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. With PR Corner: Why do some publicists offer me “bylined articles”?
Posted Under: Annals of publicity
Today’s voluminous digital PR mailbag includes a note from someone who has written to me many times — always addressing me by name — to offer me an article. Not an idea, a complete article. “Would you be interested in the 1,000 word bylined article below? …. Kindly let me know if you plan to publish the article…”
“Article” isn’t actually the most accurate word — the piece is sort of an opinion thing about business coaching, written by the head of a business-coaching company, or something. Sort of one of these “Six Rules of Whatever” writeups. I didn’t actually read it.
How am I on this PR person’s blast list? She seems to know my name — but at the same clearly has absolutely no idea who she is writing to.
I get these things all the time. Do they work? Are there publications that accept and publish “articles” like this? What value do they have? Seems like a waste of money to pay someone to send stuff like this around. And since I always tag such solicitations as junk, it kind of eliminates the publicist my from radar permanently.
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Reader Comments
I work in PR. And I’m totally baffled by the practice. But then again, I work in higher ed pr where, generally, newspapers value the type of op-eds that we can provide.
I don’t know, it sounds kind of mildly interesting, I see a lot of “special contributor” articles in my (large market) local newspaper and wonder exactly what that means. I could easily see a smaller market newspaper picking it up verbatim as a “human interest” feature given the number of reporters that have been let go. I see things in our local community magazines that are obviously picked up from somewhere, not locally reported, that are highly commercial. In the free subscription marketing publications I receive, it seems like 1/2 the articles are nothing but selling pieces for some particular company. I don’t think they are solicited by the pubs–but the authors may have a less “eblast” approach to pitching them than what you’re receiving.
I’ve been getting stuff like that for about a year now. The latest batch were coming from a company called Associated News. I tried to opt out, tried to opt out, tried to opt out until finally I started forwarding the emails to some other contacts I found on their website. They said that they bought my name from a company called DataDepot.biz that specifically had me flagged as someone who WANTS to get content like that.
Might want to check it out. Or maybe this is all just good research!
chip: Even so, I can’t what good it does to send to someone who a) is at the Times, which is obviously never going t o run anything like that, and b) is a writer (that is, not an editor).
cybele: Yeah, there are a bunch of these businesses that obtain and sell “databases” of publications and journalists are whatever, and as far as I can tell it’s a completely value-free business. Their databases are basically compilations of misinformation and stuff that as far as I can tell, they simply make up. Not helpful to the people in the database, or the people they sell the database to.