Comparing apples to persimmons only creates a recipe for disaster
By Linda Forrest
The headline “Gawker Media Now Bigger Than All Newspapers Online–Except One” caught my interest for a number of reasons. In addition to being interested in all things media, I’m a fan of Gawker Media; in my professional life for media gossip and Valley news delivered with a healthy dose of sarcasm and in my personal life for hilarious movie news and intelligent commentary on women’s issues and interests. And while I applaud its growing audience and great success for its individual websites, I feel that comparing the conglomerate that houses each of these properties with specific newspaper websites is a ridiculous exercise.
I was glad to see one of the commenters on the original story point out this very fact.
You’re not alone, Mike. Nick Denton himself, publisher of Gawker Media, recognizes that the newspapers are but one slice of his competition. In a letter to his staff, he called out additional sources of online news such as Huffington Post, Yahoo and AOL.
You’ll note the reasons that I listed for visiting Gawker Media entities were pretty soft and fluffy. Hard news or astute political opinions were not among them. If I want to read what I would consider to be real news, I’d most certainly visit one of the other sites against which Gawker Media was compared. “Online news” casts a very wide net and it’s important to define key terms if you want to be clear about your position in the marketplace and what readers can expect from your online properties.
Twitter’s traffic undeniably trounces that of all other ornithological sites on the web, if not combined, but just because they’re using the same language doesn’t mean they’re talking about the same thing. It’s an important distinction, and one that we as PR practitioners have to be extremely careful about. It’s for this very reason that we learn our clients’ whole story so that we have a holistic understanding of the company, its business, its technology and its market. A term that means one thing to one person can mean something quite different to someone else; we need to be able to draw that distinction and then pursue the opportunities that make the most sense for our clients knowing full well that we’re speaking the same language as the media outlet we’re pursuing.
If the media wants apples, don’t give them persimmons. They’re just likely to throw them at you for not knowing your apples from your persimmons. I would have assumed that the likes of Nick Denton would have been conscious of the distinction.
