07 March 2006 Blog Home : March 2006 : Permalink
Remember that reporters do not tell you every story idea that came from a flack — and so [many] stories do start with PR pitches that I’ve often said if I ran a paper, I’d have flack-free days: Every story in today’s paper came from actual reporting! (It’d probably be a thin Saturday.)
Reporters may be smart enough to rewrite the verbiage in press releases (unlike the hapless blogger in the Times story caught quoting Walmart’s flackery without attribution — a practice Edelman, smartly, warned them against). But they don’t tell you all the ... facts and viewpoints they use from flacks.
I wrote a couple of comments which I think are worth repeating here since I was kind of verbose. The first is just an agreement with and enlargement of Jeff's point:It is of course far worse in the trade presses. If it weren’t for PR agencies and press releases 99% or more of specialist publications from architecture to zoology would be either far far more expensive or a heck of a lot thinner. And either way they would probably have a lot smaller circulation. Indeed even if there is original reporting in almost all cases it is partially driven by press-releases announcing the latest widget from acme corp or trumpeting some customer success story or competitive trial.
The PR agencies and their releases are the raw material that journalists and blggers use to build up most of their run of the mill stories. Of course everyone likes to have an exclusive scoop that originates from some journalistic investigation of a rumour but in fact in most cases the announcements via the PR agency are just as important for the industry as a whole because they also contain key information. The mark of a good journalist (or blogger) is that he goes beyond simply cutting and pasting the press release into his article and provides some analysis or complementary PR from other sources or both.
The second is a response to another commenter who thinks that what the bloggers did was shilling rather than PR. I disagree:Robert wrote What is different in this case is that Walmart (or it’s PR firm) is hoping that the echo chamber will magnify the factoids that they put out and they will become part of the “conventional wisdom”. If it were just simple PR Walmart could list the emails as press releases on their own web site as is done my most major companies. The use of email as a distribution medium implies that they want the information to be re-released and its original source to be downplayed.
I think this is a incorrect on two fronts. Firstly it looks like quite a lot of the stories also appear at http://www.walmartfacts.com/ I’m not sure if they all do or even if the stories at walmartfacts are the same but certainly if they aren’t the same they do appear to be very similar and to make the same points.
Secondly emailing PR articles to selected journalists is utterly standard practise. In fact I know some PR agencies specifically write PR pieces to send to specific journalists becuase they know what the journalist is interested in, thus the same announcement may spun different ways in different versions of the same announcement sent to different journalists or news outlets.
All that walmart is doing is treating some bloggers as if they are as influential as MSM journalists.
The more valid criticism is of the bloggers who have not acknowledged the source of their posts and hence potentially misled their readership. We, as fellow bloggers should be on their case about this and both complain and consider not linking/reading them. However although this is a bad thing it is a little rich for a newspaper like the NY Times with the Jason Blair scandal to complain about it in others. Someone once said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” and it seems to me the NYT would do well to bear that in mind along with something about planks and splinters in eyes.
This is by the way an important milestone for the blogosphere as it begins to take over the role of the MSM in informing people. We bloggers usually meet a higher standard of journalistic ethics than the MSM becuase we do, as a general rule, provide the links to the source material. This is our comeptitive advantage and combined with the fact that we tend to make no attempt to be impartial is a huge strength. Any reader should be able see what our sources and our biases are and if we are to be credible sources of news and informed comment we have to continue with that level of disclosure. However, having said that, this NY Times piece is in many ways another classic attempt at spreading FUD about the blogosphere. The intent is surely to tar all bloggers with the same brush, something that simply doesn't work and something that would be like bloggers tarring all MSM outlets as equally incompetant. The fact is that just as bloggers who make the latter smear find it tough to prove so the reverse MSM smear of the blogosphere is equally poor.Update: If you haven't read them then I suggest reading the responses by the PR firm involved and by one of the bloggers interviewed. Reading both of these gives you an even better idea about the different levels of background possible to bloggers compared to the MSM - both the blogger and the PR agency's blog link to the NYT article whereas the NYT article fails to provide links to the posts at issue. As a result NYT readers are unable to see whether the journalist is fairly representing the statements on the blogs whereas the blog readers can clearly see that the NYT is taking staements out of context. If ever you want to compare and contrast the MSM approach with the blogosphere one then this is the story to use.