Weighing in on Wired
Somebody took a wrong turn….
Yes, I know the Chris Anderson BS has been dying down, and I’m extremely late in the game on this one. However, I saw his stunt mentioned on a forum today as though it were new news, and decided it was time to make at least a few comments. So here you have it:
1. First, I’m not on the list and have never pitched Anderson, so there’s no personal grudge.
2. I do have a little bit of sympathy for him, as I’ve been on the receiving end as well as the sending end in the news dissemination game.
3. I think Chris Anderson is a royal ass, in dire need of some PR help of his own before his hypocritical actions cause more harm than good for other Wired staff in his name.
Let’s face it… it’s not just that Asserson was pissed off here. It was a PR stunt any way you cut it, or at least ended up that way. If it were a truly legitimate complaint, he’d have taken real action without feeling a need to pull the “Look at me! Look at me!” bullsh*t.
He’d have reported real spam to the FTC and blocked the addresses as it happened. But the fact is that the bulk of these emails wouldn’t legally constitute spam, and Mr. Morality damn well knows that.
The hypocritical hat fits him pretty well though I have to say:
1. For someone whining like a little school girl about spam, he sure as hell has no problem publishing a (possibly illegal - if it’s not, it should be) non-opt-in compiled email list for free distribution, and
2. For someone bitching his little brains out about people being lazy, I’m confused. Exactly how lazy do you have to be to not be able to manage your own inbox?? Umm, either deal with it given the industry you’re in, or dish out the dough to hire some poor idiot to sift through your spam for you. And of course in this day and age you can customize any number of spam blockers to do all the work for you. Well golly gee… it took more time to bitch and make an ass of himself publicly than it would have taken to block a common press release phrase or two in a spam blocker like the rest of us getting thousands of irrelevant messages weekly and even daily have to do. What a lazy piece of….
Now let’s look at something else:
1. You can’t really call something spam if your company site essentially solicits it - check the FAQ page of Wired.com, and you’ll see that they do, and even direct you to their contact page to submit news.
2. If Wired.com’s contact page weren’t so half-assed, Chris would probably get a lot less pitched to him directly. If anything, I have to wonder who that general contact form goes to (if him, that sure would explain a lot…. but of course, I have no idea who the poor schmuck on the receiving end there is).
3. If you tell people to submit using that specific page, that specific page had damn well better have adequate info if you don’t want irrelevant messages sent to irrelevant people (or even worse… to be bombarded with phone calls asking what the hell the correct contact info is). This site’s sorely lacking. The company would be much better off pointing people directly to either the news tips contact form or the letters to contributors forms… or better yet, they could get their act together and learn how to create a single contact form that would address all needs and include the relevant contacts. As of now, PRs are pointed to a contact section where not a single option really reflects their needs. If you make our life a bit easier, yours would be a hell of a lot easier in the process.
I suppose it was the implication that PRs as a rule are lazy that royally pissed me off, especially having to watch one “lazy journalist” after another simply reprinting or barely altering a press release because they’re too damned lazy to write their own stories.
Frankly, I’d love to see this bite him, or Wired, on the ass with either the FTC looking into the list they’re distributing online without opt-in status, or with a libel claim or something out from someone falsely accused of being a spammer with his malicious remarks. I doubt anyone will, but still….
And to think, it wasn’t that long ago that I read some idiot PR blogger telling us we all need to write releases more as “stories” to make things easier for journalists… fat chance.
They have their job. We have ours. We’re far from all unethical in how we distribute news… no more unethical than journalists are in how they choose to cover it. If you can’t handle your job, get the hell out of the business.
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