25 Ways to Tick Off a Tech Journalist
dan tynan on Jun 23 2008 at 10:29 am | Filed under: 15 minutes, Da Web, Life, Lists
by Dan Tynan
Sure, we make jokes about PR people as we eat their cheese cubes and drink their Yuenglings, but we couldn’t do our jobs without them. I certainly couldn’t. My working life is generally made much easier thanks to the hard work of the kind folks who help connect me to the companies/products I write about.
Since I’m doing a live teleconference for Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey this Tuesday, I put together a quick list of things PR people do that drive me nuts.* I thought I’d come up with 10 or 12; but the list got longer pretty quickly (and I’m sure I missed a bunch).
So to all you out there in PR land, here are 25 things you should never do, at least to me.
1. Call me out of the blue to pitch something, especially if we’ve never spoken before. I might say “yes” while we’re talking, but odds are I don’t really mean it. Email is better. Even if I ignore your message, it will probably kick around in my inbox, which means I may find it later when I’m actually writing something on the topic.
2. Contact me without finding out who I am or what I write about. It’s all here on my blog, or just Google me. Takes five minutes. Shorter than a phone call and way more productive.
3. Know absolutely nothing about the columns/blogs I write or the magazines I write for. For example, “Gadget Freak” isn’t single product reviews of gadgets; it’s a future/trends column. Ditto for “Our Digital Life,” but aimed at less geeky reader and slightly less forward looking. Read one or two of them first to understand what I’m likely to write about before pitching me something that’s totally irrelevant.
4. Not understand that “contributing editor” is usually just code for “regular freelancer,” and that I have no control over and no knowledge of a publication’s editorial calendar.
5. Use vague subject lines in emails like “News release from Company XYZ.” Thanks, you’ve just saved me the hassle of reading it.
6. Pitch me-too products from third-tier manufacturers. Wow, yet another “cool” iPod case. Please just shoot me now.
7. Pitch products that were released more than six months ago. Worse, pitch me on products I’ve already written about (or declined to cover). Amazingly, this happens even with major companies (I call it the Sony Effect).
8. Don’t use email signatures. Of course I’ll remember you amongst all the 3000 other PR people I talk to each year…. not.
9. Forget to include your phone number in your email signature. I can’t tell you how irritating it is to hunt through an email stream looking for the one message that contains a person’s number. A handy tip: tell your email program to always include your sig in replies; they don’t always do that by default.
10. Forget to include your email address in your email signature. (Yes, I know, it’s in the message header – but sometimes I need to copy and paste the whole sig into a fact check file, and it’s way easier if all the info is in one place.)
11. Fail to put an auto responder in place when you change jobs, as some people seem to do annually. Sometimes I only get in touch once a year, and I’ll use the last good contact I had for a particular company. If that person has left, or that firm no longer has the account, my email goes into the ether and I never find out. Really, an automated bounce would be far preferable to no response at all.
12. Call me to see if I got your emailed press release. Amazingly, this still happens. I warn you, however, that few people do this to me more than once.
13. Say you’ll get back to me and then don’t, or get back to me a week after my deadline has passed. I call this the Microsoft Effect.
14. Totally ignore my requests for information. This is the Apple Effect.
15. Respond to a query I’ve posted on Profnet or Shankman’s list asking for more details about my query. I’m not trying to play 20 questions. If I posted a query, you have the same details I do.
16. Respond to a query saying “I’ve got someone good for you to talk to” and not tell me who they are or why I’d want to talk to them. The more detailed your response, the more likely you are to get one back from me. Having your expert answer my questions in the response earns you extra karma in PR heaven.
17. Respond to a query without changing the subject line. I usually save replies I plan to revisit as a text file on my hard drive. (I’m just anal that way.) If all the replies use the same subject, I have to rewrite the name of each file as I save it. It saves me 5 or 10 seconds if I don’t have to do that. Better yet, include the name of your expert or company in the subject so I can find it faster.
18. Attach press releases as Word Docs or PDFs. Odds are I won’t open them. Even if I had the time to open another program to read a release I didn’t ask for (I don’t), this is a common way for malware to spread.
19. Ditto for releases that are just hyperlinks. There’s too much nasty s**t out there on the Web. Insert the text into the email, please.
20. Send high-res photos without me asking for them first. (Low res images are OK.)
20. Dick around in the press release. A good release should read like a good news story: Give me the scoop in the first two or three sentences, with details to follow in descending order of importance. Even better: a good descriptive headline and subline/deck. At best you have 15 seconds to make an impression; if you don’t get to the point immediately you’ve lost me.
21. Include the inevitable “This product is better than sliced bread,” quote in graph 2 from some executive I’ve never heard of and don’t give a damn about. Journalists who use quotes like this are lazy sods who should have their word processing privileges revoked and their bar tabs canceled.
22. Make it hard to find the press contacts on the company’s Web page, or fail to put them on each press release. If you really want to stay under the radar and out of the blogs/magazines, make it hard for me to find a human to talk to. I’ll be happy to leave you out of the story and find someone easier to reach.
23. Post press releases to a Web site as PDFs. They take longer to load and they’re harder to search.
24. Provide only an anonymous press@ email address for a contact on the company’s Web site. It’s fine for individuals to be anonymous on the Net, but when a company does it I immediately think “scam.” Surely there’s some employee with an actual name who can take my calls or emails.
25. Tell me you don’t pre-release information about new products, then pre-release it to someone else. This is the Apple/Amazon effect. Works great if you’re Mossberg, Pogue, or Levy; but I get screwed. This makes me even crankier than usual, and that’s never good.
*Your mileage may vary.
OK, I’m done bitching for now. Shall we discuss?
This material is covered by a Creative Commons license. Feel free to share, but please don’t steal.
I’ve worked both the editor side and the PR side…and I absolutely understand where you’re coming from with this. But what are we supposed to do when our big bosses say CALL CALL CALL? Piss off the person who signs our paycheck, or piss off the hapless tech journalist? Rock, Moxie, hard stony icky place.
Yep, I realize that. I also realize some PR folks are paid to rep third tier me-too products (so what are they gonna do?), the executive nobody cares about must have his/her ego stroked in the press release, companies won’t redesign their web sites even when they desperately need to, and so on.
What to do? Show this blog entry to your boss and convince him/her they’re not doing their firm or their client any favors.
dt