PR Man Says Blacklisting Over Negative Press is Silly. I (Predictably) Agree

Here, go have a read of this. It’s an interesting article by Tom Ohle who goes and does himself some PR by day and fights crime at night. In the post (that you should go read please) he points out how any PR person who blacklists a website or journalist over something bad they said is a bad move.

While it’s not something I have ever had to worry about (I tend to just assume PR people won’t deal with a site called “Negative Gamer” unless I’ve had contact with the PR person before) it is a very interesting point he makes. The relationship between journalists and PR people is a complicated one, especially in the gaming world. Not least because the PR people hold some site’s “journalists” by a choke chain.*

Tom points to an interesting direction in which the journalists get fed up with being treated like PR’s tools (pick a meaning) and rise up in some form of backlash. Something I personally doubt, in a way. I don’t think the current generation of influential-people-writing-about-games will stop suckling the teat of Public Relations in exchange for a much harder job, however I am secretly optimistic that the next generation might. Fuelled with annoyance (or petty jealousy) and a genuine thirst for fundamental improvement, I think the next generation of writers may just do something about it.

Or they may just do the boring, shitty, same-old-story kind of thing. Anyway, go have a nice weekend read of Tom’s post.

*The romantic ideal storm of the journalist being lead around by the PR man is gross hyperbole by the way. Whilst we all see mild corruption and un-written, re-worded bribes being handed around, the real “corruption” related drama many of us crave like a teenage girl craves Twilight** really just isn’t there. The vast majority of PR is either harmless or genuinely amusing and good.

** It’s not that terrible, surprisingly. It’s still terrible, just not as bad as I expected.