the next day. Or the day after.

Lessons learned?

• No matter what, remember the guy on the phone is a salesman, and engage your cynical side accordingly.
• Don't accept the price they tell you is standard. Everyone has a recession price list in the drawer that they'll take out if necessary.
• Distributing a rubbish release wider just makes more people realise it's a rubbish release. This is not necessarily progress.

Did my invite get lost in the post?

Must admit, I don't often go to industry parties, but I always get invited to loads around this time of year.

Back in my staffer days, parties seemed to kick in around November 20th and the next four weeks would be a round of Claridges,Cafe de Paris and Sugar Reef, with some private members' clubs thrown in for good measure. There was never much work to do, but it didn't seem to matter as most of us spent the month in a drunken haze, having ill-advised liaisons with colleagues and assorted PR types. PR parties gave me my first experience of the Gimlet, and introduced me to the joys of the Cheshire Cheese.

This year, two solitary invites: the Bill Moores party (now run by Sourcewire) and Skype.

What gives? Are my invites lost in the post? Did I eat too much garlic? Or are we facing a Christmas without free USB sticks and a few too many glasses of house red because of the wretched credit crunch?

How PR types can survive a recession

Absolutely fantastic post from Wadds here on how to keep your business thriving during an economic downturn, pulling together advice from others and some of his own insight. Well worth a read.

The world's gone mad

Bit of an irritating morning.

I forgot to pay my Amex bill this month, so the payment was a week late. Rather than taking the boring, predictable approach of applying a late fee, American Express cancelled my card, added on a £575 "administration" fee and referred my account to a debt collection agency, which sent me a letter this morning saying they know I own my own home, so they're going to have me made bankrupt unless I pay off my card and the admin fee RIGHT NOW, okay?

Still, my day got so much brighter when I saw what I think is my FAVOURITE ever media request:

Name: XXX
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Never has so much been said in so few words.