Now Why Didn't I Think Of That?

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on October 31, 2007

Chris Anderson, editor at Wired and author of “The Long Tail” has a pretty good idea: Public humiliation of PR people who don’t do their homework. Those who don’t do their homework and pitch him irrelevant story ideas are banned from his email inbox forever.

One of the banes of journalistic existence is the endless stream of PR pitches that arrive by email, phone, and occasionally by fax and snail mail. Now it wouldn’t be so bad if those people actually did some research, and to be fair many to, and read some of my stories and found out what I’m actually interested in. But too often the can’t be bothered, and thus waste my time, and in fact the time their clients are paying them for.

For instance, lately I’ve been getting calls from PR flacks repping dating sites, having never once written a word on the subject in more than a decade in this racket. Other times, they see in some profile that I write about “technology” and as such must be interested in some arcane bit of server software that automates something, cuts costs on something else, and makes business people smile while its doing it.

I rarely miss a chance at a subtle put-down when someone clearly has no idea what I tend to write about and what I don’t. Sometimes I’ll ask if they’re new to the business or doing an internship (usually they’re neither). Or I’ll ask them to tell me about the most recent story I’ve written that they’ve read. (They usually can’t, because they haven’t read any.)

Once, years ago I got a very hostile phone call back from an agency head who was offended that I was offended at receiving unsolicited “news alerts” about his client: A Manhattan night spot that was at the time said to popular with celebrities. (Aren’t they all?) After about a half dozen emails like that I complained to the agency’s upstream email provider, and the agency briefly lost its ability to send email at all. After all, I had asked to be removed from that mailing list several times, and as such had the law on my side.

In any event, I’m applauding Chris Anderson today for saying in public what many people in my business wish they had the guts to say themselves about the PR industry. This of course doesn’t apply to all PR people. Many are my friends. But it does apply to the lazy ones.

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