Day: May 23, 2003

Business 2.0 has published a piece on how traditional media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal are adopting some of the practices pioneered by many of the failed dot-com online publishers.

While many of those pioneers are now gone the way of pets.com’s sock puppet, some have survived and begun to thrive, most notably Salon and Slate.

There are however some casualties of the downturn that I personally miss.  In particular; Red Herring and the Industry Standard. I am also sad enough to admit I still regularly trawl through the Industry Standard’s online archives reminiscing of a time when we were all upbeat and positive! Now that’s a long time ago.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in my professional life is recognizing your limits.  We often percieve lack of knowledge for weakness when in fact the ability to recognize when you need external assistance is a strength – and a profitable strength at that.

In that spirit I can honestly say that many walks of the PR profession are a mystery to me.  And none more so that Hollywood.  Celebrity PR’s roles are fundamentally different to anything I have done over the past decade and I can honestly say it holds no interest for me.

Many of you will have read my barrage against an ill-conceived anti-PR article written in the Toronto Star, but today I came across a story by Catherine Seipp for United Press International on her dealings with celebrity PR people.

It’s interesting but as the Smiths once sang “it says nothing to me about my life”!

Some other celebrity PR reading:

• Graham Norton and The Sunday Tribune
• New Yorker feature on Hollywood PR (re-published in the Observer)

PS.. Catherine also has an interesting article on blogging in the American Journalism Review from last June.

If you are a freelance consultant do you use a personal e-mail such as jondoe99@aol.com? 

Well you can now get a more PR-centric address free of change.  Log on to PRMailBox and you can get an address like tmurphy@prmailbox.com.

The e-mail service is provided by the UK website http://www.prfinder.com

Correction: Tracey Hopkin was in touch to kindly let me know that the service is actually provided by the PR Press Network.  You can find them at: http://www.prpn.com