Journalists and bloggers put on their bag gloves again this week for another round of PR jabs and uppercuts. Brian Solis of FutureWorks posted a lengthy public apology/explanation on behalf of one of his employees who got called to the carpet by a blogger or journalist for an unsolicited pitch. Matt Haughey of A Whole Lotta Nothing offered up a some gmail tips for blocking PR people. Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker.com, took it a step further and started a wiki called prspammers which lists the domain names of offending PR companies, instructions on adding new names to this list and how to block them using gmail. Todd Defren posted an open letter to Gina criticizing the list and explaining that PR people are human after all and make mistakes.
Why does this keep happening? Has anything really changed since Chris Anderson of Wired publicly condemned PR people last November? Each time PR people get publicly outed for shoddy work, the great PR thought leaders enter the sweat lodge for yet another round of soul searching. And each time they exit with the same remedies (be transprarent, do your homework, don't spam, build relationships, we are only human etc). Something isn't working and the solution is not more Pitching 101 tips.
This is a backlash against the mass distribution model of PR. Technology has made it far too easy to send loads of low quality content to journalists and bloggers. Journalists and bloggers are overloading and using technology to not just filter PR content but to block it in its entirety. These are extreme measures that, if adopted on a broad scale, could cause real problems for the PR industry. How does the PR industry reverse this trend? It starts with creating a quality standard for all PR content. They do it in newsrooms (editors, copyeditors etc), so why not do it with PR. Newsvetter can be that new industry standard. It's designed to help PR people avoid many of the pitfalls and bad habits that currently plague the news development and pitching processes.
The PR industry has become weak and allowed poor quality to define its image. It's time for PR people as a whole to have a Howard Beale moment ("I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore") and start doing things differently. Once PR is seen as providing predominately high quality content, bloggers and journalists will reengage and the blockades will start coming down.