Two days ago an important editor-in-chief of a mainstream publication printed the email addresses of everyone who had sent him inappropriate, or inappropriately directed and/or irrelevant email in the last 30 days. The title of his post: "SORRY PR PEOPLE: YOU'RE BLOCKED." Not everyone on the list is in public relations, but many are. It's a long list.

Reader comments on the post have been both for and against this outing of PR people by the editor-in-chief. I don't care about any of that. It is not the main story. The real story here is that the traditional public relations and mainstream media marriage is in serious trouble. The relationship is broken, the divorce is getting ugly, and the worse things get, the harder PR people beg their estranged partner to listen. The outing of PR people's emails by an editor-in-chief of a major magazine is the rough equivalent of a restraining order: go away, stay away and stop abusing me once and for all.

Here, catch up with the story: The editor-in-chief is Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine. He's the real deal. The magazine is widely, highly, regarded. Many of the PR people and firms on his pubished list of offenders are big, well-known people and firms. Here's a link to Mr. Anderson's post. The story came to my attention via this post today by Steven Lewis at Zest Digital. He's on to the real story, too. I'm getting ahead of myself a bit, but he writes, in part: If traditional PR agencies like the ones whose domain names appear in Anderson's blocked lists can't get it right with mainstream media, there is every chance they won't get it right in the blogosphere. Hold that thought!

If this many establishment PR people can be this offensive in the collective over so short a period, what does it tell you? It tells me that an ever-growing number of increasingly poorly trained pitch men and women, all chasing after the declining real estate of traditional media, are on the verge of collapsing the whole system in upon itself.

Traditional PR people who hope to survive this systemic crisis of mutual disdain have got to learn to send messages that matter to people who care in places where the news is useful and welcomed. With each passing day, these places do not include a declining number of traditional publications gated for their protection and self-preservation against a throng of PR people who just keep trying to talk louder and more often.

The trouble, of course, is that messages considered irrelevant, inappropriate, or poorly targeted by an editor probably aren't going to resonate with any client's ultimate audience in any medium either and I think many PR people know this. I think they also know they may not be able to convert their traditional unidirectional press release writing skills to the development of conversational messaging that matters for an audience that counts. Maybe that's not true. But for certain, the current old-fashioned, traditional practice of overwhelming a dwindling number of publications with an increasing number of unwanted, misdirected, or off-topic pitches of questionable value can't be sustained.

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