Adam Sherk | News media. Audience development. SEO and social media marketing

Paywalls, Media Coverage and User Access: What’s a PR Pro to Do?

by Adam Sherk on July 13, 2010

Being the savvy, well-connected PR pro that you are, you just helped bring about a great piece of editorial coverage in a major media outlet. The client is thrilled, you’ve won the praise and envy of your colleagues, all is well…except that online the article is behind a paywall so hardly anyone will ever see it. Doh!

There is a lot of discussion these days about paywalls, metered models, paytags for individual articles and the like. Publishers are desperately trying to come up with new business models and hopefully they’ll figure out a system that works. But from a media relations perspective this reminds me of the “if a tree falls in the forest” saying:

If an article about your company or client is behind a paywall and no one is around to read it, does it make an impact? [click to continue…]

The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases

by Adam Sherk on June 29, 2010

Unique, one-of-a-kind, best-of-breed…blah, blah, blah. We see this type of marketing speak over and over in press releases and promotional materials. And let’s be honest, we’ve all used it at one time or another — shame on us. But which buzzwords are the most overused?

I saw an item in PR Daily recently using the MoMA press release archive to demonstrate how press releases were much better years ago. That got me curious about which terms are currently being most abused. I hadn’t come across any anti-buzzword content lately so I thought I’d do my own research. [click to continue…]

Borrowing Content Was Happening Long Before Blogging

May 12, 2010

I was reading Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s piece on his time at Newsweek in the 1970s and this passage caught my attention: For me, Newsweek was like an upside-down journalism school, where I learned an astonishing number of bad habits, e.g., having someone else check your facts. We poached material constantly, from newspapers, from [...]

25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed

April 13, 2010

Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor, site performance and page load time are important for SEO as well as usability. So how well do major news sites perform in these areas? To get a basic idea I ran Page Speed, the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that Google recommends, on the home [...]

The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?

April 8, 2010

The cease and desist letter and the ensuing war of words between The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman and Newser’s Michael Wolff is getting a lot of industry attention this week. To me the real question is: when one site aggregates another’s content, how much attribution is enough? The value and legitimacy of content aggregation is a [...]

← Previous Entries