PR Chicago

Stop the presses?

These are hard times in the newspaper business. Besides the flurry of layoffs, we have newspaper bosses sacrificing content for snappy graphics, rearranging the ad-to-editorial ratio and even cutting the size of the paper. That's bad news for PR folks, who have seen business sections shrink to just a couple of pages, and home and travel sections reduced to mostly freelance and syndicated columns.

Now comes the disheartening news that papers are sharing content, as in the recently-announced agreement at the Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Palm Beach Post. Are we doomed to USA Today clones, with little, if any, local coverage and no in-depth stories? Perhaps blogger Jose Leal was right when he wrote a six-part series predicting the demise of newspapers.

Blogs, Drifting

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is a hobgoblin, anyway?

While berating myself for failing to post, I've noticed quite a few blogs, seemingly abandoned and floating aimlessly through cyberspace. Some tout long-shuttered restaurants, or refer breathlessly to events from the 90s.

Now I'm hardly the soul of consistency, but shouldn't bloggers be required to clean up their detritus after, say, a year or two? Pretty soon we'll be encumbered with piles of blogging driftwood as folks lose their initial enthusiasm.

Which brings me to the PR focus of this rant. So many corporate web sites I visit exhibit this same lack of consistency. On some, news releases haven't been posted for years.  What does this tell the media? That nothing's been happening? That you let your in-house PR staff go and don't think you should communicate anything to the outside world?