Monthly Archives: December 2008

Sheesh, what a mess today. I think the mass layoffs, shrunken budgets, bankruptcies, and poor industry sales figures have really gone to everyone’s heads in the media/PR world. The claws are out.

First the (excellent) bloggers at PhoneScoop get fed up with all the irrelevant PR spam surrounding next month’s Consumer Electronics Show and tell a PR company to leave them alone. The company’s president fires back with some crazy rant–both emails are leaked to another tech blog, of course, and now there are hard feelings all around.

Without taking sides or naming names, the company that was doing the spamming is among the most NOTORIOUS for spamming journalists (including me) with irrelevant press releases. In an earlier post this week, I talked about how certain agencies and PR names are punchlines in the office because of the amount of spam emails they churn out–the name connected with this story is at the top of the list; and frankly, she makes her profession look bad. OK, I guess I am taking sides.

The funny thing about the story is that PhoneScoop didn’t even post about the fracas…they kept their editorial wits about them and let CrunchGear post the dirty details.

Meanwhile, on CrunchGear’s parent site, TechCrunch, uberblogger Michael Arrington today decided that he’s not going to honor embargoes or non-disclosure agreements anymore, starting now. Journalists frequently sign NDAs that allow companies to give us information under the condition that we not share it until a certain time. The system doesn’t always work: if one publication decides to break the NDA and post the news early, it screws every other publication that dutifully sat on the news until the proper time. As I know you’re thinking right now, it could be argued that we do our readers a disservice by sitting on news in the first place, though this is wrong for two reason:

1) NDAs allow for better press coverage because we have more time to prepare and research a story before posting it
2) For product testing (the kind that PCMag prides itself on), NDAs are essential because they give us time to test products before they are available to the public. This is great for the readers, because it means they don’t have to shell out money for something before they’ve read an expert review of it.

There are lots of other benefits to the NDA system, and some downsides and compromises too, but overall, everyone–even the reader–wins when NDAs are honored, and everyone–even the reader–loses when they are broken. (This great post on ReadWriteWeb goes into more detail on why NDAs are important for the industry.)

Anyway, Arrington says that not only will TechCrunch now break NDAs, they’ll still agree to them and THEN break them:

“We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.”

Fantastic, thanks a lot. Besides being dishonest and douchebaggy in a purely human sense, it is basically a Hobbesian rebellion against the social contract and industry norms that we all follow for our own good. If everyone keeps the embargo, everybody–including the reader–wins. If one publication, acting in self interest, breaks embargoes as a matter of policy, everybody loses, including the rebelling publication.

Hopefully, the only damage that is done is to TechCrunch’s sources and goodwill. Yeah right. TechCrunch HAS no goodwill, but there are plenty of sources and PR firms that give them exclusives anyway. More likely, other bloggers will follow TC’s lead, PR firms won’t know whom to trust with NDAs anymore, and we’ll go back to a tiered system in which mainstream publications are given early access and everyone else is kept in the dark. That’d be great for PCMag, which zealously guards NDA information and keeps our NDAs (our time-intensive lab testing makes NDAs a necessity for us), but it’d definitely reduce the quality of tech journalism/blogging overall.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility though. Apple and several other companies already use a tiered system to roll out their new products. There are a handful of journalists that typically get Apple products early (I can list them by name), and the rest of the industry has to wait until the product launches. I can totally see this becoming the norm for the industry again if NDAs become too easy to break. Again, this could be great for PCMag, but bad for everyone else.

Related, but not totally:

There was talk a year or two ago among the Washington D.C. press corps about possibly refusing to accept NDAs as a group, but I’m not sure what came of it. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham talks about the necessity of NDAs in the political journalism world in this Daily Show interview:
.cc_box a:hover .cc_home{background:url(‘http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-over.png’) !important;}.cc_links a{color:#b9b9b9;text-decoration:none;}.cc_show a{color:#707070;text-decoration:none;}.cc_title a{color:#868686;text-decoration:none;}.cc_links a:hover{color:#67bee2;text-decoration:underline;}

They start chatting about it around 4:55, and really get on topic around 7 minutes. It’s obviously not a direct corollary to tech journalism, just an insight into how your news is made. I’m sure you’d rather not know, and I apologize profusely for this post.

Update: Allan Stern’s reaction over on CenterNetworks is absolutely perfect. And of course, this whole mess would’ve been avoided if PR people were reading and abiding by the counsel in Rafe Needleman’s Pro PR Tips blog.

Update #2: My own boss wrote a good post on Gearlog to elucidate PCMag’s long-standing embargo policy.

Update #3: Been getting lots of emails about this post today. I love feedback, but post it in the comments where everyone can see! Venting about TechCrunch in hushed tones via private email is futile. ;-)

For some reason, the Internet meme of choice for journalists this fall has been “Be Condescending to PR People on Your Blog.” I actually think Chris Anderson, the EIC at Wired, kicked it off a year ago by posting the names of all the PR people that he auto-filters as spam senders. Ouch.

Veronica Belmont of Rev3 wrote a thoughtful post a couple weeks ago about whether “PR spam” (e-mail blasted press releases) does more harm than good. Dylan Tweney, a former Ziff coworker who’s now at Wired, followed up with a very good response that journalists and PR folks need to rethink what our jobs really are in the current environment.

Veronica’s and Chris’s complaint is intriguing, because if you work in a newsroom, you hear it constantly. Essentially, it boils down to “These stupid PR people are wasting my time with irrelevant PR spam!” And it’s often true. There are three offenders in particular whose names are punchlines in the offices of PC Mag because of the quality and quantity of pitches they send out.

But here’s the point of this post: PR people, please don’t stop sending them. Seriously. If Wired and Rev3 don’t like getting your blasts, that’s great; take them off your distro lists. CNET’s Rafe Needleman responded to all this by saying “Sure it’s annoying to read all the crap that comes in. But you know what? *It’s my job.*” He’s right, and I’ll take it one step further: those email blasts are great for both you and me.

I know there’s been a lot of talk in PR circles about better ways to distribute a client’s news to journalists–twitter feeds, corporate blogs, viral crap–but from a journalist’s perspective, an e-mail blast really is the most efficient way for both of us to do our jobs.

As Veronica herself says, I generally know if a press release is relevant after reading the first sentence. It takes, what, a second and a half to read a sentence? That’s an amazingly efficient way to digest news and determine its value to PC Mag’s readers. And personally, I actually prefer email blasts to personal notes. There are some PR folks with whom I work more closely than others, and while I don’t mind getting personalized pitches from them, these pitches do take more time because I usually respond to them, even if it’s just to say I’m not interested. I feel no such need to respond to blasts, so by all means, blast away!

Besides simple efficiency, the other reason I prefer PR spam is because it’s a passive way to collect the news while I go about my (many) other daily tasks. If a PR person is maintaining a Twitter feed for a client, or if the company chooses to announce news on a corporate blog or something, that requires me actively seeking out announcements, and that takes longer than the 1.5 seconds it takes me to evaluate an e-mailed press release. Veronica says she assumes that the hot news will bubble up to the top of FriendFeed or Techmeme, and it always does. But guess what: if you see a product announcement on Techmeme or the blogs, it’s because somebody else beat you to it.

So please, keep sending those impersonal emails. I’ll delete 90% of them, forward 7% of them, and actually pick up 3% of them myself, but that success rate is OK with me if it’s OK with you.

[Notice I didn't even address the issue of PR phone calls in this post. I figure that issue has long been settled--don't cold call a journalist with a pitch. Not ever. The only thing more futile is snail mail]