Rosen's reporting falls short of the mark

Jay Rosen criticised PR bloggers because his research (using Technorati) found that few PR bloggers had addressed the Ketchum-Williams fiasco.

Rosen and Technorati stuffed up. At least four prominent PR bloggers posted on the subject and apparently didn't get picked up in the Technorati seach. Dave Sifry of Technorati is looking into this, see PS at the end of the previous post on this site.

Rosen's criticisms are still valid. And the industry, and PR bloggers, need to address these incidents of grossly unethical behaviour in a more a systematic and effective way.

But, Jay, as they say in news rooms (or used to in the good old days), check it. You shouldn't make bold generalisations and name names just on the basis of a quick and dirty Technorati search.

It turns out the PR blogging community actually did a better job than your original story suggested.

UPDATE: Here's another one Rosen missed in his rush to go to print.

Anyone got any more 'missed' comments.

WHOA: I've just found links to two more 'missed posts' - David Murray and Colin MacKay. That's seven now, by my counting. Eight, including one in Spanish by Octavio Rojas.

It could turn out that I was one of a minority of bloggers who missed the story!!

What the hell happened at Technorati! Or did Jay misuse the search facility?

Comments

[Jay Rosen]

You might, on the principle of intellectual honesty, have noted that there was follow-up post at PressThink that included all the posts we could find.

You might--if you had not decided to go into full spin mode a few days after my post--that the blog sphere works in just this way. The readers are the editors and wrote in to say: you missed this one, and here's another one. All of which was duly reported at PressThink. Your readers don't know that because you have been spinning since then.

Look over the posts of your fellow PR bloggers since I wrote about the Ketchum manner. One thing you might notice is that there is widespread sentiment that the professional associations in PR have failed their members, and quite a lot of discussion of what to do about it.

If there had been a real response to Ketchum--and PR bloggers had engaged one another, as they did after my post--they might have been able to influence the lame response of those organization.

This was PR's Dan Rather. That's how big it is. And you are running around saying, "we blogged it, we blogged it, Rosen missed this one, Rosen missed that one. It's a scandal!" That is truly pathetic, Trevor. It's not engagement, it's just spin.

[Trevor Cook]

Your article disappointed me because my experience with PR bloggers is that they tend to be at the reformist end of the spectrum. Many of them see blogging itself as a way of addressing the less edifying aspects of the business.

But it turned out the premise of your story was wrong. That makes your story wrong. That means you should change your story.

A little fevered blogging about the scandal du jour will not change the way some people operate in the PR profession.

It will take time. Bloggers can help by example, by the way they practice their profession and by practicing it a little more openly. I think you could play a strong role in encouraging that change.

Unfortunately, your story just re-inforced the perceptions of the 'all PR is evil" crowd.

That makes it easy for the head honchos in those associations to say: 'hey, that's just some academic having a swipe at all of us'.

Here, for instance, is a response to your story which appeared this afternoon in the daily newsletter of crikey.com.au (a site that got one million page views in January)

Blogger bites back
On Thursday we ran this whinge (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/) about bloggers and journalistic conscience: An outraged pseudo-blogger retorts that his online compatriots aren't MIA - just busy getting on with their lives:
"Oh booh bloody hoo. The so-called blogosphere didn't make a big deal out of your issue. As if millions of different people writing abut different things have a coherent editorial policy, and deliberately set out to snub you.
Depending on who you are and what you're reading blogs are: juvenile, stale, left wing, right wing, authoritarian, anarchist, feminist, chauvinist, activist and disinterested.
They can be teenage girls writing about their cats and showing off their busts while fishing for compliments, or they can be about the implications of software licences.
Some are dependable, others are flaky. But the same can be said of newspapers.
The one things they've all got in common is they're written by people who are interested in the subject they're covering (which is why so many blogs are all about their authors). That's also why they can often be more informative than an article pushed together by a disinterested hack covering the assignment of the day.
So of all the millions of blogs in the world no-one wrote about your issues? Well write about it yourself. No-one's getting paid out in blogland, it's not a command economy.
What's that? No-one's reading what you wrote? And that's somehow our fault?
Blogs are good at interpretation, good at analysis, but weak at investigation which requires resources.
Until you pay someone to write about the issue you want covered then you can either write it yourself or buy a newspaper you whining sack of garbage."
CRIKEY: Ouch. Why not check out some of the better bloggers going around.

There you go!

[Jay Rosen]

That post is even more pathetic. Your standards are sinking by the day.

There was no disproving of my premise, and if there were, I would write about it. Even with all the additions and corrections, which were duly made at PressThink, the PR blog world did not show up for this crisis, which is critical to its future. Wether it's five, or eight or twelve additional "mentions found" my verdict does not change. And if you would start reading and stop spinning you would realize how mamy of your blogging peers agree with that-- we did not show up. Stop spinning, Trevor. It gets worse with every post.

[genevieve]

And you are not spinning Jay? There are plenty of comments on your blog that show how many posts you missed.