Pitching in Public?

Here's another new development for PR people to ponder: pitching stories to journalists on their public web sites.

This innovation is being spearheaded, as best I can tell, by Robert Scoble, the iconic blogger who many consider to be a leading voice of the social media revolution.

In this post on the PR Squared blog, Todd Defren explains that Scoble, on one of his podcasts, suggests that the best way to pitch him (to write about you/your client on his blog, I suppose, or to interview you/your client on his podcast) is to post your pitch on his Facebook "wall," which is sort of an open forum on a Facebook user's main page.

This notion -- that the private pitch to a journalist or group of journalists should be abandoned and replaced by a public pitch where everyone else can see it -- has sent a quick shudder through the PR portion of the blogosphere.

In the words of Todd Defren at SHIFT Communications and the author of the PR Squared blog,

All of our pitches *ought* to stand up to scrutiny at any time, but the fact of the matter is that there are too many firms who assign this critical task to barely-trained greenhorns for whom a "mass blast email" filled with lame and irrelevant content is still considered "a-okay." This practice is exactly what will come to an end as more transparency comes to bear. "

I'm hardly a proponent of the poorly written, mass email blast. What I'm about is showing people how to develop media-friendly information to pitch to journalists. But another element of making a pitch "media-friendly" is to give it some level of exclusivity. Journalists want some degree of exclusivity because they want to resell your information as their own, after they add their perspective on it, and they don't want the playing field completely leveled.

So if we want to continue to add value for journalists, we'll need to find ways to give them information or access that not everyone has. And that will be the case for as long as there are professional journalists, whether they are in print, on TV or radio, or only on the Internet.

In other comments on this idea, people are saying that it's just another spin on relationship-building. If so, then I'm fine with that, in fact, I think that's a great idea. Given how hard it is get quality face-time with journalists, anything that works is fine with me.

PS -- I posted a request on Scoble's Facebook wall for an interview with him on this subject. Haven't heard back yet.