PR Response Time Must Improve to Keep Up With Blogosphere

Posted on August 6, 2005

David Berlind has a good article-sized blog entry on his Between the Lines blog on ZDNet where he talks about writers (bloggers and blogging journalists) taking more risks as the frequency of their writing increases. As the mainstream media blogs they would prefer to keep their article-to-risk ratio constant. But Berlind says he is finding it difficult to get quick PR responses as he increases his own writing frequency. He suggests that if the PR industry doesn't change then they may find more writers taking more risks and proceeding with stories (or blog posts) without always waiting to hear what the PR department has to say.

Thanks to the blogosphere, on relatively short order, I went from writing twice a week to 10-15 times a week and sometimes more. There are plenty more where I came from that are feeling and responding in-kind to that same pressure. But, as the established media community picks up the pace, there are those of us in it who would prefer to keep constant the number of chances we're taking. But if the PR community doesn't also reinvent itself to keep pace with the media revolution by responding to the fact checkers on blogopshere time, it will leave those writers with no choice but to take more chances. I don't know about you, but if I were a PR professional, I sure wouldn't want to be the guy that blew that one opportunity to contain the story that snow-balled into a disaster for the company I represent.