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NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> $1,027...the price of
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> $1,027...the price of
Elizabeth Gardner (egardner_at_iw.com)
Mon, 19 Jan 1998 16:34:23 -0600
>Cliff Kurtzman <cliff_at_tenagra.com> wrote:
>
>>Steve Kruse wrote a note about how he does not consider trade magazine
>>writers as real journalists.
>
Then Whitney Tipton wrote:
>Just thought I'd put my 2 cents in here. For whatever its worth I
>started out my marketing career in PR and I wouldn't say that trade
>journalists aren't real, but there is no denying that, regardless of how
>talented they are, many of their stories come from Hill and Knowlton
>releases pushed onto them by folks like me. Advertising in the
>publications helps, but you throw a bunch of bucks at a guerilla flack
>and you'll get plenty of ink.
As an actual trade journalist, I have to observe that Whitney is right on
the mark here. Coverage of high-tech and the Internet in both the trade
press and the consumer press is influenced very heavily by who has the most
PR dollars to spend, not by who buys the most advertising. Speaking for
myself, I literally have no idea what companies advertise in the magazine I
work for (and none of my editors show any evidence of knowing, either).
All I know is how many press releases I get (maybe 100 a week). I trash
most of them, but now and then one seems interesting enough to hang a story
on, or actually contains some news. If a company sends me enough press
releases, it does, in fact, increase the odds that I will write about them
eventually. I consider them only one of many, many information sources,
but writing a story off a press release is like shooting fish in barrel,
and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are magazines that fill
their pages that way. (However, it should be noted that the higher
echelons of trade magazines have the same distaste as the major metro
dailies for rewriting press releases, in many cases because most of their
reporters came from dailies.)
Steve Kruse's account of his journalism career makes no mention of his
covering business or high-tech subjects, so I have to assume that he's not
familiar with business PR practices except possibly as a businessman. If
he had stuck with journalism in the Pacific Northwest and had debased
himself at any point to become a business reporter, he would probably have
some personal experience with the extraordinary Microsoft PR juggernaut,
and would never wonder again why MS gets more ink (and amazingly favorable
ink) than any other thousand companies put together. Daily newspaper
reporters are even more vulnerable to it than trade journalists because of
their relative ignorance of high-tech subjects in general and the history
of the computer industry in particular, which is why so many seem to be
under the impression that Microsoft's market dominance is due solely to its
superior products. The computer "authority" in our local daily is an
embarrassment to anyone who actually understands the industry, and we
suspect he is on the invite list for the annual MS media party.
All I can say is, we do the best we can.
Elizabeth Gardner
Contributing Writer
Internet World (formerly Web Week)
Not on the MS media party invite list
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