commbasics

I've had several people point out an article in the New York Times from last week that talks about how social media is changing the way publicists do their work. The article points out that the day when deadlines, launch parties, press tours, news releases and getting the "right editor" to cover the news is long gone.  What the article doesn't mention is that very few companies want to put in the time and effort to do that kind of work, much less pay for it.  Most of them have gotten used to being able to crank out a cookie cutter news release, put it up on a discount wire service for a couple hundred bucks, hire a desperate publicist to make a couple of phone calls for about $300, and wait for the clips to come rolling in.  Of course they don't anymore so it's all the publicist's fault. What the Times article is describing is a much more labor intensive process.  Now publicists have to deal with hundreds of bloggers and social medi...

I'm not in the habit of promoting products and services here, but I had a demo yesterday of a PR database tool that really caught my attention. Most PR database services are still working in the paradigm that there are lots of journalists and analysts working at lots of publications where they work for many years and actually have focused beats.  That's no longer true.   Today's journalists are mostly freelancers, bloggers and those still getting a paycheck are wondering if they are going to have to clear out their desks at the end of each day.  Plus, they have to cover multiple beats and generally have to back up what's left of the staff.  So it does no good to have a database that's updated annually, quarterly, monthly or even weekly about the personnel on any publication.  And new blogs are popping up everyday. I stopped subscribing to these services a few years ago because I started realizing that my personal database was ALWAYS in b...