The Changing Face Of Tech PR
Posted: Thursday 17 February, 2011
Keredy Andrews
Yesterday felt like an extremely long day in London, visiting a client and attending an event – not long in the boring way, long in the exciting intense concentration way! I also find that London and the one hour train journey totally saps my energy and hitting Victoria station at 4.50pm is not something I wish to repeat in a hurry. As I tweeted, once finally getting to sit on my train, ‘Victoria to Euston - like being in a rugby scrum in a football pitch invasion in the middle of a festival’; how people do it each day I do not know.
The event at the Press Association was courtesy of PR Newswire and consisted of a tour of the floors, a presentation by Shane Richmond, Head of Technology (Editorial) at The Telegraph and another by a Teilo Colley, Newswire Editor at the PA. It was all really interesting (and a genuine thank you to all involved) but in particular there was one snippet I thought I would share. Shane felt that with the exception of celebrity news (if that can be classed as ‘news’), technology was the one area where blogging had dramatically changed the media landscape.
The fact that blogs are a place of influence and extremely worthy PR targets is something that Punch has understood for a long time but it was motivating to hear it substantiated by a mainstream editor. Shane’s team spend time in the morning reading through the significant sites, such as Mashable and The Register, not only because they operate from the US and therefore in a later time zone but also because they have more editorial freedom. As a reputable newspaper, The Telegraph is extremely careful to uphold a certain standard of sourcing for their stories; whereas blog sites typically don’t conform to the same journalistic standards and are happy to publish leaked information and stories from anonymous informers. By reading blogs, or the ‘word on the tech street’, it offers journalists foresight into what may be coming up from official releases as well as interesting specialist angles with which they can modify to suit their more mainstream audience... after much more in depth research, of course! So as much as we suppose that journalists are the first to deliver the news, in spheres where blogging has spectacularly evolved, reporters read the big blog sites to keep informed.
