Stop spam pitching It turns out that Wired editor Chris Anderson isn’t alone in blacklisting PR executives for spam pitches. Rainier PR set up an online survey on Friday and Monday asking hacks whether they’d ever been driven to blacklist a PR agency or PR executive.

More than two in five UK journalists (43 per cent) have blacklisted a PR person over pitches they felt were irrelevant. 180 journalists responded to the online survey over a period of 48 hours.

It also found that 37 per cent of journalists felt that less than one in 10 press releases or pitches were relevant to their publication with one respondent commenting: “90 per cent of the PR I receive is poor, I just don’t bother with anything that doesn’t have a subject line that interests me.”

Piss poor PR techniques have always had the capacity to wind up journalists to the extent that they refuse to deal with PR executives. The difference now is that irreparable harm is being done to press relationships because email - and overreliance on it for pitching - means it's simple to blacklist a bad PR person.

Agencies and their clients need to be aware that journalists are reaching break point, and so the PRs representing them need to be able to cut the mustard.

Blogging and citizen journalism have only augmented the issue, with journalists having more story sources than ever. Unless PRs can deliver the content in the right way and are honest about its likely newsworthiness, Anderson’s move spells goodnight to anyone prone to flaky pitching.

Labels: media, social media

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