Don’t spam journalists

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I know that writing this post could very easily get me into trouble, but here goes.

Chris Anderson at Wired has published a long list of PR people’s email addresses that he has blacklisted for spamming him.

Lots of comment on the PR blogosphere about this, but I particularly liked Peter Shankman’s take on it:

JESUS, PEOPLE?! WHEN ARE WE GOING TO FREAKING GET IT? DO YOUR HOMEWORK FIRST! DON’T PITCH BLIND! THIS ISN’T F’ING ROCKET SCIENCE, FOR CHRISSAKES!

Damn, this crap pisses me off - But I’m NOT pissed off at Chris! I’m pissed off at EVERYONE ON THIS LIST. MediaMap is NOT THE SALIENT BEING THAT’S GOING TO SAVE YOU. Take five minutes. Read what your reporters are writing. How many of you even have subscriptions to the magazines you’re pitching?! WTF, people? I mean, seriously.

Do. Your. Freaking. Homework.Before. You. Pitch.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. In fact I did say something similar in my post about Stupid, lazy PR people, bloggers and media databases.

Of course the problem with saying this is if I or someone in the Wolfstar pack p****s off a journalist by sending a ’spam’ news release. All I can say in our defence is that we try very hard to do our home work and check out each individual and publication before we send anything. But we’re human and will occasionally get it wrong for which we are sorry.