Category: Internet and web

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.

The next-gen web: like a Swiss Army knife

Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion) has been thinking a lot about the future of the web, and web widgets in particular. He writes that these widgets — chunks of code that can be easily installed on a web page — make it “possible to add so many collapsible modules to your tabs/pages, that you rarely need to go anywhere else.” Thus, with apps like the Google Reader widget, anything and everything you need — from news briefs to meeting notices — will be accessible from your start page.

Rubel shares screen shots of a couple of widgets that “are indicative of what the widgetized web will look like in the years ahead” and adds, “You can see a future where these pages become as essential as a Swiss Army Knife is to a camper.” He concludes that “The future of the web (dare I say Web 3.0?) will look just like a Swiss Army Knife and it’s going to be extremely disruptive.”

I just hope web 3.0 comes with a corkscrew and bottle opener.