Day: April 10, 2003

You may have missed it, but there has been some consternation over the past few days about press releases appearing on GoogleNews ahead of actual news (read: editorial) stories.

I’m not sure why anyone is getting upset.  It’s unlikely that you would use GoogleNews as anything more than a primitive news portal.  Do people also think the newswire feeds posted on sites like Yahoo’s message boards are real news? I don’t think so.  GoogleNews is useful for research and maybe an overview of what’s hot, no more.

Karlin Lillington points out that many legitimate news sources more or less cut and paste releases anyway…

My grandmother always told me that nice was a colorless adjective, but I think it describes the following miscellaneous stories…

Dave Chalk, technology columnist at the Toronto Globe and Mail has a positive article on Public Relations and it’s role in building successful brands.

The Nashville City paper has a story on how HealthSouth Corp. successfully executed a textbook response to overcome a recent scandal.

And to finish a PR story from none other than Poker Magazine  about how the  National Indian Gaming Association is investing in Public Relations to promote their gaming interests.

The release of the afforementioned film “Phone Booth” about the PR trapped in a phone booth by an unknown sniper in Manhattan is generating a lot of PR-related thinking from the media.

The New York Post‘s Jared Paul Stern comes to our aid with an eight step program to help the image of our profession.

As he subtly puts it: “Not all publicists are lying scum,of course, but the bad apples taint the whole industry.”
Indeed.