In February a group of leading PR professionals launched a campaign asking for a new charter to protect journalists and bloggers from irrelevant PR campaigns and releases.
‘An Inconvenient PR Truth’ aims to reduce “the pollution of journalist, blogger and publisher inboxes” by cutting PR spam with a list of recommendations for the industry.
The initial suggestions by the group included a ‘Bill of Rights’ on the campaign’s website, includes obtaining permission from recipients before sending press releases and not making a follow-up call to a journalist after sending a release.
The group has now created a second survey building on the initial launch document and wants responses from journalists, writers, communication professionals and bloggers to ascertain more information about:
- Who is most affected by the issue of unwanted PR and press releases?
- What are the main sources of the problem?
- What is the impact on media recipients, in terms of time wasted?
The short survey can be filled in at this link – for more details contact Adam Parker.
[T]he survey is only going to be of any value if we get lots of responses. To date any exercise (that we are aware of) that has tried to quantify and analyse this problem has been limited by the small number of respondents anyone has been able to achieve on their own. We hope that with the help of the PR and Media communities we can get a huge response so that the data can provide an accurate insight into the issue once and for all.