Weekend Rant: Bye, PR Weak

[a special cross-linkage with my Trendspotting: 2011 Blog]

I’m a guy who thinks “new media” and “old media” aren’t much different anymore. Sorry, Martha, but you either people want to read you or people don’t. So the news that PR Week is going mostly online makes me think: one more step toward extinction.

People don’t want to subscribe to an expensive weekly when the content is online. And when a magazine’s content is hard to access they think, “I’ll forget it.” It’s been clear for some time how magazines that exist only to report what we’re learning every day from our favorite online sources have outlived their need and/or purpose.



Because of this reality, I’ve been wondering why Haymarket’s PR Week is still here for a while—mostly because it possesses a 1990s “big shot” mentality. You know, the attitude that says that if you advertise with us, pay us for so-called award nominations, come to our dinners, and be super-extra-friendly to us, we’ll write articles featuring your work.

That’s lame.

I have a long history with the magazine. They did a few profiles of me in the dot-com years when they used crack reporters like BusinessWeek’s Matt Boyle to find out who the troublemakers were. I participated in roundtables with Jonah Bloom and his predecessor Adam Leyland, two blokes who ran the place with verve! That PRW was a place that celebrated change in PR rather than replaying ideas we already have down pat.

I stopped subscribing a few years back when I saw myself driven over the edge by a plethora of fluffers about a major PR firm’s latest hiring (can she keep a job?) or client win (really? it lasted how long?). Fact: I don’t care about the competition. I’m a practitioner and I want my firm to be better at what my firm does. If I wanted to learn more about the others, surely I wouldn’t get my intelligence from a magazine that writes fluff stories. Besides, most of the big guys are too in love with their own business models—and often treat customer service like an oxymoron.

And then, last night I was watching a segment on CNBC Reports about advertising in tumultuous 2009. The guests were that happy-go-lucky chair of Saatchi and some woman CEO of a hotshot ad agency. The host, Dennis Kneale, intelligently asked each to come up with a slogan for beleaguered JP Morgan. Neither had a clue because, really, they didn’t possess a single creative bone in their bodies. And then I saw WPP announce they’re slashing 7,200 more jobs.

Watching it got me thinking of how lucky I am to still hang out in the trenches and use ounces of creativity to create strategies so companies can grow vertically. What I do—and have done for two decades—is not what PR Week meanders about. They go on and on about pitching shortcuts and what a certain journalist wants from a PR person, and every now and then run a “tip sheet” about Twitter or something we’ve already mused on.

I got a chuckle when PRW was written up in the New York Times last month about their reduction to “a monthly circulation magazine”—what, does that W stand for—Weak ? —which can’t become anything if it’s not released each week. The last time PRW got granted an actual Times article was in 2000 when the grey lady discovered there was a weekly devoted to all things PR in a Sunday piece entitled “What Really Matters; Getting Beyond the Truth, Into Appearances.” Here is an excerpt:

As Pets.com shut down last week, selling off everything from kitty litter to that famous Sock Puppet mascot, it shocked many observers in the PR world who had been confident that sites with the strongest profile would survive.

But Pets.com's own brand of promotion, successful though it was, did not prove popular with everyone, particularly those working to boost the profile of Internet companies. ''I really hated that little puppet,'' said Richard Laermer, CEO of RLM Public Relations. ''I thought it was obnoxious and pandering. It really annoyed me.''

It was a full page stating: “Look—a weekly trade that looks at an industry that none of us understand!” and the positioning for Haymarket was fantastic. The world is made aware of their new magazine that acted as watchdog and trend seeker and support mechanism for a constantly-evolving field.

While Haymarket publishes the outrageously hip tech magazine Revolution UK in the US its PR rag seems to be bent on being old-fashioned. Take the spam problem: It should know better, and yet each day I get more begging emails sent to RLM’s many internal distribution lists. How could someone who claims to know how our industry runs send such artifice? I sometimes fantasize about throwing it back in a Pied Piper way—mailing them to ask them how it feels!

Those who manage the slowly dying magazine, like so many failing players, refused to be prescient about the fall of their kind of media. They stayed focused on a long-forgotten time when they bought their way into advertisers’ hearts. I saw this first hand: As the dot-com days waned I suggested a column to editor Bloom that analyzed new gadgets on the market—and I did the Toy Box section weekly for about a year. I was proud of what appeared on the back page of that thick periodical. It was fact-filled but irreverent —funny, topical, weird, talked about. Bloom’s successor arrived, kept me on for a month, and then replaced this guy in no uncertain terms, casually explaining she wanted to use it for acquiring advertisers. Or more bluntly: “We will do it with a staffer.” It was a new journalism: “Take what you can from whom you can.”



In the last straw world where I live, just the other day I asked the PRW news editor for a behind -closed-wall link to a story I wished to feature here on Bad Pitch. Her response was a terse “No, we can’t do that—it’s only for subscribers.”

Yep, a magazine that doesn’t see how such we-own-it thinking is a surefooted step away from total implosion. All together now: a magazine that doesn’t deserve us.

I’m twittering at www.twitter.com/laermer