Last week I blogged that over the next several years companies will decrease their use of press releases in favor of increasing their reliance on corporate blogs and RSS. I repeated this conviction over the weekend at Gnomedex, even attaching a time frame of five years to this transformation. This sparked an outcry from many other PR bloggers and even from Rich Levin, a journalist who I once worked with and continue to respect immensely. Consider what Rich told Shel Israel...
Steve Rubel recently wrote "Blogs are the New Press Releases." Like Robert, Steve and I go back a few years (we worked together at CMP). Steve, I love ya', and I read your blog and you have a lot of great ideas, but on this point, you're wrong. Blogs are just another delivery medium, not "the" medium, and certainly not the content. Like Robert, Steve has the religion, and he's not seeing things on balance.
PR practitioners need to be masters of multicasting; that is, capable of spinning a story simultaneously as a news release, a query, a blog post, a blog comment, a byline, a phone call, a flyer, a TV or radio interview, a wire feed, a billboard, a text message, an e-mail, a T-shirt, a pen with a slogan, etc.
Rich, I am all about multicasting. I don't think that press releases are going the way of hula hoop. In fact, I said so quite clearly in my post...
"Do I think press releases are dead? No. I think companies will rely on them for years - especially for big news like mergers."
So, I stand my original conviction that - over a period of five years - the volume of press releases on the major wire services will decline because more companies will choose to instead blog or RSS some of their news. In the future you will see PR professionals saying let's "blog it" or "RSS it" rather than let's "press release it." But press releases are not going to die. I said it before and I repeat it again now in case anyone missed it in what I admit was a bit of hyperbole.
