Category: public relations

To blog, perchance to verbizize

As a recovering editor now working on the vanguard of the English language (aka the innerweb), I still have my relapses.

I’m not nearly as anal retentive about the use of AP style or proper grammar as I used to be. (Who has the time, in a deluge of info and under constant time crunches, to obsess over whether anal retentive should be hyphenated?) But sometimes my inner editor, in the immortal words of Billy Jack, just…goes…berzerk.

It happened on Monday,when one of our writers tried to slip “piecemeal” past me in a draft news release. The sentence read something along the lines of, “The workers piecemealed shim plates to run the length of the bridge.” Brandishing my red pen, I circled the errant noun-turned-verb and suggested she rework the sentence.

No less than 30 minutes later, though, I read in The Wall Street Journal an article about the usage of “gift” as a verb (“Especially During the Holidays, ‘Gift’ Is a Verb That Just Keeps on ‘Gifting’,” by Elizabeth Holmes, reprinted in today’s Arizona Republic). According to this story, the verbizizing (or “verbification,” if you prefer) of nouns is becoming commoner and commoner.

Holmes cites a few recent examples:

Users of Apple Computer Inc.’s popular iTunes online store can “gift” songs and albums and videos to one another. Mondera, an online jewelry retailer, pushes customers to “go ahead, gift her” a diamond. Epicurious.com, a gourmet online food guide published by Conde Nast, features an entire section labeled “Thanksgifting.” Gossip Web site TMZ.com reported actress Angelina Jolie “was gifted” a diaper bag after the birth of her daughter.

The gift-as-verb contingent have history on their side.

[T]he mutation of noun-to-verb is fairly common, according to Geoff Nunberg, chairman of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel, which regularly surveys writers for their opinions on such issues. Milk a cow. Water the grass. Fax a document. [Or blog about nouns-turned-verbs.-ed.] Some experts estimate that as many as one in five verbs began as nouns, Mr. Nunberg says.

Oops. I guess I verbizize nouns more often than I thought. So I showed the writer this article, told her history was on her side, and encouraged her to follow her own best instincts as a writer.
I didn’t expect to run into more verbizizing on Monday, but when I turned to page 2 in our local newspaper, there was another one. In this case, a local public figure was quoted expressing her gratitude to the local university (that’s us) for granting her some space in which “to office.”

We are grateful for the invitation to office in this location, and we will work diligently to grow these relationships to the benefit of the community and the university.

Arrgghhh.

At least she didn’t say she was grateful that the university had gifted this space to her.

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.