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Humour People tech pr Technology PR

PR is “deader than the journalistic trade”: Mike Magee

Mike Magee, founder of The Inquirer, co-founder of The Register and one time editor of PC Business World, has penned a rather amusing departing shot from Incisive Media. In a self described “final act of ennui”, he gives us the definitive Guide to Modern 21st Century Journalism.

He has seven rules for the budding tech hack (reproduced in full below). As Peter Kirwan says, it’s a sensible rant against Google-driven hackery.

Rule 1 did get me thinking though:

Totally ignore PRs. The PR profession is deader than the journalistic trade. What place is there for an agency PR person when all the vendors throw up press releases instantly copied by serried ranks of “data gatherers” so cutting out the middle bunnies?

Amidst the satire, there is a serious point about the role of a PR agency today. Clearly there is a role to be played, but it almost certainly doesn’t resemble the PR stereotype of yesteryear. Sadly for Mike, it will involve knowledge of SEO, analytics, etc – but should still include the basics of good content skills and media relationship talent. And personally speaking, I don’t see why booze needs to be cut out of the equation.

Finally, as Intel and AMD’s PR departments break open the champagne, Mike says he will be “at his wit’s end at the end of the month at what to do”. I think the Coach and Horses beckons – for old time’s sake.
I decided to buy this drug on Cheap Ambien Possible side effects are dry mouth, drowsiness during the day, constipation, etc.

Those rules in full:

Rule 1 Totally ignore PRs. The PR profession is deader than the journalistic trade. What place is there for an agency PR person when all the vendors throw up press releases instantly copied by serried ranks of “data gatherers” so cutting out the middle bunnies?

Rule 2 A Modern Journalist never leaves the office, never has a drink, unless it’s a non-alcoholic Pimms, never double checks a story, never takes a chance, and has a pathological fear of a telephone unless the Health and Safety Inspectors clean the mouthpiece and earpiece every morning before the tidy world begins.

Rule 3 Google is the robotic news editor which rules the roost towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century. A Modern Journalist can do nothing except spur Adsense sales by endlessly re-writing stories that appear on Google News, which may never have actually been broken by anyone but first processed by the more important class of “data gatherers” who get early access to the er, press release.

Rule 4 The Modern Journalist never “breaks a story”. That would court the ire of the serried ranks of news management spinners and would breach Rule 2 to boot. Plus, even if a story fell into her or his hands, it would have to be “gathered” and then “processed” through the serried ranks of lawyers who act as an expensive filter to ensure that no boat is rocked.

Rule 5 The Modern Journalist must have gone to “journalist school”, where she or he will be taught all the tricks of the trade, such as sitting in serried ranks, never going out, never using the phone, re-cyling the endlessly re-cycled, and shamelessly cohorting with legions of other “professionals” such as people that went to “PR school” and those that drink non-alcoholic Pimms. They must be taking other stuff to get them high, surely? An old-fashioned hack would never do that. We think.

Rule 6 Show your adherence to 21st Modern Journalism standards by mouthing marketing slogans in your copy at every turn. If you have a news editor, and she or he wants you to “break stories”, complain through levels of the organisation that you’re being pressured and abused because she or he is complaining that you’re just recycling either press releases or re-cycled chunks from Google News.

Rule 7 Make sure you ignore this so 20th century saying: “You cannot hope To bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But seeing what The man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to. – Humbert Wolfe, Over the Fire” Accept bribes gracefully.

Categories
Business Performance Management

Accenture and fungibility

It is always a pleasure to come across an unfamiliar word amongst the usual sea of familiarity in marketing literature. In the current issue of The Economist, management consulting giant Accenture has paid to have a “special excerpt” included from Outlook, its “journal of high performance business”.

Standing out amongst the usual suspect words like “leveraging” and “groundbreaking” was the phrase “fungible commodities.” Or rather, that people should not be viewed as “fungible commodities.”

I confess, I didn’t actually know what this meant. So I went and looked it up.

Would seem fungiblity “is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution.”

Not entirely if Accenture’s argument about the non-fungibility of personnel actually works. But at least I learned something. Which is always nice in marketing.

Categories
Current Affairs Humour

Explaining the financial crisis: words versus video

The debate over video versus text continues to rage – both in journalism and PR. Some argue that TV news can’t provide the depth of analysis of a lengthy editorial. And should PR be exploiting new web video technologies more fully?

To me, it is a bit of a red herring. The real issue is the amount of time you have to convey the necessary information and how well you use each respective medium – the so-called ‘attention economy.”

Here is a case in point.

I read Charles Goodhart’s lengthy article (sub required for full feature) in Prospect magazine last week which went into the background of the current financial crisis. I then watched the following Bird and Fortune sketch on YouTube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_qK4g6ntM]

I came away feeling that Bird and Fortune pretty much captured the key points of Goodhart’s piece and delivered it in a more impactful way. On this occasion, video 1, text 0. But the video versus text argument remains, generally, a waste of energy.

Categories
Technology PR Uncategorized Web/Tech Weblogs

Wikipedia’s definition of Digital PR

This Wikipedia entry for Digital PR is curious for a variety of reasons.

First up, it has clearly been flagged as an orphan entry (ie few or no other articles link to it). Second, it has been marked as a blatant piece of ad fluffery.

And when you read it, you note the very poor use of English. The final line had a certain odd quality to it:

“Digital PR is also a new style of pr not just an agency! Many agencies do this form of pr not just the above group.”

Which seemed a rather mangled way of saying “other PR agencies are available.” As well as a lame attempt to make out that this item had been written independently.

I was curious to know more about this H&K division – clearly I’d missed something. On checking out the Digital PR web site, I discovered that they are: “an agency specialized in the research and implementation of the most advanced digital communication tools.”

Hmm. Lots of non-existent links. Garbled English at every turn. The most recent “news” dated from May 2007.

Perhaps these guys could do with some help. It was only after looking at the contact page that it revealed they are based in Milan (they also have an office in Madrid). I’m sure the copy is fine in Italian and Spanish – but it felt like they’d hired a cheap translator to do the English version.

However, I came away with a general sense that they were shooting themselves in the foot – as well as, by association, tainting the view someone might get of H&K’s overall capabilities in this area.

Having a key search term like “digital PR” linked to a high ranking Google slot (via a Wikipedia entry) would on the surface appear to be a good thing – but allowing this entry to remain there –  as well directing English language speakers to unhelpful content – (if they can even be motivated to click on the link as most people will realise it is a very unsubtle plug) does seem rather counter productive – both to Digital PR and H&K.

Anybody who feels like helping Digital PR to remove this unhelpful Wikipedia entry can of course go here.

Not only that, but we could do with someone writing a more detailed and objective entry to replace it. Any takers?

Wikipedia entry on Digital PR