Month: November 2006

A journalist’s complaint: PR people who don’t return email requests

Karine Joly of collegewebeditor.com has a bone to pick with higher ed PR types who ignore her requests. For an upcoming article in University Business magazine, she emailed a few PR folks to ask them how they use the web for media relations. She didn’t get a very good response, and blogged her complaint for the world to see. (Don’t worry, she didn’t name names, so all you PR folks out there — you’re safe.)

I didn’t have any problems getting answers from a few reporters and editors I interviewed about this topic. But, it has proven to be very difficult to get my higher ed PR contacts to cooperate.

Wait a minute.

Isn’t it supposed to be tough to get a few minutes of an editor or a reporter’s time?

And, aren’t PR practitioners supposed to answer questions from media folks… for a living?

I won’t name the names of the 3 institutions, but I can tell they include a state university, an institution highly-ranked by the US News Report and a technology institute.

I know that I’m no NYT columnist. But, in this age of the Long Tail, this column or even this blog post might be read by reporters working for the NYT. That’s why I fail to understand why PR people wouldn’t take a few minutes to reply to a short email.

Several of the responses have offered insight as to why they might not have responded. Among the possibilities:

  1. PR people are short-staffed and too busy to respond to every request they receive
  2. PR people are more accustomed to phone calls than emails, and perhaps don’t take such queries as seriously as phone calls
  3. PR people aren’t really doing all that much with the web to enhance their media relations, and are probably too embarrassed to admit it
  4. PR people are former journalists who like to pick and choose what they respond to and what they write about

That’s a very much boiled-down assessment. I’d say point No. 3 rings true for many of us. We’re struggling to deal with this new world of new media, even when writers from old media (like printed publications, such as University Business) are using the new media to communicate, conduct interviews and gather information.

Karine received some thoughtful comments from her readers. Some of those comments paint a less-than-flattering portrait of our ilk. But maybe some of that criticism is deserved.

Karine states that our web folks are better at responding to such queries than those of us with a PR background. Maybe it’s just that they’re more comfortable with the medium. As a former webmaster, I know how inundated they can be with online requests, and how they take the time to respond to as many as possible. So maybe it’s the nature of their work versus the nature of our work.

Or maybe it’s something else.

Happy World Usability Day

Today is World Usability Day. If you do nothing else about usability today, the least you can do is to observe a minute of silence (at noon EST) “as a means of sending out the hope that there be a greater respect for all users and their ability to make the world a better place, through the time won by greater usability.”

Maybe during that minute of silence, you could also heed designverb‘s suggestion and “think about everything that you use, touch, see, or hear and ask, how can I make it better? Is something broken, confusing, too complex, or just not working?” I know of one guy who thinks about that stuff, and then blogs about his frustrations with unusable products.