Bloggers and Flacks

Chris Anderson started this whole bloody mess by creating his very own version of The 300 (and even taking it further by making it 329).

Sure- Lots of us in PR laughed when this was posted, but I can assure you that it was only after we used Control-F a few times to make sure our name wasn't included.... and then our firm wasn't included.

Today seems like a really great day to roll out a fun new idea, based on what's happening in the Blogosphere.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, from RWW laid out tips for working with ReadWriteWeb, which was met with some ire in the comments, and some good responses. Ironically, one commenter points to another blogger (Stowe Boyd), who is complete going the other direction from Marshall.

Adam O, from Mashable, posted his thoughts on the subject as well.

So... in the spirit of Channeling my inner-Peter Shankman (if you haven't seen Help a Reporter Out... it's completely worth it for Flacks)- I've created a website.

It's called Pitch-A-Blogger.

Why do this? Well.... it's simple. There are lots of tools out there for PR pro's that focus on giving us background on reporters (that said... it's still good practice to actually READ what reporters are writing). However, none of the tools out there have good information about bloggers.... perhaps because there's so many of them.... or perhaps because the service are lazy.

Who knows?

Why bloggers should feel safe: Well... for starters, I am a Flack.... and it seems to me that I am putting my Flack reputation on the line by trying to make this worthwhile. Second off.... not everyone in my profession sucks.... so I'm hoping to create a tool that makes this more obvious.


So, let's see how this goes. Updates will periodically be provided here at AFTB.