{"id":434,"date":"2007-02-26T15:25:08","date_gmt":"2007-02-26T15:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/02\/26\/prangle-quare-name-but-great-stuff\/"},"modified":"2007-05-27T01:24:17","modified_gmt":"2007-05-27T01:24:17","slug":"prangle-quare-name-but-great-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2007\/02\/26\/prangle-quare-name-but-great-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Prangle: Quare Name But Great Stuff?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prangle.ie<\/a> (this<\/a> urban dictionary definition notwithstanding) is a press release service recently launched by a former Sunday Times journalist<\/a>, Douglas Dalby. It promises to make sense of the hundreds of press releases that daily issue forth from agencies, and target them specifically to the needs of the each journo\u2019s particular beat. This is good for the agencies and their clients, good for journalists and good for Prangle. It is highly questionable whether it\u2019s good for newspapers or their readers (see more or less every Paper Round<\/a> post for more on the journo\/PR relationship).<\/p>\n

That a journalist\u2019s job is to write up what the PR companies tell him to do is taken as a given in Prangle\u2019s material. Outlining the advantages<\/a> of their services to PR agencies, they tell us
\n \u201cJournalists can be hard to get to. But they love Prangle, because they are lazy<\/strike> it’s a trusted, central, one-stop resource???<\/em>.
\nApart from the amusing but probably all-too-accurate assumption that journalists will be delighted by having to make only one stop in order to research a story, it\u2019s interesting to note that no possibility is acknowledged that a journalist might not want to print what the agency feeds him. No, there\u2019s no need to worry about him having critical faculties of his own \u2013 merely “getting to him” will suffice. Again, this assumption is probably depressingly on-the-money. Still, this is sales material and must be read as such. If you\u2019re selling a service to agencies, you will obviously do your best to reassure them that it is the key to unlimited news coverage for their clients. But what are they saying to journalists? <\/p>\n

The key selling point<\/a> is that journalists will receive more targeted, less plentiful press releases, but the assumption remains that PR material is essential to the journalist\u2019s job. In this vision of the press, journalists provide a service to PR firms (free publicity) and vice versa (effort-free stories). As I suggested above, everyone\u2019s a winner except the reader. Why not let Prangle write the whole paper? Better, let\u2019s just abolish the papers and subscribe to Prangle ourselves. As a very occasionally published writer, I thought I might just squeak into Prangle\u2019s definition of freelance journalist and thus be considered eligible for a subscription. At present my application is awaiting moderation. If all goes well, I may never buy a paper again. After all, why would I need to? We all know that any really important news comes from a PR agency, not from journalism.<\/p>\n

I have no real problem with PR people or with Prangle. My problem is with the environment that makes Prangle\u2019s product such an indispensible one. The villains here are not the PR people, who are just doing their job, but the papers, which are not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prangle.ie (this urban dictionary definition notwithstanding) is a press release service recently launched by a former Sunday Times journalist, Douglas Dalby. It promises to make sense of the hundreds of press releases that daily issue forth from agencies, and target them specifically to the needs of the each journo\u2019s particular beat. This is good for the agencies and their clients, good for journalists and good for Prangle. It is highly questionable whether it\u2019s good for newspapers or their readers (see more or less every Paper Round post for more on the journo\/PR relationship). That a journalist\u2019s job is to write up what the PR companies tell him to do is taken as a given in Prangle\u2019s material. Outlining the advantages of their services to PR agencies, they tell us \u201cJournalists can be hard to get to. But they love Prangle, because they are lazy it’s a trusted, central, one-stop resource???. Apart from the amusing but probably all-too-accurate assumption that journalists will be delighted by having to make only one stop in order to research a story, it\u2019s interesting to note that no possibility is acknowledged that a journalist might not want to print what the agency feeds him. No, there\u2019s no need to worry about him having critical faculties of his own \u2013 merely “getting to him” will suffice. Again, this assumption is probably depressingly on-the-money. Still, this is sales material and must be read as such. If you\u2019re selling a service to agencies, you will obviously do your best to reassure them that it is the key to unlimited news coverage for their clients. But what are they saying to journalists? The key selling point is that journalists will receive more targeted, less plentiful press releases, but the assumption remains that PR material is essential to the journalist\u2019s job. In this vision of the press, journalists provide a service to PR firms (free publicity) and vice versa (effort-free stories). As I suggested above, everyone\u2019s a winner except the reader. Why not let Prangle write the whole paper? Better, let\u2019s just abolish the papers and subscribe to Prangle ourselves. As a very occasionally published writer, I thought I might just squeak into Prangle\u2019s definition of freelance journalist and thus be considered eligible for a subscription. At present my application is awaiting moderation. If all goes well, I may never buy a paper again. After all, why would I need to? […]","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[662],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}