Friedman vs. Frydman

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I'm torn. Two of my close friends, both in the PR biz, are currently embroiled in an epic PR battle on the streets of Jane in New York City.

Nancy Friedman runs one of the top travel and upscale destination PR shops in the biz. While Ken Frydman and his business partner Richard Schwartz have built a great local PR and PA practice after cutting their teeth in the halls of power in city government and elsewhere.

The two adversaries also happen to be close personal friends themselves.

Mr. Frydman is using the MSM and a blog or two to accentuate a community's displeasure with the nightly crowds drawn to a trendy hotel in the mostly residential West Village neighborhood. The proprietors of The Jane Hotel are said to prefer a negotiated truce with their local, vocal antagonists, while the latter group simply wishes to shutter the hot spot altogether.

I have personal memories of this neighborhood when it first started morphing away from the rough and tumble trade. My old buddy Jeff Ross, Conan O'Brien's long-time producer, shared an apartment at 24 Jane Street back in the day. I digress.

The local vocals in this fight had pinned their fate on a rather substantial New York Times Sunday real estate story, until it was learned that the author of the piece appeared to have a pony in the race. The story was killed.

My favorite line: when asked whether it made sense to hire a P.R. company, the head of the Greenwich Village Block Association, who's sitting on the sidelines for this one, responded:

“Why do you ask that question? Is there a down side to hiring P.R.?”

I also liked PR Newser's take in which Jason asked Ms. Friedman for a clarification on her assertion that positive comments in support of the hot spot are being removed from some community blogs:

"Positive blog posts about the Jane are getting taken down on some of the sites and blogs who are supported by the neighbors. I thought blogs were about dialogue and not just one-sided."

We'll see who prevails in this one. Again, I can't take sides, but it's certainly interesting to watch these PR pros, with distinctly different styles, do battle.

Small and Big Screens...

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I had the good fortune to attend the thought-provoking "Future of Media" panel, hosted by MediaPost and sponsored by AOL and others, in New York City last week as part of Advertising Week.

Featured (from left to right) were: Mark Cuban (HD Net, Dallas Mavs), Vivien Schiller (NPR), Bob Garfield (Ad Age, NPR), Martha Stewart, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Susan Whiting (Nielsen), Rob Norman (WPP's Group M), Judy McGrath (MTV Networks), publishing legend Milton Glaser, and moderator Chris Anderson of Wired.

The conversation, held at The Times Center, touched upon many of the issues with which nearly everyone in the content production and distribution space are grappling today: the monetization of online content, the role of social networks in the media mix, analytics, the blurred lines (for some) between church and state (advertising and editorial), and what's next.

Here are some of the notable quotables that caught my attention:

Chris Anderson: "I also have to confess that I have a problem with the title of this panel....Using words like media are probably limiting us in our search for business models, and the path forward."

Vivien Schiller "What the [NPR] stations need to do...is to become increasingly relevant to their local market. They need to increasingly provide information in the public interest to their communities, particularly as local newspapers, many of them are suffering or folding, and in doing so they become so relevant that they cannot be disrupted."

Judy McGrath "If you have some creative excellence and a brand, it's a great fertile time to try to figure out how to connect with consumers...and hopefully how to monetize your content. It's exciting."

Martha Stewart "It [merchandising] is important to our customers. They want to satisfy their dreams. They want to become become doers once they learn how to be dreamers. By reading the content, they then become the doers."

Reid Hoffman "A business model is not just something you slap on top of content production -- the whole thing from how it's discovered, distributed and produced. Those ecosystems are changing. So it's a question of how do you re-architect the ecosystem. And that's the thing I think would be most interesting, but also the most perilous."

Chris Anderson "In the media industry, I'm stunned by how controversial Free [my book] is because it is, of course, the foundation of traditional media. Radio is free to air. Television is free to air. Our publications are subsidized 90 or more percent by the advertisers that are virtual free. And yet free is considered heretical by many, including by Mark Cuban."

Mark Cuban "Certainly free as a form of sampling is very valid. Giving someone a taste of it then upgrade it, has been used by drug dealers for years and years. The internet is becoming stale. Fifteen years in, it's old news...some of the conversations we're having here, I close my eyes, it's 1998. Streaming media...Wow! Who thought of that idea?"

What's next? Did anybody watch the Cowboys-Giants game where the Giants won in the last second? What was the #1 thing that was talked about the entire game? The screen! You can't take your eyes off of it. It's digital. It's seven stories high, 70 yards long, and it weighs more than a 747. And it cost $40 million dollars. I look at it and I said, it cost $40 million dollars today. What's it gonna cost in five years? What's it gonna cost in ten years? If it's a medium that you just can't take you eyes off of. And it's what everybody wants to talk about...what kind of opportunities does that create? And is that medium gonna be free? Everybody since 1976 have said 'smaller, cheaper, faster.' Now we're transitioning to a world where it's 'bigger, better, and, cheaper." And now, it's going in the opposite direction. Can't see U2?

Would you pay 20 bucks to go watch it on a seven-story high screen with the most amazing sound system with all your friends? The rules are changing. Everybody 's so focused on the Internet as a solution for everything, they're missing all the good stuff....I'm talking about a platform. I think they're going to be new platforms, that are real time, event-driven that could be connected to much bigger platforms that will ingrain a more social experience...digitally-enabled platforms that can be anywhere that will enable a better social experience. But we're not looking for them. We're still looking to say how can I get a better search to my iphone or my laptop or my PC to watch TV on my PC. That's so last century.

Susan Whiting "That idea of 'best screen possible' enabled by content...it still matters. The entertainment and information content still matters. No matter how fragmented we get, we see that every day."

Bob Garfield "The fundamental problem is fragmentation and ad avoidance and the glut of supply is going to...is already churning out to destroy the critical mass...produced by quality content. Craig's List has eviscerated the newspaper industry. The DVR and the Internet are destroying broadcast. Broadcast is in huge, huge trouble...Two of the top four broadcast networks are talking about becoming cable outlets -- CBS and NBC -- which is swell, because cable has much better prospects than broadcast in exactly the way that it is way better to have multiple sclerosis than Lou Gehrig's disease."

Milton Glaser "The combination of words that most terrifies me is 'targeted consumers.' Poor darlings. In the old days when we started New York magazine, we would not permit a salesperson to enter the editorial part of the building...I suspect that that is no longer the case...What strikes me as being most significant is not so much the emergence of new platforms, new media, new technology as much as how does it affect the nature of the message itself that people are receiving and what are the consequences. Are these targeted consumers really benefiting in the deepest way from the content?"

Martha Stewart "We've been watching very carefully the destruction of church and state that exists between advertisers and edit. Increasingly we find that there' a major breakdown... There is definitely a change going on. Is that because the consumer wants to see a product next to a page talking about that product. The Internet certainly does that constantly. We are dealing with it. We are taking very close notice of it and we want to not only serve our readers and our viewers and our Internet users in the best way possible, but we also want to make money and get advertisers to welcome our good content."

Bob Garfield "There's a big difference between relevance and corruption...you describe the magazine world as a kind of cathedral and I think historically it's been more like a brothel...and now it's becoming like Plato's Retreat."

Vivien Schiller "I think in this conversation that we are substantially underestimating the intelligence both of the audience to smell a rat, and the intelligence of the people who run [legitimate] news organizations...Integrity is the fundamental of the business model."

Rob Norman "One of the marvelous things that has happened...with the rise of social media in particular is the ability for the bad and the rotten and the underperforming to be teased out and actually raise the standards of corporate behavior and raise the standard of product development and relevance. ...the checks and balances of the democracy of the dissemination of information. is one of the things that my clients have discovered...is that social media helps their good news travel fast and helps their bad news travel much faster than that."

Click here to listen to the whole conversation (TRT: 85 minutes), and please excuse the audio quality.

Photos: Peter Himler (Canon PowerShot SX20 IS)

Monday, Monday

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Maybe it was a Monday. Who can remember? But here I was sitting quietly in my cubicle some two-and-a-half years into my first job in PR. I worked for a small, but highly influential entertainment boutique in midtown Manhattan.

That morning, I answered the office door and in walked a lanky guy with a mustache who asked to see my boss. I escorted him back to Bobby's office, and returned to my cube.

About 15 minutes later, Bobby called me in and introduced me to John Phillips...yes, that John Phillips. Apparently, Mr. Phillips was in desperate straits. A jail cell seemed a lot closer than California Dreamin' at this stage of his life. He was busted for cocaine possession and on the verge of going before a judge who would decide his fate.

He explained that he and his daughter Mackenzie have been active in a rather progressive drug treatment program out of Fair Oaks Hospital in New Jersey. If my memory serves me well, it was Dr. Mark Gold and his novel use of the drug Clonidine to ween addicts off of cocaine on whose wagon the Phillips hitched.

Apparently, John was a model patient who took a leadership role in the program. He hoped this positive "positioning" would weigh heavily on the judge's fateful decision.

My boss asked if I could help garner some media attention for John's "work" with Dr. Gold...on a pro bono basis. I accepted the assignment (as if I had a choice). Still, it was a pretty good story, as I soon learned. People magazine quickly committed to a cover, followed by appearances on "The Today Show" and elsewhere. Dr. Gold was an integral part of the interviews, and thus benefited professionally as well.

When Phillips finally went to court, the judge cited his good work at Fair Oaks and gave him a suspended sentence. Phillips called me to say he owes it all to me. Had I known what a twisted soul he really was, I would have thought twice about helping him. In fact, based on his daughter's revelations to Oprah today, both of them were apparently in on the ruse.

Future of Media

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On Wednesday, I expect to learn the future of media. The day begins with Media Magazine's Future of Media Forum or "It's Not What it Used to Be."

At The Times Center in NYC, Wired's Chris Anderson will take these and other media movers and shakers through their paces: Mark Cuban, Martha Stewart, NPR's Vivien Schiller, Ad Age, NPR's and Chaos Scenario's (see above video) Bob Garfield, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, and MTV's Judy McGrath.

Later that day, yours truly will take another group of equally astute, yet non-executive media mavens through their paces. They include HuffPost's media editor Danny Shea, Mediaite's (and Shea's predecessor) Rachel Sklar, The New York Times's prolific TV/media reporter Brian Stelter, PaidContent's man in New York David Kaplan, and Henry Blodget's #2 who edits the increasingly influential The Business Insider (fka Silicon Alley Insider) Nich Carlson.

So if you had your druthers and could extract anything there is to know about the future of media, and maybe by extension the future of the PR biz, where would you start? I've begun to formulate my questions. Please chime in with others.

• Is charging for content the right remedy for decimated bottom lines at MSM companies?
• Will the blogosphere eventually usurp the established news organizations in authority?
• In the age of Twitter, will the PR professional decline in value as a trusted news source?
• Can the long-standing PR model of "earned" media through pitching (I mean "engaging") journalists survive in an age when consumers increasingly derive their news and info from the friends?
• Won't there always be a segment of the population that takes its news from TV and newspapers?
• Was President Obama's five-show interview-fest effective in advancing his healthcare agenda?
  
• Will online ad revenue ever be able to fully cover the expense of producing a quality news product? Or does something else have to give?
  

Watch this space for coverage and hopefully, some audio takes, from Wednesday's media confabs.

Higher Ed Muscles In

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Start with Yahoo and Google, and go from there. This seems to be the recipe cooked up by 35 of the nation's most prestigious universities in an effort to re-exert their influence over the science news that percolates in the public domain.

Specifically, the MercNews reports, these universities have banded together to form and sustain a web site and "wire service" called Futurity.org.

The plan was mostly necessitated by the drastically reduced news hole and number of mainstream beat reporters covering science news.

"Whereas 20 years ago nearly 150 U.S. newspapers had a science section, today fewer than 20 do, and those are often dominated by health and lifestyle coverage. Reporters covering medicine, space and environmental issues have taken buyouts or been laid off across the nation. In December, for example, CNN eliminated its entire science and technology team. In February The Boston Globe closed its science section, an action the Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle had taken several years earlier."

In a recent post, this blogger noted that ProfNet, the original crowd-sourced service for journalists to quickly identify experts, started with a closed universe from academia. The thinking then, and thinking now, presupposes that universities provide journalists with a greater degree of editorial "reliability," versus, I suppose, those charlatans from private industry. Still, skepticism abounds:

"Any information is better than no information," said Charlie Petit, a former science reporter at U.S. News & World Report and the San Francisco Chronicle. "The quality of research university news releases is quite high. They are rather reliable," he added. "But they are completely absent any skepticism or investigative side."

Cristine Russell, a former Washington Post science reporter who is president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, weighs in:

"This can be a really good source of information for students and others who are looking for information. But it does not replace the independent news media."

Personally, I think Futurity is a very smart and timely move that may not win a ringing endorsement from a Darwinian depleted species of traditional science reporters, but has the ability to bring credible science news and research directly to the public. And what's wrong with that?

Prez Presses the Press

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If you're an A-list newsmaker, you can pretty much call the shots over where, when, and how you take your media interviews.

And today, there are few bigger newsmakers than the leader of the free world (unless you count celebrity-du-jour Lady Gaga (or that "skank with a brain.") But I won't go there.

The Wall Street Journal (and others) today report on President Obama's media blitz slated for this coming weekend in which he has no fewer than five network appearances on the docket, including Letterman on Monday.

In her piece, "TV Blitz Will Test Obama's Star Power," WSJ reporter Elizabeth Williamson writes:

"The president's heavy media schedule raises questions about whether his ubiquitous presence will dilute his effectiveness as a pitchman."

To which former former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart paints a do-or-die dilemma:

"I don't dismiss this idea that if at some point you fire your best weapon and it doesn't work, what do you do next? But you come to the point in a debate where you're not worried about the next battle."

The President intends to four-wall the Sunday talk shows, something few mortal newsmakers can do. I'll never forget the angst involved in organizing the first U.S. TV interviews for HSH Prince Albert and Princess Stephanie on both GMA and Today, arch rivals. We finally negotiated to have GMA go live and Today pre-tape, or was it vice-versa? No matter.

As for the Journal's POV, my feeling is that if you have a powerful communicator with a compelling message, there is little reason not to deploy him far and wide. In fact President Obama's relative absence from the media sphere this summer, likely fueled the need to play catch-up today. Also, this weekend's not the first time our President pressed the press with his presence.

Still, White House Deputy Press Secretary Joshua Earnest is not worried about the prospect of a diluted message:

"The president accepted invitations to appear on these programs to talk about his health plan. These programs reach a variety of audiences because we're confident that the more the American people understand about the president's plans for health-insurance reforms, the more likely they are to support it."

And, of course, we all know about the importance of being earnest, especially for a PR pro.

Courtyard Copley's Content

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My wife and I have to be in Cambridge, MA for a dinner in late October. Kayak is my first resort when it comes to online research of domestic or even international travel. (C-G site Trip Advisor is my second.)

While I'm no Peter Greenberg, I happen to find online aggregator Kayak to have the most functional and easy-to-use interface. Searches are easily modified to allow me to pinpoint travel parameters, e.g., ratings, cost, hotel or airline brands, dates...

Anyway, my pre-purchase research on Kayak took me to the Courtyard by Marriott in Back Bay Boston. I then visited the chain's own site and noticed the ability to "follow" the property on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. How clever. Strangely, a visit to the same property off the main Marriott domain doesn't permit such socialization.

So who exactly would want to follow a local hotel, and what kind of content does the hotel post to make it worth following or friending? A visit to the hotel's Facebook page reveals 346 fans, two hand-held video clips (RT's 1:16 and :21), three photo albums (two with one image apiece, and one with 11 images), a Wall with 14 posts all of which derived from the hotel's promotion department, or so it seems.

Heading over to the @BostonMarriott Twitter feed, I see that the site has 1127 followers and is following 1224 people. Lots of cross-over here. As for the nature of the tweets, they again seem to emanate from the promotions and come-ons department. No sign of human life anywhere.

On the hotel's Flickr photostream, we find seven images, all taken on April 24. A search on variations of the property's name did not produce any other images - consumer-generated or otherwise. And finally, on the Boston Courtyard's (very green) YouTube channel, we find four hotel-produced videos posted plus 10 favorites (with no apparent relation to the property). The last visit was notched some six months ago.

The purpose of this non-scientific analysis is not to denigrate the social media acumen or strategy of the Boston Courtyard. In fact, the property should be applauded for even endeavoring to establish beachheads in these popular social media channels. The property might also consider blogging. Here's a link to some reasons why.

I would say, however, that building a presence is merely a beginning, and usually insufficient to drive bookings. In order for social media to accrue to one's business, it requires care, feeding and, most of all, a human touch. Passion helps too.

To this end, the city of Boston offers an extraordinary palate of culture, sports, education, and gastronomy from which to create a rich and colorful canvas of content. If the hotel's social media strategist could personally draw from this cornucopia of content, and inspire his or her hotel guests (and others) to contribute, I bet my future Boston hotel searches would more readily lead me to the Boston Courtyard.

Then of course, it's up to the hotel to deliver on the promise.

Facebook Finds Its PR Mojo

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Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington has tweaked a few noses as proprietor of perhaps the most influential tech blog in a milieu overrun with tech influencers. We all remember the brouhaha he created by publishing the business-sensitive internal emails provided to him by some randoid who hacked into Twitter's email.

And then there was his spirited defense of the value of breaking news with or without the confidence that the news was fully baked. How many rumors about Steve Jobs, Google's acquisition strategy, Apple, Facebook and Twitter can one bare before Peter cries wolf?

Late yesterday, I noticed a seemingly innocuous TechCrunch tweet (and post) in which the author (Jason Kincaid) proclaimed Facebook's new feature that allows users to FAX any photos from the site. Rightly, TC derided the wisdom of such an application. Other picked up on it including B-to-B social marketing expert Paul Dunay who also wondered why anyone would have an interest in such a technological throwback.

@PaulDunay Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This

Sure enough, it was a goof. The Facebook team, with its PR people in tow (or vice-versa?), arranged to have this "new feature" only be visible by TechCrunch, and TechCrunch took the bait hook, line and sinker. They were punk'd....big time!

"Jason then called Facebook PR. Jaime Schopflin took the call and, apparently, couldn’t stop laughing for five minutes. Between laughs while catching her breath she mentioned something about this being a joke, that nobody but us could see it, and that they were placing bets around the office on how long before we noticed it and posted. And something else about teaching us to contact them before posting."

Sometimes it takes a little irreverence to make media waves...and your point. Kudos to FB.

Good Wife, Bad Pitch

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The following note was received (and reported on) by Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood blog:

Dear Deadline Hollywood Daily Editorial Team,

I know I just emailed you recently about CBS's Three Rivers - I don't mean to stalk your inbox - but I didn't want you to miss out on The Good Wife either! ... My goal in writing to you today is to see if you’d be interested in sharing this information with your readers. As a thank you for considering the story I would love to send you a $20 Amazon Gift Certificate...

I look forward to hearing from you!

Best,
Amy

Need we say more.



A hat tip to @ErikDeutsch via @Niche for the timely tweet.

NewsCore

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Did you ever have a client ask you to contact an AP reporter to learn which news outlets picked up a story in which the client company was featured? If you are asked, politely decline and offer instead to use some of the off-the shelf monitoring tools, starting with Google News, that scrape and index online content. (Refrain from calling your client an idiot.)

Of course, with bloggers freely borrowing and remixing original AP reporting in their editorial output, one may never attain a complete accounting. If the AP had its druthers, that free and unfettered use of its content (i.e., its "intellectual property") will soon follow the teletype machine into oblivion.

Richard Edelman writes on his blog that AP rival ThomsonReuters sees otherwise:

"ThomsonReuters has been public in its views on the evolving online news industry, often times in disagreement with other big name publishers on issues like aggregation. On Reuters.com, its primarily ad-supported consumer news site, it encourages bloggers and other news sites to link to our content. 'Simply put, we [ThonsonReuters] believe in the link economy.'"

New York Times's executive editor Bill Keller recently shared his perspective on web journalism in a response to a substantive piece that appeared in the New York Review of Books. From Keller:

"Thankfully my job does not require me to know the future, but I suspect the journalistic landscape five or ten years from now will be a mix of survivors and start-ups, and that the distinction between mainstream and new media will diminish from both directions. I think traditional news organizations—including the Times but also many others—will continue to evolve. We will survive in print as long as the revenues justify it (and, thanks in part to growing circulation revenues, they still do) but we will grow, adapt, and ultimately prosper on all manner of nonprint platforms."

Propelling a story to go viral remains a core deliverable for PR (and marketing) pros charged with building a positive branded presence for clients in the mediasphere. In the early days of satellite-delivered, privately-produced video news feeds, we would attempt to extend a local TV news story's reach by pitching the respective network affiliate news feed service (ABC News One, NBC NewsChannel, CBS NewsPath) on the story's national news value. It was these syndicators' jobs to determine whether a local news package would play outside of Peoria.

And then there were the ad hoc networks of local TV affiliates. Minneapolis-based Conus or Group W come to mind. At its height, Conus had some 80 local TV affiliates -- from all three networks -- sharing news content via twice-daily satellite feeds. Conus, coupled with CNN's own content-sharing feed to disparate network affiliates, increased the likelihood that two competing stations in the same market might air the same reporter's package.

Today, with a cacophonous mix of news mediums, loose affiliations, and linking, lifting and re-tweeting by bloggers and microbloggers, the path to broad, national exposure is circuitous indeed. Top-down, bottom-up and side-to-side story-seeding, in combination, may serve as the only recourse for those of us striving to build a redeeming branded presence for clients.

On the subject of cross-medium, content-sharing scenarios, today I learned of a significant initiative by News Corp to aggregate and share news content across all of its media properties. The Guardian reports:

"The service, called NewsCore, will operate like a global wire service for all the company's newspapers, TV networks and websites. News Corp is describing the venture as a "21st-century multi-media information service that will draw on the worldwide news and sports resources within News Corporation and make them available to other News properties everywhere."

The New York-based service will be headed by John Moody, the former executive vice president of news editorial for Fox News who will "help coordinate editorial assets." Joining Moody in the venture are Mike Gutch, a former vice president finance at News America; Adam Birnbaum, technology and data executive; and Scott Norvell, formerly the Europe bureau chief for the Fox News.

As far as I know, this is the most ambitious, if not the first intra-aggregator and syndicator of news content across a single, multi-channeled media enterprise.

Monopoly Mash-Up

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Scrabulous. You remember that little tempest in a teapot? It seems like forever ago when a couple of young entrepreneurs from India created a Facebook version of the popular word game that ultimately grew into the most downloaded third-party app in Mr. Zuckerberg's burgeoning empire.

In December 2007, this blogger took note of the fabulous Scrabulous with a cautionary note: beware of Hasbro, which held the domestic rights to the game. Sure enough, eight months later, a suits was filed and the game went poof in spite of valiant efforts to save it (as well as Hasbro's reputation in defending its rightful ownership).

Geek.com and Mashable report that Hasbro's other iconic board game will enter the interactive virtual realm in what clearly is the quintessential Google Map mash-up. Monopoly has teamed with Google to create Monopoly City Streets, which "allows users to compete in a live, worldwide version of the popular game, creating the biggest Monopoly tournament ever played."

Hasbro naturally (or was it contractually?) took to Google's Blogger to tease the initiative:

Friday, September 4, 2009
Shhhh... Your chance to WIN MONOPOLY fame coming soon!
This global game will feature an incredible amount of amazing new buildings and building types from MONOPOLY. From humble houses to stupendous skyscrapers and everything in between, never before will you have had the freedom to tailor your property empire exactly the way YOU want it.

Blogger, btw, celebrated its 10th birthday last week with a bash attended by a veritable valleyful of movers and shakers including Blogger's founders, Ev and Biz. They shared their thoughts on the early days of their less geeky, but certainly more "democratic" blogging platform. Today's they're better know for an even more democratic platform for idea exchange. But I digress.

The Hasbro-Google effort likely won't produce any lawsuits or corporate PR angst. It seems Hasbro smartly courted Google. (Could anyone be considered not smart by courting Google?) But Google benefits too. Apparently, the company will get to draw (excuse the pun) some attention to its 3D modeling app SketchUp, which is no stranger to working with other big consumer brands.

Anyway, I wish my old friend Wayne Charness and the Pawtucket gang much luck with City Streets. Sounds very cool.

HARO v. Profnet

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A couple of years after ProfNet's 1992 debut, founder Dan Forbush (below) decided to expand his service's universe of users to the agency side of the PR spectrum. I remember talking to Dan at the time, and soon after, convincing my firm to subscribe to what grew into a veritable "killer ap" for the profession.

ProfNet had previously only allowed PR pros from academia to access the daily batches of reporter queries seeking "experts" to interview. Some 600 colleges and universities ultimately signed up for the pioneering, crowd-sourcing tool that efficiently served the needs of both PR pros and journalists.

Where else could the profession glean details for actual stories in the works without plying his or her media contacts?

For some lazy PR peeps, however, ProfNet became a crutch. It almost obsoleted the "relations" piece of the media relations equation. They relied on ProfNet as their primary reservoir for enterprising story ops for clients. (Bad move.)

Today, the PR world is all a twitter over Peter Shankman's free, ad-supported service he aptly calls "Help a Reporter Out." Much of HARO's success is derived from its cost (free) and Mr. Shankman's promise to boot any abusers of his service, i.e., PR spammers. Reporters liked the sanctity of that and signed on. (Horse-cart) The HARO website reads:

This is really the only thing I ask: By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you'll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn't send the response.

Now here is where I have a question (which I posed to Peter and am awaiting his reply).

HARO now boasts in excess of 100,000 subscribers, which is good for his advertisers, and perhaps for the prospect of journalists discovering relevant sources. Yet, HARO's users increasingly come from outside the PR world and I wonder whether this really is such a good thing.

Today I stumbled across this adulatory post from a Mom entrepreneur calling on her entrepreneurial brethren to jump on the HARO bandwagon:

"You can join and receive the daily emails and you can also join and pitch yourself as a source if you are looking for a story. Oh, and it is FREE."

Does a bigger crowd always translate into better results for journalists? If HARO promises reporters a no-spam zone, how can a service whose doors are open to pretty much anyone protect against such abuse? (Some reporters may argue that it can't get any worse that it already is -- with just PR pros.) Another like-minded free service called Reporter's Source doesn't discriminate either.

Profnet, on the other hand, continues to offer its journalist-users a predominantly PR crowd from which to find experts, mostly because it's a premium (i.e., expensive) service. Doesn't a filtered PR crowd serve journalists' editorial needs better and more efficiently than Moms and Pops? I suppose the answer depends on what the journalist seeks.

Perhaps HARO should be divided into two services: the first for non-experts, e.g, a person who lost his job and started a curious new business, and a second for experts, e.g., the chief economist at the Labor Department who can interpret the trend of people losing their jobs and starting curious new businesses?

I also wonder whether HARO has ever booted anyone from the service, and if so, whether they hailed from the PR or lay side of its user base?

Update (9/3) -- HARO founder Peter Shankman offers his perspective in the comments section of this post. Here's a snippet: "We don't consider Profnet to be our competition! Profnet is for the PR person, the agency that can spread the cost out over 20 clients. The key reason we've grown as fast as we have, is because we're for the every-man. We're a company that helps small businesses (which make up 99.7% of the economy) showcase themselves to reporters, to other companies, and to the world. In addition, we help them build their brand through a host of ways. We do much, much more than Profnet. We're a different company, with a different focus. The comparison really isn't there anymore."

Update2 (9/3) - Profnet Director of News Operations Maria Perez also weighs in via a comment following the post. Here's a snippet: "I saw Mr. Shankman's response that HARO and ProfNet are not really competitors, and I have to say I agree. While both services connect journalists with expert sources, ProfNet is much more than just queries.

For example, ProfNet has a searchable Experts Database with hundreds of thousands of experts available to talk to reporters... As for queries, we are also the only service that provides members with filtering options, allowing members to receive queries only in specific industries. So if someone is only interested in getting health queries, they can. They can also choose how often they want to receive queries -- every 30 minutes, every hour, two hours, six hours, 12 hours or once a day."