I’ll make a few updates to this post as I think more clearly about it.  But aninteresting debate has erupted over at Techcrunch, where Michael Arrington has declared he will no longer adhere to embargoes (except from a few people he likes.) Furthermore, he has called out a 43 year PR executive in a follow up article, calling her an excessive spammer.

This argument is funny on a few different levels.  First of all, it’s pretty amazing to think that a blog no one had heard of 4 years ago now has the guts to tell the entir PR community that they will no longer play by the rules that the New York Times, Time Magazine, WSJ, and People Magazine have played by for the last 60-70 years.  

Second, for all of Arrington’s vitriol toward PR firms, there’s irony that he will only review companies that are on his own PR “A” List.  Techcrunch started as a blog that promoted new start-ups.  Over the years, as they began getting more invites to more high class events, their focus shifted to Apple, MSFT, Google and companies that are one degree away from the top rung of Silicon Valley VC’s and power brokers.  A few years ago, I did some work for a start-up whose CEO worked tirelessly to get Arrington’s attention. Understanding how the Techcrunch ego worked, he actually underwent a 12 month PR campaign to build the right connnections to get one degree away from Arrington’s circle.  The plan worked, and now he has access to him.  Same guy, same intelligence, same social circle, but now that Arrington sees him as a connected influencer, now he’ll open his emails.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.  It’s the way the world works – you naturally stop dealing with small fish when big fish are jumping on your hook.  But when you are working with the big fish, you shouldn’t start screaming and yelling at both big and small fish about which way they should attach themselves to your hook.

But on to anoher point.  The reason we are in this mess now, is that at some point reporters stopped being “reporters” and started being “relayers.”  years ago, a few PR firms figured out that a reporter could spend more time in a bar if the PR firm did the research, wrote the aricle, provided the photos and listed contact information if the reporter wnated to add his or her own sentence to the piece.  These PR firms started getting companies placed.  Pretty soon, all the PR firms started doing this, and reporters stopped looking for stories, and hired assistants to sort through the pitches.  Now comes the internet, and while it used to take a bunch of $.32 stamps to send out a pitch, one email can blast out to 10,000 reporters.  The reporters have created this mess where you have to send your relase to everyone, because everyone is sending everyone the release.  And no reporter is actively doing any research themselves.

So my synopsis is that PR firms should keep spamming the heck out of reporters until reporters start chasing stories themselves.  if they are just going to sit back and regurgitate releases, they should expect to get 1000’s of pitches.

(I’ll think about htis more and see if I still agree with it later…)