In long-ago 2000, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wrote about a tongue-in-cheek bet with a colleague at the newspaper, whereby they gauged the “desperation” of PR supplicants by trading coverage for humiliating personal stories. The article was—while condescending as hell—indicative of what can happen when random, quantity contact prevails over precise, topically oriented pitching.

Weingarten’s impetus to see these hapless PR people “debase” themselves also highlighted the growing peevishness of journalists. He delivered the piece as wry, rather than angry, but you don’t have to be a lit critic to see the underlying message in his feigned sympathy for “the poor, desperate PR people.” The only people who will actually get his story are people involved with journalism and PR. Everyone else will just laugh at the embarrassing anecdotes without looking for the real punch line.
And yet there was something missing—and it’s something people forget when dealing with journalists.

How far would Weingarten go for a scoop, I then wondered?

Weingarten’s article brought out a personal rant of writers and editors pushed to the edge by follow-up calls, spam mailings, and offers of interview setups, product reviews, and company information. These somehow showed up as newsworthy material in any number of places.

If you promote a company or product, you are a flack. Flacks [or flaks]—the slang for PR practitioner—and “hacks”—the writers—of the business and technology media, have, since 1998, been fighting a particularly fevered war over the contested territory of public exposure. Whether you work for a new entrant on the software scene or a tire company in need of some positive spin, the opportunities for public promotion are as vital to your product as an open spot on a California stream in 1849. (I think I’ll avoid the opportunity for another needless metaphor. I’ll keep it G-rated.)

One topic of dispute is the proliferation of press releases and story pitches stuffed with gimmicky buzzwords. And the dot-com implosion did little, if anything, to cure buzzword malaise. The beef presented by the journalists is unquestionably legit in this case. Who wants to read a hyphen-littered, uninformative piece of spin loaded with invented syntax, hyperbole, and marketing concept jargon? The journalists claim that phrases and words like thinking outside of the box, ease-of-use, shifting the paradigm, leveraging, and category killer (to name a very few), are merely verbal filler, meant to disguise the haste with which the pitch or release was put together, and the lack of actual technical or financial knowledge on the part of the assembler.

The transparent purpose of this sugary shorthand—the “flacks” and “hacks” representing the e-hordes seem to be the unofficial majority—is to imply success or knowledge in the field in question without spending time on all those bothersome specifics. If you can fit a pun into the sound bite or evoke a previous business genre, such as clicks-and-mortar or e-tail, well then it’s even better. Like the kid who wears black socks in gym class, your release will be an automatic target for ridicule.

For the journalistic take on this trend, I have for years recommended The Buzz Saw, a site that singles out these vapid attempts at gaining press for a little PR of their own. Although in this case, PR means public ribbing. The “about” page of the site claims, “The Buzz Saw’s mission is primarily educational.” You have to wonder whether the site’s writers or visitors laugh harder at that premise. Maybe “mission” should be on their list of banned words, since that one gets used more in corporate propaganda and advertising lately than in a whole season of The A Team. Either way, the site’s main goal is a sardonic bitch-fest on the theme of blundering PR contact. Mission accomplished.

We, like many people in the business, target outlets and contacts on behalf of clients with precision in mind. A large extent of the friction between PR pros and writers like Weingarten comes from indiscriminate, mass pitching. Throw buzzwords in, and the problem doubles.

Point of all this: PR people need to talk like real people, and we have to talk fast because journalists are usually busy. A lot of the buzzwords make their way into PR directly from clients. At places where junior staffers do the pitching, they have no previous vocabulary to deal with some of these topics. They get it secondhand from the clients, and the result is like trying to learn English by watching The Donna Reed Show.

Regardless of where the buzzwords originate, PR firms have long realized that they are not serving their clients’ needs by using phrases like “best-of-breed,” which is just the ‘00s take on “state of the art.” In some of the technical magazines, a certain amount of jargon is necessary, and the writers have the knowledge to back it up. But when you catch words like “mindshare,” “killer app,” and “architected”—why not use real words like “engineered” or “designed”—floating around, it’s not hard to wonder where journalism ends and free advertising begins.

There are some simple extenuating circumstances behind the growth of the PR industry’s role in the current media. The increase of personal participation in the stock market through 401Ks and online brokers, and an increasingly commodified news media foster an environment in which public relations thrives.

PR has become so much more important. In the past, the Marketing Director or someone like that would approach the PR firm. Now, CEOs and a lot of the other management work directly with us. The days of the ‘cyber Gold Rush’ became so heady that generating buzz (not buzzwords) has come down to finely honing the message. And this takes a lot of involvement on the side of those people doing PR.

Oh and how far would our friend Weingarten go for a scoop? Not very. When asked he shrugged and said to no one in particular: “I get all my best stories from PR folk.”

Amen.

Richard Laermer is RLM’s CEO, founder and chief creative guy. He and VP Michael Prichinello co-wrote the book Full Frontal PR.