From his post on Ground Zero … This is a good time to draw the public relations community into the discussion.
Much the same way writers find themselves wanting to do more or less fact checking, a lot of that has to do with how quickly we can get a response. …
Thanks to the blogosphere, on relatively short order, I went from writing twice a week to 10-15 times a week and sometimes more. There are plenty more where I came from that are feeling and responding in-kind to that same pressure. But, as the established media community picks up the pace, there are those of us in it who would prefer to keep constant the number of chances we’re taking. But if the PR community doesn’t also reinvent itself to keep pace with the media revolution by responding to the fact checkers on blogopshere time, it will leave those writers with no choice but to take more chances. I don’t know about you, but if I were a PR professional, I sure wouldn’t want to be the guy that blew that one opportunity to contain the story that snow-balled into a disaster for the company I represent.
His other part of the post talks about fact checking and how bloggers and journalists are beginning to cross paths, and that some bloggers are fact checking more – he points to Robert Scoble as one example – and that journalists might start fact checking less. Or, that’s how I read it.
Berlind has some points. And he is the man behind the media transparency experiment, where he shows that everyone needs to be upfront in the whole PR and media dance. Yes, PR does need to work in a faster time frame nowadays. Yes, PR needs to think about responding not only to journalists, but to bloggers and citizen journalists.
But, there are only 24 hours in a day. PR still needs to tier the opportunities and requests that come in to the media department. Unfortunately, some things get tiered higher than others, and because of that, some opportunities are missed or ignored. Is that right? Maybe not, but then again, it is about reach and influence. You need to weigh the opportunities and it’s a simple cost/effective measurement. Are you going to get back to a USA Today before you get back to a 3000 circulation newspaper?
Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.
He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.
