I‘ve had the occasional rant about bad PR company behaviour (mainly pour encourager les autres) but I’ve pulled back recently. It seemed like better karma to try to find positive things to say and talk about writing rather than behaviour. Still, I couldn’t suppress a chuckle reading The Bad Pitch Blog this morning. Some truly horrendous press releases. Although it’s not the worst example, there is one comment that talks about the quality and process of writing:
If you held on until the end of this pitch, you got to read my favorite part: the company boilerplate. I’ll spare you from more snark, but it looks less like a concise, substantive description of the company and more like a piece of copy that emerged from a gauntlet of approvals by people focused more on specific words than overall meaning. As a result, it merely adds to the noise this pitch has come to represent.
But the PR industry has its revenge in the equally excruciating badhack site which lists some of the worst behaviour of the fourth estate. Here’s a classic:
There’s a well known tale of journalist who was interviewing the MD of a very large IT company in his office. After a few minutes, the journalist says “Excuse me a second.” He then picks up the waste paper basket and throws up into. Without missing a beat he says, “Sorry about that. Where were we?”
So who is the sinner and who is the patient? I suspect that PRs and journalists are pretty evenly matched when it comes to bad behaviour.
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