An InconvenientPR Truth - decent point but it’s a PR campaign

In case you’ve missed it there has been a bit of a furore this week about a whether PR is destroying itself by spamming journalists with ill prepared and generalist press releases. The video, called An InconvenientPR Truth, rips off Al Gores famous film with a warning about the indiscriminate use of emailed press releases to journalists and how this could affect the future of PR. It’s a fair point and clearly it does happen. Has done for years, particularly since email. And it’s likely, as the ratio of journalist to PROs is becoming ever more biased towards PROs, journalists are likely to see this trend of increasing press releases continue. Now, I’m not the press releases biggest fan. It clearly has its place, but there is a strong argument that it is the most overestimated tool in the marketer’s armoury.  A PROs success depends on successful, sustainable relationships with journalists. Whilst the InconvenientPR Truth campaign has proved a helpful catalyst for a healthy debate, the source of the video is a news distribution company called Realwire. Presumably their point is along the lines of "if PROs use Realwire you won’t end up spamming journo’s." We’ve never used Realwire's services, so we can’t comment, but the InconvenientPR Truth should be seen for what it is, a clever piece of PR. And nothing wrong with that!