You are right in many areas, however picking up the phone and “pitching” is still the most effective way of getting messages across to the public. (Assuming you are shooting for traditional media which unfortunatly is still the most important deliverable in a PR campaign, regardless of the client and my opinion.)

-Tyler Barnett
Barnett Ellman

Conversations are good. I’m with you man.

When you get a chance visit me at the ReidWegs Report and provide an opinion.

RW

Chris, word.

Ryan, exactly. This is about building relationships. People like you represent the good side of an industry long plagued by malpractice. As I’ve been saying all along, engage or die. Eventually, people will have to change and improve their game in order to stay relevant in the future. If you’re willing to learn, then you have nothing to lose.

Joel, personally I advocate well-written press releases and have long said that as long as they’re relevant, they will continue to remain effective in not just PR, but also SEO and business development. But I have to disagree with you on your platform for defending “the pitch.” Have you ever asked journalists if they like to be pitched? I have, and I can tell you that most will say no. What they will say is they appreciate inbound email from someone who did their homework and presented a compelling package that can help them write a story that matters to their readers. But is that still a pitch or is that something more important and effective? We have to call it out in order to get people to think differently about their approach. I think we all need to get out of the bathtub…

Chris, the moral of the story is that we just need to think more about why what we’re representing is better matched to those we’re trying to reach. I think at that point, you look back and realize that you could call it a pitch, but in reality it’s something more important.

OnlinePRguy, thank you. It’s funny how most of the comments completely overlooked the much-practiced mechanics of blasting journalists, choosing to arm-wrestle over the semantics of the pitch instead of the fact that the majority of the industry is confusing spamming with pitching.

That’s the essence of this post, to me, Brian.

The unexamined life is not worth living; the clunky blast-pitch is not worth sending.

The death knell of the press release has been widely sounded, yet a recent survey found 77.9 per cent (of journalists surveyed) said they preferred to receive information “via press releases sent to me by email!”

http://tinyurl.com/2j3z4b

And the pitch is not dead either. What’s dead is random, generic, poorly crafted email pitches lobbed over a blogger’s fence with not thought as to the blogger’s “beat,” preferences, primary topic, etc.

A good pitch, crafted and managed by a PR professional with a genuine media relationship and some real intelligence, can still land a client on the cover of Fortune.

Bathwater anyone?

I’m all for moving our industry forward, but at what point do we say ‘to hell with it’ and let the dead weight flounder? Embarrassment from being outed is a great motivator for some, but not all. Frankly, it needs to happen more because too many PR people have forgotten that our business is about relationships, it’s too impersonal now.

I call a good number of media and bloggers alike friends. That doesn’t happen by accident. How does that happen when those people generally have disdain for people like us? You tell me. Either people like me are brilliant, lucky, or, as I like to think, meticulous, thoughtful and patient.

PR virtues, if you will. Some have it. Others don’t.

I disagree – it’s the same with press releases. Neither are dead, but the bad ones need to go away and PR needs to get back to relationships.