Steve Jobs has always had a reputation in Silicon Valley as an asshole. A brilliant asshole, and one that I greatly admire, but an a-hole none the less.

So it was almost refreshing to know that some things don’t change, when a Long Island college student shared with Gawker her exchange with Jobs about trying to get someone from Apple PR to comment for her story about her college giving incoming students an iPad.

Until now, I did not know that Mr. Jobs actually engages with some of the people who send him email to his Apple email address, sjobs@apple.com. So that’s interesting. You can read some of his replies to people at a site that compiles them, Emails From Steve Jobs (what a world, eh?).

Anyway, Jobs decided to respond to this young lady, who was complaining to him that the PR department wasn’t answering her emails and calls, and that this meant she would not get an A on the assignment from her teacher. Jobs actually writes to her that “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade” and ends the exchange by saying, “leave us alone.”

There’s the Steve I remember from my days in the Silicon Valley press corps.

This isn’t really a lesson for PR people, because every CEO is different when it comes to media relations. But this is a good lesson for aspiring journalists. The lesson is this: the PR department is not the only place to get a comment from a large corporation. In fact, a good journalist uses the PR people to get an interview with actual executives and decision makers. Furthermore, why not go down to the local Apple store and get a comment from the store manager? Why not do some research and find an Apple exec who focuses on the college market and contact them directly. Don’t wait to be spoon-fed by the PR department! The most ridiculous part of the whole exchange is when she writes that she has questions that “only Apple Media Relations”  can answer.

But here’s a memo to Apple PR: for gosh sakes, couldn’t you have written back to the student with a one-sentence answer? Are you really that busy and/or self-important?

Here’s an interesting post from the other side of the PR/blogger divide: it’s a well written, well reasoned post by a beauty blogger about her experience dealing with PR for cosmetics and other personal care products.

After starting her blog in 2007, she says she was besieged with free product — full-size samples of everything she could possibly want. She describes being fairly journalistic about methodically trying the products and reviewing them. But more came in than she could handle and she gave a lot of it away to her friends and readers.

Then, the recession hit, and the companies a) got chintzy with the samples and b) wanted more out of sending a sample than the possibility of a post — they wanted guaranteed good coverage.

It’s a good post and worth reading for a firsthand account of how the other half lives. My value-add will be the PR perspective:

There are effectively no barriers to entry in blogging — anyone can be a waitress one day and “fashion and beauty blogger” the next (or both at the same time).

Pre-Internet, the barriers to being a recognized and influential writer were fairly high, which made it possible for PR to figure out who to deal with and what they were getting out of the arrangement.

Now, since anyone and everyone can position themselves as “influential,” PR has a lot more trouble to deal with. Accept anyone’s claim to legitimacy and you end up giving away your products, or set up barriers and get blowback like this.

The embargo is one of my favorite PR tactics, but it looks like it will soon be another casualty of the Internet, if it isn’t already.

In the ooollllddd days, you could hand out embargoed news and assuming you had a good relationship with the media, the news would sit in the can until the agreed-upon time. But the Internet and online media changed all that, for good.

In the tech news space, in particular, the embargo has become a cause celebre. TechCrunch, one of the gorillas in the tech media space, has been pushing for the death of embargoes for awhile, and their wish may be coming true. TechCrunch may be a little early in writing an obit, but in the end, they may be right.

For other tech journalists, however, it’s still something of an open issue — and one we’ll discuss next Wednesday (along with many other topics of interest to tech PR) on the PR University webinar, Tech Media and Trends PR Can’t Afford to Miss: Top Tech Influencers Reveal Best PR Practices for Reaching Consumers in Today’s Economy. Panelists include:

• Nancy Blair, Senior Assignment Editor/Technology, USA Today
• Spencer Ante, Computers Department Editor, BusinessWeek
• Jim Kerstetter, Executive Editor, CNET News
• David Lidsky, Articles Editor, Fast Company
• Tom Foremski, Author, “Silicon Valley Watcher”

How do I know we’ll be talking about this? Two reasons: it came up today on our pre-webinar prep call, and I’m the moderator and get to ask the questions.

I almost didn’t even react to this latest example of journalists giving businesspeople bad advice about PR, but I couldn’t help it. I figured it was better to blog about it than to leave a comment on someone else’s blog.

Here’s the story: a Boston web trade group held an event on Tuesday called, “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR.” All the panelists came from the media, in other words, the people being pitched, not the people with any experience at pitching (panelists: Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe, Wade Roush from Xconomy, Peter Kafka from AllThingsD, and Bob Brown of Network World). Working journalists were recruited to give profit-seeking businesspeople advice on conducting PR, a marketing department function.

For fun, let me ask: would a right-thinking trade group ask a panel of business writers to opine on “bootstrapping R&D,” “bootstrapping legal,” or “bootstrapping HR?”

But journalists think they know something about PR, so they opined on what cash-strapped companies ought to do to maximize publicity without hiring those expensive, pesky, clueless PR people who presumably bug them all the time with useless pitches. Here’s the moderator’s summary of the panel:

As far as these reporter/bloggers were concerned, PR agencies aren’t worth much.

BTW, his post was titled, “PR Bashing Harsh but Fair.” Excuse me, but was that the title and intent of the panel? I thought the idea was to give sound business advice, right? [Here's a longer and more nuanced summary of the proceedings]

Anyway, enough. In my experience, the vast majority of journalists know nothing about how PR works or why companies need it. That’s not to say that a lot of PR isn’t overpriced garbage or that PR people don’t annoy journos with stupid pitches. It is to say that there is a perfectly normal role for communications and PR in a growing company, and smart entrepreneurs will figure out how to use it to build their businesses. But don’t ask a working reporter — you’re wasting your time.

Tip: it’s actually pretty hard to do PR right without some professional help. It’s time-consuming and can be unproductive if you don’t know what you’re doing. But if you’re sure that you want to do it and don’t have squat in the bank, at least buy a book like “PR for Dummies” or one of the others in my “Recommended” ad from Amazon to the right.

I just can’t get enough of journalists trying to make sense of their relationship to PR.

Today’s example comes from Monday’s New York Times, where David Carr relates the story of his friend and neighbor, Thomas Moran, who left his thrilling but insecure newspaper job covering New Jersey politics for the safe but dull-as-dishwater world of corporate PR at local utility company PSEG.

At least, that’s how Carr characterizes Moran’s two worlds. Here’s how Carr describes being a journalist:

Sure, being a newsie is a grind…but it beats working by a mile. Every day is a caper, and most reporters are attention-deprived adrenaline junkies who care only for the next story. Journalists are like cops, hugging the job close and savoring the rest of their life as they can.

Let me just say that nothing in my journalism career came close to that experience. It was more like working in an insurance office, people sitting at cubes, working quietly, talking on the phone or typing.

And here’s how Carr characterizes Moran’s PR job:

“… a good job representing the interests of a large corporation… At neighborhood gatherings, we couldn’t help but notice that the once lively and mouthy Mr. Moran was bringing a dark cloud with him wherever he went…For 18 months, Mr. Moran’s nose was pressed against the glass of his nicely appointed 10th floor corporate office in Newark, watching the world go by, mostly without him.

I’m not going to idealize PR, but I’ve never felt like I had my nose pressed against the glass watching the world go by in my post-media PR career. To the contrary. I felt like an observer, not a player, when I was in the media, and I feel like a player, and not just an observer, in PR.

The end of the story is that after his miserable time in corporate PR, Moran made his way back to the ivory tower insecurity of the newsroom to get his adrenaline fix.

Chalk one up for the powerful media columnist of the New York Times using precious paper, ink and electrons to prop up and perpetuate the myths of the crusading ink-stained journalist and the zombied PR person. What else would you expect?

When will they ever learn? Never, apparently.

Today’s story is the breathless coverage in Stars and Stripes and elsewhere that “dossiers” were created by the PR firm Rendon Group on reporters who wanted to embed with U.S. military in Afghanistan. Oh horrors! According to the story, PR professionals are reading the stories published by journalists and “analyzing” them for whether they are pro- or anti-military (or just “neutral”). Who thinks of these diabolical schemes, Dick Cheney?

The story does not a) say that these analyses are determining who will and won’t go to the war zone, nor b) does it quote any PR professionals explaining that “briefing books” on journalists are as common in the PR biz as coffee stains are in media newsrooms.

But the story does quote two anti-PR cluckers as follows:

Professional groups representing journalists are decrying the Pentagon’s screening of reporters.

“That’s the government doing things to put out the message they want to hear and that’s not the way journalism is meant to work in this country,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“The whole concept of doing profiles on reporters who are going to embed with the military is alarming,” said Ron Martz, president of the Military Reporters and Editors association.

“It speaks to this whole issue of trying to shape the message and that’s not something the military should be involved with,” he said.

My response to Martz and Mitchell (and Stars and Stripes): baloney. I’m GLAD to hear that the U.S. military is using standard-issue PR tactics to conduct business — that tells me they know what they are doing. As a PR pro, I’m FINE with that.

Putting on my citizen hat, I would be concerned if the ever-vigilant media were to find that coverage was significantly affected by these tactics, or to put it another way, that we were sold a phony war by con men. But I guess getting that story is beyond most of the media. It’s much easier to kick PR.

I was out on holiday for most of last week and so missed the opportunity to offer some timely insights into the glorious coverage of Silicon Valley PR in the New York Times on Saturday, July 4 (an aside — why does our industry get coverage only on national holidays and other B-list days?).

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter’s Notebook, Batman — stop the digital presses!

Among Miller’s other “findings” in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client
• “In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.”
• “Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers … PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.”
• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK — enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling’s expense. What are my takeaways? Read more

When you send an email pitch, do you always follow-up with a call? Or do you never follow-up? This is one of the trickiest questions in PR.

On today’s PR University audio conference with top editors of womens’ magazines, there was a definite split among the panelists regarding their receptivity to follow-up calls.

“Please don’t call me,” said Lea Goldman, Features Editor of Marie Claire. Goldman says that she religiously checks her email and reads all email, at least the subject line. If she wasn’t intrigued at the time, calling to plead your case rarely if ever helps.

Cari Dineen, Senior Editor of Redbook, and Jeanine Detz, Senior Editor of Shape, both agreed 100%.

On the other hand, Stephanie Emma Pfeffer, Senior Associate Editor of Family Circle, and Nancy Minikes, Research Editor of Women’s World, were somewhat more open to follow-up calls, but not minutes or even hours after you sent the pitch. Give them a couple of days to get back to you — remember, most editors are getting hundreds of pitches a week.

Minikes made an interesting point about customizing your pitch: if you address it directly to her by saying “Hi Nancy,” she will make a point of responding by email and telling you whether or not she’s interested. But if you just send PR spam, she will very likely ignore it and will not respond.

The bottom line for all these editors: customize your pitch! [How many times do we have to say this?] Address them by name, know their slice of the female demographic they are targeting, know the sections that they edit, and then make your pitch accordingly.

The dumb pitch that got the biggest laugh from this panel: emails that say something like, “I have a good expert or story about [fill in the blank]. Can you help me figure out whether it’s a good fit for your publication?”

So, back to follow-up calls, here’s a poll: do you make the call or not?

[polldaddy poll=1490921]

By now you’ve probably heard about the otherwise wonderful Rachel Maddow’s rant about PR and specifically, about industry giant Burson-Marsteller, regarding B-M’s representation of AIG, the big insurance company that has gotten tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout cash.

Maddow let her inner media whiner out and went on a classic anti-PR rant about Burson, saying that AIG shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money to spiff up its image, and simplifying (or dumbing down) a segment of Burson’s client roster to a who’s who of evil-doers (the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, for example) — the latest of which, by extension, is AIG.

Now my perspective is that this kind of criticism is to be expected in our industry and tolerated to some degree. We are the industry of spin, we are relatively easy to understand (and hence criticize), and we make so many gaffes that we are easy targets. But we’re not alone. How would you like to be a “trial lawyer” or a “tax collector” or a “meter maid”? See my point? They get ribbed all the time too, but you don’t see them and their industry associations crying about it.

So my question is not whether we are fair game (we are), but is AIG’s decision to hire PR help a good move or a bad one? Should AIG be spending any taxpayer money on outside PR counsel, or should it acknowledge that spending money on outside PR help is counter-productive because it generates the negative coverage that AIG is, presumably, trying to avoid?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd6gqvydzOk]

Thinking about pitching an embargoed story to TechCrunch, arguably the top new media web site about emerging technology? Don’t. TechCrunch Supreme Leader Michael Arrington has decreed that the site will no longer honor embargoes and will, in effect, only accept exclusive stories from PR folks they trust.

In Arrington’s typical over-the-top egomaniacal style, he makes this case with maximum bluster. But when you boil it down, it comes down to these points:

• Arrington is sick of being hounded by PR people who would kill for a placement on his site, one of the top tech start-up news sites on the Internet
• He’s particularly sick of playing by the rules when it comes to embargoed stories, only to have others break the rules and break the news first
• So, he’s not going to honor embargoes anymore, even if he accepts some information under embargo
• He’d rather have stories exclusively, but only from PR people he trusts

Reduced to these points, his complaints and strategies are hardly new. TechCrunch has some power in the marketplace, so Arrington is trying to leverage it by demanding exclusives. The Wall Street Journal does this all the time. In turn, other bloggers are trying to gain market power by first agreeing to the same embargoes that TechCrunch does (or did), then posting first in the hope of climbing up the search rankings. So Arrington’s little game of accepting embargoed information and then breaking the embargo at some point afterward is an attempt to fight back against those who would challenge TechCrunch’s supremacy.

Read more