As an ink-stained wretch (i.e. journalist) for more than 21 years, I've certainly seen my profession change.
When I left newspapers in 1996 and joined the Internet explosion at CMP's NetGuide Live in San Francisco, I started to see the changes. Most of them have revolutionized journalism, in a hundred different ways. Some of the changes have been scarily bad. (It'll all be in my next book.)
I was reminiscing on this after reading a column at Datamation.com, Mike Elgan's piece titled, "How the Blogosphere Killed the Press Conference: The Internet -- including the Twitosphere -- has made announcing information to groups of reporters gathered in a room an obsolete process."
His column reminded me of a frustrating experience, related to what Elgan describes. Earlier this year, my site, Intranet Journal, announced our products of the year. During the vetting process for the awards, I went to the web site of one of the hip, young startup companies that was being nominated. I needed to research the company, find when it had launched products, etc. It's a time-honored tradition. It's one of the great things about the Net -- easy access to press releases and other company information.
Now, I've been to enough sites over the past 12 years to crack just about any silly code and find press releases buried anywhere, no matter how hard the company tries to hide them within their bizarre (but oh so hip) web labyrinth. But on this startup, I spent more than an hour clicking every link, using all my tricks, but I could not find any releases.
So I called the company, asked where they were. "Oh, we don't post press releases. We put them in our blog," she said.
I was stunned. And this is what I'm talking about regarding the Elgan column. Companies -- especially startups seeking publicity -- need to make it easy for journos, customers, analysts, venture capitalists, etc. to actually learn something about their wares. The startup should not be burying press releases at the bottom of a long, pretentious, windbag blog.
And as I write that, I'll wrap this up, so as to cut down on the windbag factor of my own blog post. So if you're listening startups, do us all a favor: Read the Elgan column and do not bend to this latest press release trend.
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