April 2005"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the NewYork Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe becausethe suit was also back in February,September2004, June2004, March2004, September2003, November2002, April 2002,and February2002.Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? BecausePR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discoveredduring my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry,lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of thestories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics,crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spentits entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assemblingour own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent ofsearch engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readersignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. [1]Our PR firmwas one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got presshits in over 60 different publications. And we weren't the only ones they did great things for. In 1997 I got a call from anotherstartup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. Itold him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd.Why call an auction site "eBay"?SymbiosisPR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PRfirms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest.They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firmwon't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they'veworked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and theydon't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely,overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up storiesfor themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices andlet PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know goodPR firms won't lie to them.A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths(what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the samestrategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truthfavors their clients.For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true.But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about thisparticular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchantswere our target market, and we were paying the piper.Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms.At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most oftheir money from advertising and would give the magazines away forfree if advertisers would let them. [2] The averagetrade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enougharticles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for"content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim,if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.At the other extreme are publications like the New York Timesand the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out andfind their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times. [3]The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity.You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as ifyou were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make itseem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves.Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based onsome fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on theWeb. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quoteit to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20%of the online store market.This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of theonline store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. Butthe way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.Reporters like definitive statements. For example, many of thestories about Jeremy Jaynes's conviction say that he was one of the10 worst spammers. This "fact" originated in Spamhaus's ROKSO list,which I think even Spamhaus would admit is a rough guess at the topspammers. The first stories about Jaynes cited this source, butnow it's simply repeated as if it were part of the indictment. [4]All you can say with certainty about Jaynes is that he was a fairlybig spammer. But reporters don't want to print vague stuff like"fairly big." They want statements with punch, like "top ten." AndPR firms give them what they want.Wearing suits, we're told, will make us 3.6percent more productive.BuzzWhere the work of PR firms really does get deliberately misleading is inthe generation of "buzz." They usually feed the same story to several different publications at once. And when readers see similarstories in multiple places, they think there is some important trendafoot. Which is exactly what they're supposed to think.When Windows 95 was launched, people waited outside storesat midnight to buy the first copies. None of them would have beenthere without PR firms, who generated such a buzz inthe news media that it became self-reinforcing, like a nuclear chainreaction.I doubt PR firms realize it yet, but the Web makes it possible to track them at work. If you search for the obvious phrases, youturn up several efforts over the years to place stories about the return of the suit. For example, the Reuters article that got picked up by USAToday in September 2004. "The suit is back," it begins.Trend articles like this are almost always the work ofPR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward tofigure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usuallyline up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director ofGQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. [5] Whenyou get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.Not surprising, considering The Men's Wearhouse was at that moment running ads saying "The Suit is Back." Talk about a successfulpress hit-- a wire service article whose first sentence is your ownad copy.The secret to finding other press hits from a given pitchis to realize that they all started from the same document back atthe PR firm. Search for a few key phrases and the names of theclients and the experts, and you'll turn up other variants of this story.Casualfridays are out and dress codes are in writes Diane E. Lewisin The Boston Globe. In a remarkable coincidence, Ms. Lewis'sindustry contacts also include the creative director of GQ.Ripped jeans and T-shirts are out, writes Mary Kathleen Flynn inUS News & World Report. And she too knows the creative director of GQ.Men's suitsare back writes Nicole Ford in Sexbuzz.Com ("the ultimate men'sentertainment magazine").Dressingdown loses appeal as men suit up at the office writes TenishaMercer of The Detroit News.Now that so many news articles are online, I suspect you could finda similar pattern for most trend stories placed by PR firms. Ipropose we call this new sport "PR diving," and I'm sure there arefar more striking examples out there than this clump of five stories.OnlineAfter spending years chasing them, it's now second natureto me to recognize press hits for what they are. But before wehired a PR firm I had no idea where articles in the mainstream mediacame from. I could tell a lot of them were crap, but I didn'trealize why.Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, whereyou had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whetherthe author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to bea critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one stepfurther, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth,but why he's writing about this subject at all.Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people whopublish online write what they write for the simple reason thatthey want to. Youcan't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, asyou can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons,though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trustbloggers more than Business Week.I was talking recently to a friend who works for abig newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble,and that they were still mostly in denial about it. "They thinkthe decline is cyclic," he said. "Actually it's structural."In other words, the readers are leaving, and they're not comingback.Why? I think the main reason is that the writing online is more honest.Imagine how incongruous the New York Times article aboutsuits would sound if you read it in a blog: The urge to look corporate-- sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve-- is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace. The problemwith this article is not just that it originated in a PR firm.The whole tone is bogus. This is the tone of someone writing downto their audience.Whatever its flaws, the writing you find onlineis authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked upout of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippyjournalese. It's people writing what they think.I didn't realize, till there was an alternative, just how artificialmost of the writing in the mainstream media was. I'm not sayingI used to believe what I read in Time and Newsweek. Since highschool, at least, I've thought of magazines like that more asguides to what ordinary people were beingtold to think than as sources of information. But I didn't realize till the last few years that writing for publication didn't have to mean writingthat way. I didn't realize you could write as candidly andinformally as you would if you were writing to a friend.Readers aren't the only ones who've noticed thechange. The PR industry has too.A hilarious articleon the site of the PR Society of America gets to the heart of the matter: Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and companies, which is the reason they began blogging in the first place. PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readerslike them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. Asthis new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, weshould be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed storiesto bloggers, if they can figure out how.Notes[1] PR has at least one beneficial feature: it favors small companies. If PR didn't work, the only alternative would be to advertise, and only bigcompanies can afford that.[2] Advertisers pay less for ads in free publications, because they assume readers ignore something they get for free. This is why so many tradepublications nominally have a cover price and yet give away freesubscriptions with such abandon.[3] Different sectionsof the Times vary so much in their standards that they'repractically different papers. Whoever fed the style section reporterthis story about suits coming back would have been sent packing bythe regular news reporters.[4] The most strikingexample I know of this type is the "fact" that the Internet worm of 1988 infected 6000 computers. I was there when it was cooked up,and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm mighthave infected ten percent of them.Actually no one knows how many computers the worm infected, becausethe remedy was to reboot them, and this destroyed all traces. Butpeople like numbers. And so this one is now replicatedall over the Internet, like a little worm of its own.[5] Not all werenecessarily supplied by the PR firm. Reporters sometimes call a fewadditional sources on their own, like someone adding a few fresh vegetables to a can of soup.Thanks to Ingrid Basset, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and Aaron Swartz (whoalso found the PRSA article) for reading drafts of this.Correction: Earlier versions used a recentBusiness Week article mentioning del.icio.us as an exampleof a press hit, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was spontaneous.
