Day: December 9, 2002

Back in September I mentioned a fantastic feature that appeared in New Yorker magazine about the world of Hollywood PR. Unfortunately the New Yorker doesn’t publish features online but the UK Observer yesterday re-printed the feature and it’s now online. Do youself a favor and have a read!

PR news is getting harder to find online.

Last week, the excellent O’Dwyer’s announced it was following the example of The PR Network (tempremental site) by adopting a subscription (albeit for a small sum) based service. Its decision has removed one of the best (free) places on the Internet to find out what’s going on in the PR business. PR Week does publish one in-depth story online a week (and the PR Week Worldwire is worth subscribing to), but the fast starting Corner Bar PR seems to be unfortunately grinding to a halt.

So where do you go for PR content? The Holmes Report still has some great content, and you could do worse than checking out the links on the left where Phil Gomes, Kevin Dugan and Richard Bailey regularly fill their PR blogs with great news and views. You should also bookmark James Horton’s Online-PR website which includes a huge number of PR-related links.

Finally the PR services firms are a good source of PR editorial. In particular, MediaMap’s Expert PR and Press Access’ the Scoop run regular features and how-to’s.

If you have any additional suggestions let me know.

I don’t know about you, but I conservatively estimate that probably 60-70% of my e-mail is now spam. If you’re working in PR and you post press releases with your e-mail address on a website, you are probably facing a similar toll.

While products such as Cloudmark are helping remove some of the clutter the weight of spam continues to grow and it impacts everyone’s ability to effectively communicate over e-mail.

With that in mind it’s always pleasing to hear that some spammers are getting a little of their own medicine.

Alan Ralsky is acknowledged as one of the world’s most prolific spammers and recently anti-spam advocates have been signing him up to every direct mail service they can. The result? His new plush house is besieged with paper spam. He’s so annoyed he’s threatening legal action against the anti-spammers. Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press reports.

(In Mike’s original story, he writes: “Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records” – hee hee hee nice way around the issue….)