Here's the drill: the PR person wants you to do a story on the product or service they are publicizing, and you want to do stories about things that are unbiased and newsworthy. Rarely do those two roads meet...though, to be fair, sometimes they do.
Normally the call will consist of some poor, underpaid intern who's been handed a script and told to call hundreds of TV stations in the country they have on a list...that person doesn't particularly care about the product or service, nor can they speak intelligently about the subject. They just want you to downlink whatever feed is going out so the company they're representing gets advertising without paying for it.
This isn't to say that there aren't smart, savvy, helpful, friendly, and awesome PR people in the world (I've known several)...but it *is* to say that they are the exception to the rule.
A time when those excellent PR people can come in handy is when you need comment on something from an expert in a REALLY SHORT TIME FRAME. TV news works fast, and calling back the next day isn't good enough...especially in local.
So, reading this outburst from a media guy towards a PR person, I can start to understand where he's coming from. She (in his mind) had all the time in the world when she needed him to do some story about her product or service...but when he needed her to help out with comment on something, she was nowhere to be found.
However, where he handled it (on Twitter) and the way he went about it (by being a jerk and using a lot of profanity) are just downright stupid.
Check it out for yourself.
Have you been on either end of this kind of phone call? Does he deserve to be called out like this (especialy since he took down the offensive messages soon after sending them)? Leave me a comment and tell me what YOU think!
Big thanks to my coworker Gary Bender (@GLBcnn) for pointing out this story.
(Original source: http://search.twitter.com/
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