Speed is backing an industry initiative launched this morning to address the issue of PR spam. It’s the brainchild of Realwire’s CEO Adam Parker.
We’re all aware of the issue; there isn’t anyone in the PR industry that hasn’t been guilty of spamming bloggers or journalists at some point in their career.
Research by Realwire claims that 1.7 billion irrelevant press release emails estimated to be received in total each year by UK and US Journalists alone
Mark Borkowski and Stephen Davies are also onboard from the PR industry alongside media distribution services and journalists. It would be great to see more PR agencies get behind the initiative and sign-up to its Bill of Rights.
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Speed backs Inconvenient PR Truth campaign as Realwire reveals 1.7 billion irrelevant releases sent each year: http://bit.ly/cbEceC
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Speed backs Inconvenient PR Truth campaign as Realwire reveals 1.7 billion irrelevant… http://goo.gl/fb/DF07 (@wadds)
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Nice. I’ll wack this out 2 our media lists
RT @wadds: Speed backs Inconvenient PR Truth, 1.7 bn irrelevant releases http://bit.ly/cbEceC
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not the most rigorous research methodology but 1new ind group estimating 1.7 bn irrelevant press releases per year http://bit.ly/cbEceC
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It’s interesting to see the number quantified. But I don’t think the number of irrelevant press releases developed will drop as time goes by. All we (and the beleaguered media) can hope for is that the number *actually distributed* drops.
I think it’s perfectly in order for an organisation to create a press release and put it online, correctly tagged, so that its information can be found by people who are actually looking for it. A press release is potentially a good exercise in disciplined thinking and the creation of a document of record. As such it can increase the visibility of what an organisation wants to say.
However, it’s not necessarily in order for that organisation then to send out this press release to a whole host of journalists most of whom (it knows) will not be interested.
This strategy, of course, disinternediates the press – the information goes directly from organisation to consumer. The down side of this is that the role of the journalist as news reporter is diminished (so news reporters should maybe not complain about receiving lots of news releases); the up side is that, were the decrease in actual distribution of press releases to happen, it would leave the media with more time for analysis and thoughtful writing, which would improve the number and quality of feature artcles.
And I believe that well-written feature articles are what publications can sell – so there may be more money in this route than today’s feverish search to get news out online a few seconds before a publication’s competitors.
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