Fast Five Q&A with Adweek’s Digital Editor, Brian Morrissey

Anyone following Brian Morrissey on Twitter may assume he hates PR people. I’m here to tell you he doesn’t. He does hate PR spam. As digital editor at Adweek, he gets a ton of it.

After seeing him out a bad pitch this morning, I sent him a note asking for his help in reducing PR spam. He was kind enough to oblige by doing this Q&A.

Morrissey is also a multitasker. While answering our questions he notes he was “on a conference call while writing a story and updating Twitter on the awful cliches (he’s) hearing.”

BPB: Your Twitter feed is brutally honest about your bad PR experiences. What approach pisses you off the most?
BM: I try to be honest about my daily experiences. It turns out that, as a reporter, I often have to deal with a deluge of PR.

I break down my problems in two buckets. The first is “spray and pray.” The PR industry seems overwhelmingly about hits, the more the better. This, along with the ease of hitting the send button and staffing a junior person to repeatedly follow up, means I’m overwhelmed with emails, follow-up emails and phone calls to follow up on the follow-up emails.

It’s not my obligation to reply to every email I get from PR people. My job is reporting, not to interact with PR people. What’s more, since PR is about hits, this means a bias toward a very broad definition of relevance. I get over a dozen emails a day from people that have clearly never read one thing I’ve written.

The second bucket is “gatekeeper.” I don’t like PR people trying to insert themselves between me and interviewees. It wastes my time and annoys me.

BPB: What in your opinion is the difference between a pitch and PR spam?
BM: It’s a fine line, I guess. Spam is unsolicited and unwanted, but there’s no set definition because I get a lot unsolicited emails and calls that are very useful. It’s like pornography you know it when you see it. My advice: do your homework, be relevant, and be mindful that reporters are busy.

BPB: What single piece of advice do you have for PR people that want to improve their media relations skills overall?
BM: Recognize that media organizations are shrinking while PR is growing. The ratio of PR people to reporters is probably like 75:1. This is profoundly bizarre to me. (We could have another debate whether this is a positive thing for society.)

What it means for PR people is your job is harder. The best PR people I know simply connect me with people that can help me. They know what I cover, what I don’t and how their clients do and do not fit. That means a lot more work before the email and the call. It also means knowing when to get out of the way.

BPB: Do you believe that PR people help, hurt or are they just a necessary evil?
BM: As a reporter, PR is a necessary evil. Right or wrong, companies are convinced they need layers of middlemen to a produce and protect a bland “message.”

On top of that, smaller companies feel they don’t need advertising; they need PR for “earned” (free) media. This is why I guess there’s the imbalance of shrinking newsrooms and a growing PR industry. It also means a never ending flood of companies that expect me to market their new optimization tools. No thanks.

BPB: As digital editor at a print magazine, we have to ask, what's your opinion on the future of print media?
BM: Well, I’m digital editor of a news organization that used to be a print magazine. We publish much more content online than in print format. That said print has been an important part of Adweek.

Print is very valuable to the credibility a news brand, but it needs to be supplemented so media companies make more money online and through events. Any media company still relying on print revenue for the overwhelming majority of its business is probably doomed.

Pennies can’t replace dollars, but gather together enough nickels, dimes and quarters, and you’ll get close to those offline dollars. Cost cuts have to make up the rest.

The challenge for us is the same for lots of what was formerly only print media: how do you find a financial model that works when you’re not going to make as much money from online ads as offline. Jeff Zucker has a point about trading offline dollars for digital pennies. I’m not on the business side, but my personal view is this will mean media needs to have a lower cost base and at the same time produce new kinds of content. We’re starting to do that.

As an example, yesterday I wrote two Web news stories, worked on a print feature, shot a video interview and updated Twitter several times. I didn’t get to a blog post I meant to do. That’s just the way it is nowadays. I think it’s cool to have the opportunity to tell stories and share information in so many ways. I hope to do more of it.

Twitter. Again with the Twitter?!
We’ve droned on before that you can learn something on Twitter. Oddly enough this entire transaction, less the actual posting of Brian’s answers, took place in less than three hours. And to sum up this post the Bad Pitch Blog will note that with things moving this fast, if you're not making a reporter’s life easier you're just making it harder.

tags | public relations | PR | media relations | media | good pitch | bad pitch | bad pitch blog | advertising | marketing | Twitter | Adweek | Brian Morrissey