The hacks vs. flacks war

• November 19, 2007

By Francis Moran

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I leap into the latest eruption of a long-standing conflict that, invisible to most, has waged between journalists and PR practitioners ever since ink first spilled on paper. But when the New York Times itself is driven to comment on how things have turned ugly in this war, you know this has gone from bitch session to serious business.

The latest round was sparked by a blog post by Wired magazine executive editor Chris Anderson complaining about the hundreds of emails he receives every day from PR folk pitching him stories in which he has absolutely no interest. Anderson kicked the volume up to personal insult level when he went on to list more than 300 individual email addresses of practitioners he accused of being guilty of this practice, swearing that his magazine would block those addresses for all time. Some of the world’s largest agencies were on his list, as were many of our more direct competitors. We were relieved, but not unexpectedly so, to find that we were wholly absent.

The blogosphere raged with swift, loud, passionate reaction. Although there were clear exceptions, the PR industry tended to react defensively while the media industry cheered Anderson for outing these bad apples.

inmedia is unequivocally with Anderson, the majority of reporters and a distressingly small number of our fellow practitioners on this one. Sending a pitch to a reporter who does not write about your client’s stuff and so has no interest in what you’re pitching is bad for the client, bad for the PR industry, a waste of time and resources, and, most of all, betrays a profound ignorance of how the media function and how the PR industry interacts with that function to create value on both sides of the divide.

My colleague, Linda Forrest, weighed in on Friday with the unhappy implications this all-too-common practice has for the PR industry. Let me offer my view on why it’s so common. As a reporter for 10 years and a PR practitioner for another 20, I’ve been on both the transmit and receive ends of too many pitches not to understand why the good ones work so well and why there are so many bad ones out there.

Like many other things, PR is perceived to be a numbers game; throw enough darts and some of them are bound to hit the board. And with too many PR practitioners and their clients unable to measure the value of the function except in terms of the level of effort expended, then more must be better, right? Add in the ease with which today’s technology puts massive lists of journalists at the disposal of practitioners, lists that can be converted into seemingly personalised email blasts with just a few key strokes, plus the tendency, at least on the agency side of the business, to drill the labour-intensive task of actually pitching the media down to the most junior resources, and you have a sure-fire recipe for what Anderson and every other reporter who’s ever been asked about it hates most about the PR profession — bad pitches.

Maybe we’re just fortunate in that most of our clients can’t afford very many darts, so we’re obliged to make the most of every single one we throw, putting a huge amount of effort into ensuring it is aimed as accurately as possible at the highest-scoring part of the right board. But I think it has more to do with our conviction that every story has a natural news value, and that the proper telling of the story to the proper set of media targets will allow us to capture its full value for our clients.

I said at the outset of this post that it was with trepidation that I ventured into these roiling and disturbed waters and my reason for saying so is that I know we can’t afford to be smug about our own record. My colleague Danny Sullivan relayed just Friday morning the very positive reaction he received from a reporter he was pitching that day, a woman who said he had restored her confidence in PR. This is a not uncommon reaction for us. At the same time, Linda reminded me of the wire service reporter who rages at her every time she follows up on an email pitch.

Bottom line: There are many good PR practitioners and many bad ones. Same’s true of reporters. The so-called “war” between the two professions is waged exclusively between the bad operators on one or both sides. And clients, who want more, are not blameless is this, either.