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Paul Graham on PR
ralejs writes "Paul Graham takes on PR. From the article:'Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.'
As always, it's an interesting, surprising and slightly provoking read."
Well, I didn't read the whole article, but its amazing how true this guy is. I have tons of friends that work in PR who tell me all the time how the influence the media and people's perceptions of the world. The ironic part is how the "business" world has had the tendency to shut them out of their exclusive, black suit wearing clique. People often underestimate the fact that quite a few PR firms take on a lot of pro-bono work as well. So many start ups could not have well, started up, without their help. its a double edged sword.
I am not (I won't even wear a tie on a daily basis - fucking collars for wage slaves) which is probably why I'm [essentially] unemployed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The implication being that at some point they left. But outside the "geek community and high-tech development" as you put it, suits have always been their. Lawyers and businessmen and most non-uniformed male professionals have been wearing essentially the same clothes for the last 80 years or so. Pretty much only hats disappeared and maybe suspenders. Male business fashion doesn't change much.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Is there anything wrong with PR people doing PR? Is anyone out there suggesting that some benevolent authority should intervene and saves us from PR?
Not to say that everyday I wear them. I usually dress simular to what my customers are dressed as so I am not considred sales guy. But I do look forward to the days when I work with my more formal customers where I need to put on the Suit. I dont know it feels like I am one of those big shot buisness men walking the streets around the capital when I am waring a suit. On days when I don't wear a suit walking around the capital. I just feel like ordanary joe.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If Slashdot's going to post every single article that Paul Graham writes, regardless of its nerd quotient, could we at least have Paul as a topic or author? So we can filter it out like I used to do with that other marginal fellow Jon Katz? Please?! At least shove his long-winded drivel off the front page. Save that real estate for Star Wars and dudes that shoe-horned Linux into weird shit.
One company I was at, they had a guy whose job was just to write newspaper style articles about the company and submit them to various local and national papers. Even if they weren't very interesting stories(some were just reworded press releases), there are always newspapers that have a few colum-inches to fill.
It's cheaper than buying an ad and often more effective.
I think the geek community is a good indicator of how business *should* allow they're employees to dress, short of the old concert t-shirts and torn jeans. Geeks usually tend to not bother with fashion, opting for comfort instead. But in business, especially the marketing peons and others who think appearance is everything, clothes make the man. A suit just makes you a better person. I think it's BS, but unfortunately people like that run the business world. Funny how they think that clothing, rather then actions, make a person. Hell, mobsters and contract killers always dress pretty nicely in movies, but that doesn't make them good people. They still go around killing people...
Wired might spontaneously run a story on tagging, but if Business Week is writing about it, the story must have been fed to them by a PR firm. Since PR firms cost $10-20,000 a month, only fairly rich companies can afford them. And sure enough, a few days later I read that del.icio.us had just gotten money from VCs.
No, that's not true in the slightest. Any size firm or charity can do PR. Wikipedia is in BusinessWeek every now and then, and they're not paying any PR firms anything. They just know how to write up a press release and use a fax machine.
What's particularly insidious is government PR and video news releases. Wikipedia can't replicate that.
In the ever-present attempt to mirror Paul Graham's web site, the submitter forgot to check if this essay even has anything to do with technology, which it does not!
That as may be, there's probably more useful thought in the first 18 (unfiltered) replies to this story than there is in the 100-200 '+2 or above filtered' replies to the typical iPod, "Dell are definitely going for AMD this time!", or just slow news day story.
Anything that gives more insight into how people are influenced and *why* PHBs believe the crap they do must be useful to the average geek, right?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Well, a couple of years ago, geeks didn't have to wear suits because they weren't expected to be fashionable. Geeks were outcasts making a lot of money. Now, geeks are hipsters. Geek is the new chic. I mean, look at half the alternative rock bands that are becoming popular these days...those are some really geeky looking dudes if i've ever seen them.
Paul Graham's right-on about this phenomenon of PR firms feeding stories to various press outlets. But...
Frankly, we're going to have to come up with a good name for this phenomenon (I could go into all the reasons why putting a name to something is a Good Thing, but life is short and I'll take it as a given).
"The Submarine" doesn't cut it.
Thoughts?
Because there's always at least one new mode of thought to add to my arsenal. Here, it's "...ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all."
Maybe its just me, but I actually feel like I'm more productive if I dress up for work. I wind up getting more into getting stuff done than usual. I think I heard it put once something like the lines of dress for football and a game will break out...except far more eloquently. Its a sports analogy so I didn't pay as close attention as I should have. Anyway I've always thought it was kind of shame how casual everything is, dress wear can make people look really good. If it fits and its made of the right material it can be quite comfortable too...the ironing and purchase cost I can live without however.
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." -Voltaire
... At least at the place I work at (large aerospace/defence company in So. Cal.) if someone in a suit is noticed around it is a definite hint that an important customer is coming. Other than that, everyone wears slacks and (polo) shirts, or even more casual. At some point the sector president sent out an e-mail reminding that surfers' outfits (swimming shorts and faded t-shirts) are a bit beyond the line of acceptable business attire. ;-)
But then, again, it is a bit too warm here to wear a suit and tie...
Paul B.
The more I saw the stories the more I subconciously could start picking them out, much like my spam filter. But the more I saw them where I expected them, the more I saw them everywhere. And I didn't expect to see them everywhere. Now I know why I'm seeing these stories turn up where they do.
Hopefully it becomes common for people to see these stories where they appear. Hell, maybe someone will write a firefox extention that will filter out such stories, or mark suspected advertisement stories. Though advertisers would be again forced to be up-front about their products until the next subversive advertising.
I do security
Anyhow, it is a kind of tautological system, wealthy people fund politicians, PR firms, lobbyists, think tanks and whatnot. They also own most of the major media, and even PBS is starting to look like it has commercials between shows.
The majority shareholders of finance companies pay some think tanks to make the case for eliminating bankruptcy protections (unless you're wealthy) or to privatize social security. Then they pay lobbyists, and finance campaigns of candidates they support, the politicians start talking about this. Their employees - editorialists for the newspapers, magazine and TV networks they hand out the party line like the commissars of the USSR used to.
Perhaps a better example for us was the supposed shortage of high-tech labor in the late 1990s. Only one senator voted not to lift the number of H1-Bs coming into the country. I believe the "shortage" was manufactured, but now that there is a glut of foreign IT workers in the country where is the movement to correct it? There isn't much of one - the big money likes a labor glut, and as far as IT workers, there's a variety of tools to wield against them doing anything about it - all that money, various laws to prevent worker organizing, IT workers who think they're brilliant and everyone else is beneath them and only losers worry about things like this.
The scariest thing for me is when I sit at a table and hear someone repeat word-for-word - word-for-word (!) something said on TV to get them to think a certain way. I have been in focus groups and know that they are just saying those exact phrases to make people think a certain way. This entire propaganda system doesn't disturb me as much as when I hear the people around me repeating the propaganda message, word-for-word like it was said on TV, back to me. It's like their brain hasn't done any processing except acceptance of the message that came from the TV, via the PR firm, via the focus group, via the company, via the wealthy majority shareholders of that company. That is what I find scarier than the whole propaganda system.
The concept that PR influences media is about as novel as the concept that media exists primarily as an advertising vehicle. None of this is anything new.
Remember subliminal advertising?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Some of us manage to wear t-shirts (I prefer collared t-shirts) and shorts or jeans, and sandals every day, and earn a lot of money (6 figures base salary). Without contracting - in fact, I wore "better" clothes when contracting - I wore boots.
Actually, when contracting I was willing to wear shirt and tie. If they asked about it, I told them up-front it would cost and additional $20/hour.
In that case, and given a choice, I'd also consider how they'd fit into a team, their apparent people skills, how they present themselves, communication skills, and so on.
For one thing, and again, given the same qualifications, I refuse to hire someone who even can't write a coherent paragraph.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
As a reporter for a technology publication, I find Graham's points to be rather overwrought. He makes it sounds as if every story in the mainstream press was ghostwritten by a PR agency.
No doubt the PR agencies have a hand in launching many stories, but far more of their pitches fail than get picked up. I get anywhere from 50 to 100 pitches a day via E-mail (not to mention phone calls). I write maybe one or two stories a day. Sometimes the story begins with a pitch, sometimes not.
And when a story does arise from a PR pitch, there's no guarantee the agency will be pleased with the results. Reporters generally do talk to a range of sources and not all say things PR reps like.
No doubt there are a lot of rewritten press releases that get published as news. That's true of mainstream press sites and of blogs. Sometimes the press release says it all. And sometimes time or resource or editorial ambition constraints prevent a more substantive analysis.
Graham cites fashion stories as an example of the mainstream press's lack of initiative. Please. Is he expecting a Pulitzer from the fashion and lifestyle pages? Is that much worse than the gear-porn stories so common in the tech industry? (He should have condemned those who covered Enron...that's a case where the spin really did some damage.)
Sure, there's lots of feel-good or sensationalist fluff out there. But that's what people prefer to read. How else to explain the popularity of titles like People?
Every journalist dreams of getting a hold of a great story, but they're rare. Not everyone is approached by an inside source with nation-shaking revelations. And it's hard to find such people by cold-calling. Nor do most publications have the reources to fund a thorough investigation of a particular practice or industry. Be grateful we still see some from time to time.
Graham writes, "Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think."
Well, I think it's a stretch to condemn the entire mainstream press as inauthentic based on a few stories born of PR. I'd also venture to say that much of the writing I find online is suspect. Is someone's review of some book or CD on Amazon somehow more worthy of trust than one penned by a reviewer for the NY Times (who got the book for free from a PR agency)?
Graham talks about people writing what they think. Usually, their thoughts begin with a link to a story in the mainstream press.
The best bloggers are good reporters. If reporters happen to use facts that originated with a PR agency, that shouldn't be a problem as long as efforts are made to consider the reliability of the data.
Back in the days when I was filing 2-3 stories a week on open source software, I made a pretty quick realization that there were only so many stories you could write about people writing and rewriting each others' software. Once that realization set it, I was on the slippery slope to PR addiction as I struggled to a) fill the news hole while b) covering stories with any type of efficiency.
I can't think of too many examples where a PR pitch shaped my story, but Graham's comments about "mystery meat" covered in a coating of "journalese" sent a shiver down my back. Good PR people influence reporting by packaging ideas in the same glib, half-chewed fashion a reporter uses to package it for an editor. It's sort of like a virus slipping its DNA into the host cell's DNA. Since the number of clever ideas a reporter can process in a given week is finite, if you can slip one clever idea into his thoughtstream, it becomes a sit back and wait for the payoff process.
What Graham neglects to mention, however, is access. What makes PR so addicting to the reporter isn't the minimization of workload: It's the guarantee of face-to-face access when you need an interesting person or group to drive your story. Aside from seeking out buzz-quotes, another way to test for existence of a PR company is to look for all the subtle cues of an arranged meeting -- Hollywood journalism clues such as the way the interviewee attacked a salad during a 15 minute lunch or they way their eyes crinkled briefly in a 20 minute walk-and-talk. Good PR people know that every reporter is trying to make a mink coat out of a single pelt, so they make sure to keep the pelts on limited supply.
Anyway, I can say all this because, thanks to the economy, my career has veered away from relying heavily on PR folks. I now can afford to pitch only the story ideas I know are unique and that precludes talking to too many intermediaries. When I do convince PR people to have their clients talk to me, I wind up feeling guilty when the pitches bomb.
As for the future of the PR/news writer relationship, I've said it before and I'll say it again: A person should read the news the same way they buy fruit at the market. Sniff it, inspect it, clean it, and then eat it knowing that you still need a few more courses if you want a balanced meal. Blogs may expand the buffet table, but I find the fare the journalistic equivalent of an all candy diet. Something tells me the PR folks have already figured out how to package that candy.
I'm a lawyer. I work for a major oil company. I don't own a suit that fits properly anymore (my waist is a bit thicker than it was the last time I bought one, 6 years ago), and the only time I put on a tie is when I take my wife to the symphony. The idea that suits are back is PR BS, like the original poster said. If you wear a suit to a business function, people will figure you to be hired help, and ask you to bring them drinks. But I do notice that I see a lot more of them in London than I do in the US. Maybe they've come back there.
If you don't have this attitude (along with some team-oriented ones) I don't want to work with you. If you don't respect yourself and the work product of your staff over the superficials, why should I?
Uhh, actually, I value performance and quality, cohesion and teamwork. We had 300 qualified applicants for our last opening, and this isn't in a huge area. There were at least 25 people who were qualified, capable, fit in well with the team, and who would have done a great job. So fine. I am saying, as I will repeat, when other factors are equal - which in many cases they are virtually equal - I'll take the well-dressed, well groomed, attractively packaged person over the slob everytime. Everytime.
The fact is I am not talking about some mythical cog. For every person hired, including yourself, there is a more qualified, more capable, better candidate willing to work for less. That's a fact. If you are doubting me, contact me privately and we can make a wager. I can find you that person in 6 weeks on a small budget. Subjectively and quantatively, for every person on your team, I can find a better fit, a better worker, a more capable employee, a more honest person, and that person will gladly take the position for 10% less than you are currently paying.
Everyone may contribute a UNIQUE part of the puzzle, but that does not make a person unique.
There is no reset button in life; however, there are bonus levels.