This link has been bookmarked by 85 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Jun 2006, by Matt Schneider.
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28 May 19
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30 Nov 17
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Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.
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Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
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at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.
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Symbiosis
PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. -
they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.
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The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them.
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A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.
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Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising
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The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine.
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At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically.
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The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves.
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Reporters like definitive statements.
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reporters don't want to print vague stuff like "fairly big." They want statements with punch, like "top ten." And PR firms give them what they want.
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Buzz
Where the work of PR firms really does get deliberately misleading is in the generation of "buzz." They usually feed the same story to several different publications at once. And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think there is some important trend afoot. Which is exactly what they're supposed to think. -
Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally.
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When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client.
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The secret to finding other press hits from a given pitch is to realize that they all started from the same document back at the PR firm. Search for a few key phrases and the names of the clients and the experts, and you'll turn up other variants of this story.
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Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.
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Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think.
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As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
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[1] PR has at least one beneficial feature: it favors small companies. If PR didn't work, the only alternative would be to advertise, and only big companies can afford that.
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[3] Different sections of the Times vary so much in their standards that they're practically different papers. Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have been sent packing by the regular news reporters.
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someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them.
Actually no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because the remedy was to reboot them, and this destroyed all traces. But people like numbers. And so this one is now replicated all over the Internet, like a little worm of its own. -
Reporters sometimes call a few additional sources on their own, like someone adding a few fresh vegetables to a can of soup.
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20 Sep 15
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Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.
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28 Aug 15
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25 Nov 14
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03 Aug 12
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But reporters don't want to print vague stuff like "fairly big." They want statements with punch, like "top ten." And PR firms give them what they want. Wearing suits, we're told, will make us 3.6 percent more productive.
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08 Mar 12
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16 Oct 11
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24 Sep 11
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12 Sep 11
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13 Jul 11
Pristis pristis"Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath
journalism public_relations articles media Blog_Posts_News_Articles Blog_Posts
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04 Sep 10
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A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.
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The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves.
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This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. But the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.
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Where the work of PR firms really does get deliberately misleading is in the generation of "buzz." They usually feed the same story to several different publications at once. And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think there is some important trend afoot. Which is exactly what they're supposed to think.
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I doubt PR firms realize it yet, but the Web makes it possible to track them at work.
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Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.
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PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
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29 Sep 09
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19 Aug 09
julius beezerAbout public relations, advertising, press, editorial: useful summary of what good PR does/is
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18 Aug 09
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26 Feb 09
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18 Aug 08
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18 May 08
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11 Dec 07
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12 Aug 07
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27 Mar 07
aminggs"The Suit is Back" as an example of PR marketing. Mentions eBay was a customer of the same PR firm as Paul's startup. Links to A Sell-Out's Tale. Compare to astroturfing.
document article blog paul-graham pr marketing business journalism ebay import:delicious
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07 Mar 07
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12 Dec 05
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29 Sep 05
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19 Aug 05
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22 Jul 05
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12 May 05
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04 May 05
S JonesOutstanding insider look at how PR firms feed talking-points/trends/facts to meme-hungry media
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27 Apr 05
Triple Entendrearticle about the hidden PR industry that fuels much of the "trendy" news we get
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25 Apr 05
Amy Gahran"PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. If anyone is dishonest, it's reporters."
media journalism trends problems content+biz PR+marketing problem+solving blogs
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PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate.
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23 Apr 05
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22 Apr 05
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21 Apr 05
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Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.
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