Chris Anderson,
editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, has fired off an
angry message to PR pros.
Appearing Oct. 29 on
his blog, www.longtail.com, Anderson's rant, entitled
"Sorry PR People: You're Blocked," railed against
the "300 emails" he gets daily from PR pros sending
blind email pitches.
Chris Anderson
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"My problem isn't spam
it's PR people,"
Anderson wrote. "Lazy flacks send press releases to
the Editor-in- Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered
to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be
interested in what they're pitching."
Anderson then proceeded to list the individual e-mail addresses
of each of the more than 200 PR pros and spammers who have
"sent me something inappropriate at some point in the
past 30 days." A quick glance over list reveals email
addresses from Edelman, 5W PR, Fleishman-Hillard, Ogilvy,
Lippe Taylor, Morris+King, SS PR, Weber Shandwick, and dozens
more.
The idea, Anderson said, is to give PR pros a taste of
their own medicine. "If their address gets harvested
by spammers by being published here, so be it turnabout
is fair play," he wrote.
The blog has since been flooded with hundreds of responses,
many from angry industry pros who pointed out that many
of the "blind pitches" Anderson has received are
not directly from account executives, but rather the result
of email lists purchased from services firms.
Anderson rebutted that PR pros should not rely on such
lists and should instead tailor their pitches individually
to editorial staff. He referred to the tactics of such emails
lists as being akin to magazine circulation departments'
proclivity to place five or six subscription cards in every
magazine, a practice he also abhors.
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