Categories: OLD Media Moves

Wired editor: Press releases rarely result in a story

Jason Tanz, the business editor of Wired magazine, told Hamilton Nolan of PRWeek that he hasn’t banned e-mails from public relations people like Wired editor Chris Anderson, but he still questions the usefulness of sending releases.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

PRWeek: Wired editor Chris Anderson got a lot of attention recently for blacklisting PR peopleâ€”do you have any tips for PR people to stay on your good side?

Tanz: Well I haven’t banned anybody, or posted anybody’s e-mail recently. It’s tough, and I think different editors at Wired have a different approach. But at least for the magazine, and for middle of the book features, which is what I edit, it’s rare that we will get a press release and then write about it. It maybe has never happened. But what we do do is we write about trends, and we write about where the world is going, and some of that we do learn from getting press releases or from talking to PR agencies or their clients.

It helps us to know what is going on, and potentially as these ideas germinate and we take these meetings and we sit with these ideas, we do end up coming back to those people as part of a bigger piece, or a trend piece, or we think about it a month later and remember it and think that can fit into something we’re doing thematically. So I guess I don’t have real hard and fast advice on how to get your clients into Wired.

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Business Consulting says:
November 27, 2007 at 2:48 pm
This seems to be a two fold issue: reporters are blasted with tons of press releases per day because anyone can write one and e-mail it off, fax it in, or have a PR website blast it out. Secondly, the average person doesn't understand how to write a press release properly so the truly good ones get lost in the clutter.