The hacks vs. flacks war: Take two
By Francis Moran
I could subtitle this, A newbie’s excellent adventure in blogging. Read on.
A week or so back, I reluctantly waded into the increasingly acrimonious battle being waged by some bloggers against the worst of the pitches they receive from PR folk, a contest that even the most mainstream of media are characterizing as a war. I believe it’s really a phony war given that competent practitioners on both sides of the PR-journalism fault line understand and appreciate what the others do, and know how to create value from the necessary relationship between us.
In my post, I cheered the bloggers who were naming and shaming the wretched. This caused my colleague, Gillian Brouse, to comment that, while she generally agreed with my sentiment, she was thankful such bloggers were not around in her misguided youth to call her out on the mistakes she made. Then, late last week, she drew my attention to what she called a “particularly egregious” example of a horrible pitch. I’m not going to provide the link here; if you really want to see it, you’ll be motivated to find Gillian’s comment and get the link there.
I’m not providing the link because my intent here is not to dump more opprobrium on the poor flack who was called out. I’m writing this update to share with you what happened when I posted a comment on that site, mainly in response to the many defensive comments it received from other bloggers and, especially, from PR practitioners who felt slamming bad PR was, to quote one of them, like “shooting fish in a barrel.” I wrote,
We’ve been commenting a bit on this whole hacks-versus-flacks thing our own blog, wwww.inmedialog.com, and one of our readers pointed to this, what she called a ” particularly egregious” example of the worst of PR practices. Some of our comments, and yours, wonder how fair it is for bloggers to pick on such easy targets. As a practitioner for 20 years, I say, “Bring it on.” Like the jackal who actually does the shepherd a favour by culling the weakest from the herd, having bloggers name and shame these poor practitioners will only make the PR species stronger.
BTW: Poor Tom Biro has missed the boat. This wasn’t a case of a “blog pitch gone bad.” This was malpractice from the first cut-and-paste. It was engineered from the outset to be a disaster.
As soon as I hit “Submit,” I had a momentary pang of concern that I had gone too far, especially in naming Tom Biro, the unfortunate flack’s boss, whose internal email addressing the problem had also been outed by the blog site. I’m very new to blogging and while I most certainly don’t want to pull my punches, I also don’t want to insult people or start flame wars.
So imagine my consternation when, the following morning, my Inbox told me I had an email from Tom! I expected a broadside of invective from him, or, at least, a mumbling defense of how his person had been mistreated, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Well, my hat is off to Tom. He wrote me a gracious and sporting email that made no excuses and actually thanked me for weighing in. “I completely take your comments to heart,” Tom wrote, adding, “I appreciate your chiming in and criticism of this situation, and this is yet another reason why I’m so strident into bringing much closer the way that solid media relations is supposed to work.”
And then, bless him, he graced us with a marvelous compliment. “Thanks for adding some actual value to this discussion, and now I’ve got another blog to keep an eye on by people who take their world very seriously.”
It confirmed my conviction that strong opinions about best practices in PR will find a receptive audience and that the blogosphere can be a forum for effective and considered debate of these issues.
