Here’s how you release a press release: you write it, you submit it to a……

“are some citizen journalists – aka bloggers -unaware of journalistic conventions like quoting, attributing sources, checking facts, etc.? Seems likely to me. (Although I don’t know enough about this particular case to make that judgment.)”

Most bloggers that I know are fact checking, and attributing either directly or through a link where they get their info. If you see a “h/t” in a blog article, it’s a “hat tip” to the person who sent them the info.
Most, but not all are pretty good with their quoting, also.

The flip side of her question is does the mainstream media always disclose when an article was started by a tip from PRNewswire or a drink with a PR rep? No, they don’t, at least no according to the reports I’ve been talking to the last few weeks, including Michael Barbaro at the Times for the article.

One of the big gripes on this whole issue is that there seems to be a double standard applied in Mr. Barbaro’s article.

Perhaps the post title would have better matched the content as, “Did Wal-Mart Blog PR Backfire?” but I doubt it would have received as much attention from both pros and cons.

- is the NYTimes reporter biased in favor of anti Wal-Mart readers? Seems unlikely to me but who knows.

- are some citizen journalists – aka bloggers – unaware of journalistic conventions like quoting, attributing sources, checking facts, etc.? Seems likely to me. (Although I don’t know enough about this particular case to make that judgment.)

- should Edelman be engaging in this kind of blogger relations? Hmmm… why not. The bloggers who are being approached need to be super savvy about the information they’re being fed. In other words, they need to act more like mainstream journalists and ask lost more questions themselves.

My .02 cents for the day.

Barbaro’s claim of “cutting and pasting” is because I used a line from an email tip (not from Wal-Mart or the PR firm, btw) I received and neglected to put it in my quote box. The fact that he only mentions that one line attests to the fact that I didn’t write “word for word” what was sent to me.

Barbaro’s reporting on this is….let’s just say, unique. He has his own version of what really happened, and he’s more than happy to share that version with anti Wal-Mart readers everywhere.

What is missing from this story is the corporate campaign by the unions against Walmart. If they can’t get the Wal-mart employees to unionize they are trying another old strategy of propaganda, regulation accusations, along with the help of the pro-union media (which the NY Times author is a member of). What people fail to realize, is that this doesn’t hurt Wal-mart. It hurts the hundreds of thousand of employees trying to earn money for their families.