I just left the following comment on a post Antony Mayfield made calling for the end of the practice generally known in our industry as "blogger relations" and thought it would be worth re-posting here too. Antony picks up on a discussion kicked off by Tom Coates rejecting the practice of pitching news to bloggers in the same way PR agencies do to the media.
I'm not sure that "blogger relations" (a term I have a problem with anyway) is doing the damage to the industry's reputation (do we really have one worth mentioning anyway?).
If anything, I think the link you posted to is generating a healthy and much-needed debate about our industry amongst people who do not work in it and therefore don't see what we actually do day to day. It's also not a new debate - I recall something a year or two ago in the US when a prolific blogger there was similarly outraged.
In my experience, PR people only learn by making mistakes. You can tell them something until you're blue in the face, but it won't mean anything until they get their asses raked over the coals by their client or boss for doing something dumb.
So actually, let's get them doing *more* "blogger relations", let's have more exposes like this one, and let's have more naming and shaming. Only then we will weed out the people (including clients trying to force their agencies to include bloggers on a media list) who see online networks as just another channel down which they can shove their messages.
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