You’ll have to pardon me if I go off on a few tangents here. This whole thing was sparked by some lovely chats I had with some other PR folk last night.
Here I sit, perched high above the streets of San Francisco in a swank Japanese theme hotel that I couldn’t possibly afford were it [...]

Okay, so yesterday a pillar of the tech blogosphere/websiteosphere (I don’t even know what to call websites these days anymore, since most of them are blog-like), Engadget, shut down comments on its stories. As explained to VentureBeat by Editor-in-Chief, Joshua Topolsky, the decision was made because of a recent shift in the tone of comments, spurred largely by an influx of new visitors who found their way to the site because of the iPad unveiling. Now, apart from concluding that the iPad is an inherently evil device created to brainwash hipsters the world over, I’m forced to think about whether shutting these abusive commenters out entirely is really the right decision for Engadget.

Ah, what a great vacation that was. So relaxing. I can still hear the sounds of the waves crashing on the white, sandy beach, tropical birds singing their alluring songs in the lush forest behind me. I really meant to update the blog from my cabana, but the resort was having problems with their wireless [...]

It’s time for another entertaining installment of PR Shorts, our highly informative — if somewhat basic and embarrassingly infrequent — look at a particular aspect of this job we do. Today I’ll discuss the daunting task of pitching a journalist.
The last PR Short touched on the press release, a vital weapon in the PR rep’s [...]

“Public relations” isn’t “media relations,” folks. The definition of PR seems to have moved away from its literal meaning — relating to and interacting with the public. If I focus my attention on individuals — or any number of “second-tier” websites and blogs (or third-tier or fourth-tier or even the guy who only gets 3 hits a year) — I can reach a massive audience. Those individuals appreciate even a moment of your time — particularly if you’re working for a company they adore — and will become extensions of your PR efforts (not necessarily your media efforts, of course), telling their friends, Twitter followers, and everyone else about your company and its products. They want to help you succeed. Let them do that. It just takes a bit of your time.

I’m going to try to put together a series of brief posts about PR practices, and thanks to my current diet of cold medication and coffee the best name I could come up with is PR Shorts. I know that sounds like a pair of cut-off jeans that will never give you a straight answer, [...]

Here’s a bit of deception to kick off your Monday (though the story was posted on Saturday, and it’s already evening today… so if your day is just kicking off… lay off the booze, buddy): MobileCrunch has tossed up a rather intriguing article alleging that Reverb, one of the industry’s more recognizable PR agencies, has [...]

“I was reviewing a big, anticipated game in a well-known, successful franchise from a top-tier publisher. It’d gotten plenty of slobbery preview coverage from ours and other outlets in the months previous, but the final game was inescapably mediocre. So I gave it the score it deserved.”
Just like any other day for a gaming journalist [...]

Throughout a game’s PR and marketing campaign, the publisher or developer needs to create promotional screenshots to show off a game’s visuals. It’s important to note that the final polishing of a game — those extra steps that take the game to final quality — often isn’t done until the last few months of the project. That will vary, of course, from one game to another, as some teams may aim to be “art complete” much earlier in development. Anyway, these shots will usually be created with whatever game content is available — so if a game is being announced two years before its release date, there’s a good chance that the aforementioned game content is not final, only partially available or completely non-existent.

The seedy underbelly of the games industry exposes itself. When a journalist goes rebels and does something as recklessly disrespectful and anti-gaming as write a negative article about a game or publisher, a lot of PR reps and executives forget that golden rule and do something so unimaginably dumb in times of duress that I just can’t wrap my batshit insane head around it: they put that journalist on their blacklist.