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[…] If every PR rep suddenly said “You know what? The heck with all of you. We won’t send you pitches if you are going to be picky about it,” and only pitched bloggers who didn’t complain, what would all these sites have to regurgitate for their 20 articles a day? Not a darn thing. Not a SINGLE thing. That news comes from press releases and pre-embargo press kits, and if that well suddenly dried up, so would the glut of posts. We can talk about social media press releases and Twitpitches and anything else until we are blue in the face, but if PR reps sent words written on a dirty paper napkin in catsup and the A-listers wanted that news, they’d cover it. […]

Comments

I usually skim over posts which don’t have comments on a lot of the noisy blogs. If nobody else found it interesting enough to comment on, why should I bother? Then, I don’t feel a compulsive need to know every bit of pointless “news” being generated by the retarded monkeys running Web 2.0, either.

I think this is a great post, and I’ve felt the same before. As a small time blogger in the web startup space, I’ve seen press releases posted almost verbatim at other blogs and have been disappointed. But at the same time, I can kind of understand it (though I’m not saying it isn’t a bad thing):

The bigger blogs are in a race against time to fire off as many stories as possible under tight deadlines. They’re in a competition with each other to get the exclusive, post it, promote it, rinse, repeat. It seems to me that in that circumstance, there is no way a prominent blog could actually take the time to do their own investigation and analysis given the cut-throat pace.

For a while I had delusions that I could join their ranks by trying to track down every breaking story and posting links to press releases, but that just didn’t sound like fun to me. When I get an embargoed story, I’m much more interested in jumping right in, trying out the service, taking screenshots and documenting the inner workings of what’s being pitched. That’s the fun part for me.

But again, I’m not trying to post 10 exclusives in a day, so I have a lot more time to devote to a single post than the big dogs. What’s my takeaway? Well, there will be plenty of blogs out there covering the regurgitation of a press release as breaking news, and that’s okay with me. If I haven’t seen the press release, there’s some value in that to me. But when it comes to digging deeper, I’ll either do it myself or go somewhere else.

One more point and I’m done:
This reminds me a bit of the difference between a quick, 30 news segment on the radio vs. listening to NPR. Sure, you’ll get a snippet of what’s going on from the headlines, but if you’re really trying to understand the story at a deeper level, you go to a different source.

C — gotta tell you, I am having a hell of a time at work this week — you know me, and hopefully I am on your list of non-sucky PR people. But there seem to be a lot of sucky PR people who are annoying the crap out of bloggers, bloggers and journalists who are mad at sucky PR people, bloggers who are mad at bloggers, people who hate press releases, people who regurgitate press releases. . . and so on. Hehehe what’s the line from William Goldman about the film business? “Nobody knows anything?” (And I don’t mean that about you — I respect you greatly and agree with this post wholeheartedly.) But it’s hard to go to sleep at night not feeling yucky, and/or wake up not feeling angry. I think Scoble got it right — he just got off the highway. Heck, Duncan left TC after a year.

I met a cool guy last night, an Austin entrepreneur named John Eric Metcalf. A while back he asked a question of his LinkedIn friends about the value of and need for money as related to 1.) happiness and 2.) entrepreneurial viability. The answer he got back from his friend Dusty is analogous in my mind to the issue at hand (http://tinyurl.com/6b8oal):

“Personally, I consider capitalism like a video game. There are a set of rules you must play the game by, there are weaknesses in the system you can exploit, and you generally have to practice to beat the difficult parts. . .You should always follow your dreams. That will make you happy. It won’t necessarily make you money though. And you usually need money to follow your dreams. This conundrum is the game we’re all playing. But, as long as you have enough money to feed yourself, your family, and your business, you can keep playing the game. If you run out of cash you’ll be forced to find a new racket.”

What I mean to say, is — some people play the game better than others, and some people have different objectives within the game. To be happy and successful you have to play the game — but you don’t have to play it like everyone else — in fact, its better not to;)

I think that you’re a great example of someone who is playing the game quite differently. Hats off! And if you need reassurance (or if I need it, hehe) — look at the RWW peeps (and many others, don’t mean to be exclusive) — amazing analysis/insight and meaty posts, genuinely nice people, meteoric rise. It works! The same way, as with the movie business, even though no one knows anything per Goldman, the good films always get seen eventually (well, with the possible exception of Killer of Sheep, but that’s another story entirely, hehe).

Oh…was it our embargo or someone elses that triggered this post? Well its a great post and potentially more interesting than our launch story!

I left a huge comment on SheGeeks part deux but thought i’d pop over here too.

Its hard to be a smaller blogger because you need *better* quality *and* you get less rewarded for it (harder to get onto TechMeme, for example).

I think marketing people in general are too focused on pitching the huge bloggers like Robert Scoble. Don’t get me wrong, I think Scoble is great, but it is the mid-size bloggers (like you, Corvida, Louis Gray) who take the time to really engage with a company and help the company raise their game. And these are the right “noise filters” for the big Retweeters like Scoble.

We marketing people (I’ll wear that hat for this comment) also need reach and awareness, so we *have* to go after coverage like TechCrunch, etc. But I personally want to encourage marketing people to support the mid-size bloggers in this way:
1. offering to do IM or email interviews…fast and efficient
2. offering to provide some exclusive angle on the story…maybe a unique visual, or a unique comment that fits with where the overall blog is going.
3. Don’t know what else, open to ideas.

As a blogger (CNReviews.com), I *totally* understand the frustration because I have spent blood, sweat and tears on the 1000 word posts and gotten little more than the cathartic feeling of pushing the post out!

Anyway, great post both parts and look forward to learning from the dialogue here.

Elliott — I remember you from this blog post — http://tinyurl.com/2pbsab — great to meet you, and would love to know who the Twine beta is going for you. . .and am excited to try out UpTake myself;) Hope all is well!

@Grendel Some of those comments may very well be taking place in other locations, like FriendFeed or Shyfter, so the lack of comments doesn’t always indicate that no one found it interesting, only that the conversation has moved.

@Nathan Obviously, I agree, since that’s what we try to do here at Profy. My theory is that anyone can read a press release, but not everyone can take the time to drill down into a new product to figure out whether it’s worth trying or not. Of course, there is obviously an audience for the quick tech news, but it doesn’t interest me at all, and those are the blogs I always skim and rarely comment on. Judging by the number of troll-like comments they get, I’m not encouraged by the readers there either, who don’t seem to be as interested in the news they are discussing as in being noticed.

@Josh I have no beef at all with any PR people. I wish I had the time and bandwidth to reply to each and every pitch because I know how frustrating it is to not get coverage for a client. It’s really tough with a blog like Profy because we get all these pitches and we just don’t cover everything, and it isn’t like we have a set rule for which ones we pick up and which ones we don’t; it all depends on what we find interesting, what we think our readers would find interesting, and what else is going on in tech at the time. And thank you for the compliments!

@Elliott Yes, it was your release, and I need to get you guys on my schedule to talk to soon. Unfortunately, offline life threw me a few curveballs last week and I was short on time. If the entire world could just keep MY schedule and have availability for interviews at 5:30 AM or midnight, I’d be able to manage this whole thing a lot better.