The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs — I know Edelman PR Executive Steve Rubel, and was surprised to read about him openly talking about a magazine (PC Magazine) that his company pitches to constantly as something he throws in the trash. It took me more than a little aback.
Curiously this incident was brought to my attention by a non-Ziff writer concerned about this. This is like the dumfuk blog posts done by office dingalings who apparently do not think anyone is reading and they get fired along the way for bad-mouthing the boss.
Hey Steve, I thought you were a blogging pioneer who had a clue about how this all worked. This incident reminds me of the dummy who worked at PC Computing years ago who was discussing her love life in some detail with a friend over e-mail but ended up sending the note to the entire staff. Oooops!
What Steve has managed to do here is make everyone at Edelman eat crap when they call anyone at any publication. “Hey are you throwing out our publication too?” And since I work at PC Magazine I’ll have extra fun. “You want me to write about the product? Yeah sure, but how will you ever know?”
If you follow the entire thread you’ll see that Rubel’s apology is pretty useless for an arrogant insult of this nature. Edelman has to come out at the corporate level and do something. They won’t.
A bigger problem revealed. The fact is many large PR agencies — at the executive level — have developed an arrogant disdain of the media. This was only accidentally revealed by Rubel. This is not Steve talking, it’s an industry being expressed through him. Seriously, it is.
These folks honestly believe that the media consists of boobs who do little more than parrot what they’re told to parrot. I have actually been told this point blank by PR folks. Rubel just let it slip how they all feel. Yikes!
And if you are not a stooge and a parrot they grouse about it behind your back. I’ve run into this sort of thing buried here and there on supposedly secure forums. I ran into a PR woman once who was bad-mouthing me to an extreme for some petty reason and have followed the trend for years. And yes, some of them will go after you if they think they can get away with it. Kudos to the fake Steve Jobs for breaking this one into the open.
I just had a meeting with some of our PR team and they mentioned, in reference to my earlier post about PC Mag’s Jim Louderback, that Louderback recently has been involved in a kind of funny to-do with Steve Rubel. Apparently Rubel blabbered on Twitter that he doesn’t read PC Mag and in fact tosses his copy into the trash when it arrives. Smooth move for a PR guy right? Louderback blasted back here saying that since Mr. Bigshot PR man and blogger Steve Rubel of Edelman PR has so little respect for PC Mag, then he would start ignoring pitches from Edelman clients.
That in turn prompted this hilarious groveling open letter from Rubel to “Mr. Louderback” and everyone at Ziff Davis, which owns PC Mag. It’s really a must-read, if only because Rubel is one of these guys who’s been going around saying how the mainstream media doesn’t matter anymore, and how blogs are displacing all the big newspapers and magazines, blah blah blah … but here he is taking one deep down the windpipe on behalf of his clients, who no doubt carved him a new one for pissing off PC Mag.
What’s really admirable is the ease and style with which Steve Rubel handles the fellatio.
Does Edelman even have a blogging policy for its people?
found by John Markoff
I’ve been a fan of PCMag since 1982 (when it was just “PC” and Louderback was in school). Good grief, has it been 25 years? Please forward that free copy to me, I could use it.
From your article:
“Louderback blasted back here…” [John, did you forget a link?]
You should have taken me up on that fishin’ trip invite, you seem a little agitated, can’t blame ya’ though.
That’s from the pull quote/excerpt…you can get to that link from the link at the top. I seldom transfer those sub-inks since they are redundant if you actually go to the source.
I’ll go fishing later. Time to save the cheerleader.
From the article link, by the “bad guy” Mr. Rubel”, before it disappears from the site (posted just moments ago at 04:15 CDT 04.26.07)
“More importantly, my opinions and habits do not reflect the broader populace, our agency or its clients. While there is a subset of people who are reading blogs more than they do traditional media, magazines are in fact thriving. I noted this important trend on February 12 of this year. Therefore, the audiences that magazines like yours reach are important to our clients and our agency.”
Good Grief, Charlie Brown. These guys could be -gasp- politicians !!
Darn, JCD, no wonder you’re cranky !!
[deleted by request of author]
There was a time when ZD had a bit of veracity. Then I accidently found myself in the midst of a ZD sales event, where vendors toadied with the sales people, striking various kinds of deals– editorial deals. As a fly on the wall there, I watched what happened: quid pro quo, baby.
So get off your self-righteous high horse. Like it or not, advertisers ran the books there. The buyer’s guides were essentially written by vendors, not be research done by detective work of an investigative journalist.
The believability of PC Mag, PC-then eWeek, and so on have always been somewhere near zero; light entertainment at best. And no, I’m not a PR person; and yes, I’m an independent freelancer whose income doesn’t depend on my freelance work. Computer trade magazines have a horrid symbiotic relationship with vendors in the industry, and the value of a PC Mag (in my estimation) is land fill fodder. I go to trade shows and see how people play off guys like Louderback– playing him!
That Edelman or anyone else has a low opinion of a ZD book is no surprise to me. Like other computer trade rags, PC Mag has less relevancy than ever, and only the ZD web engine keeps things going– albeit in an unpredictable way– as demographers try to discern what the damn clicks actually mean when people surf ZD’s sites. This, in turn (a doubleclick madness), becomes fodder for the ZD sales department. Don’t get me wrong– everyone needs sales, but sales drives ZD, not highly respected journalism.
At least Jim can keep this guy from talking outta’ his *mouth* for a while…….
How do PR people look down on anyone if they have no spines to hold themselves up with?
John
Sounds to me if Edelman might have a PR problem themselves.
I know “few” people from Edelman (I won’t say which location). Each and everyone of them is an incompetent moron. There entire business is nothing more than an overpriced “we have the connections” middleman. You are right. That whole industry is arrogant to a level that even a nice old lady would like to rap them upside the head with a FU bag. Hearing Steve Rubel speak, you would think he believes he and not Al Gore invented the internet. lol He acts like no one else has ever thought of what he is doing and that it was all his incredible idea. When in fact all he did was see what others were already doing then claimed it as his. I think he gets way too much attention and way too much credit.
BTW Al Gore did really have a great deal to do with the internet becoming what it is today but I know you already know that.
I think this dilbert cartoon summarizes it all.
http://tinyurl.com/3d7gbq
#5 – You’re an idiot.
The most popular websites, podcasts, and blogs relating to technology can all trace their roots back to ZD. To say it means less now is a joke: It’s never meant more.
10 – You’re right. I thought the CNet merger (or whatever it was) took ZD down a notch in general quality, but I got my small-computer education from PC and then PC Mag in the 1980s. It is still the best source of information I know about the industry. And ZD reflects that on the web.
That said, I gotta say the PR people I’ve known had no such disrespect for the media or its writers. One I know says she is saddened by the tendency for thin, understaffed print publications to pull down the “wall between church and state” – by which she means separation of ad sales form editorial – in recent years. But she doesn’t look down on the writers. In fact, she told me the winnowing has been so severe, even some of the best have been lost and the rest are way overworked so she tries not to waste their time. She sees PR as facilitating contact between vendors and writers and she doesn’t look down on either party.
I can’t claim to be an expert anymore, though before retirement I did work in both journalism and PR at different times. But I’ll accept her word as accurate for the current time. I’ll also guess on that basis that Rubel’s attitude reflects the snobbery of someone with too much money or unearned influence, not an industry attitude.
Most of the current ‘computer’ magazines are, frankly, ‘ad rags,’ as are most tech sites, C/NET particularly. (I wonder whether there might be some kind of sneaky payoff scheme going on between C/NET and Microsoft.) But, even so, there is still more actual information available in traditional tech media than all the tech blogosphere combined. The reason Edelman is so enamored of blogs is that many bloggers can easily be turned into public relations tools. Their lack of sophistication, inablility to distinguish opinion from fact and greed guarantee that.
I stand behind my comments. The whole ‘product of the year’ charade is just one tip of a big iceberg. The advertisers run all but a small and meaningless portion of the content. There is little critical thinking, and most of the writers there have no large systems experience, and wouldn’t know the inside of an operations center if you swung it at them.
Instead, what you get is prattle about how their personal machines can’t do silly stuff, or perhaps drivel on simple vendor bashing– no hard technical journalism at all. Because they hobnob with the likes of Edelman, Waggoner Edstrom, and their high-profile clients, they think they’re getting ‘scoops’. They’re not user advocates, and they’re not able to see past PRNewsWire to do any real analysis.
There was a day when ZD did their own benchmarks, loose and moderately useless as they were. They ignored Macs, Linux, and anything but Wintel, and gave lipservice to enterprise computing needs, becoming more of a gossip sheet than anything that could be described as hard-hitting journalism with deep technical analysis. Instead, they went for the low hanging fruit of users that bought a PC and after two years thought they were experts.
Blogs added blather to the content. Whoopee if a guy that used to write sports pages went after Microsoft or Intel or anybody else; the bad taste left in one’s mouth after reading “insightful commentary” turned me off. I control multi-million dollar budgets, and my colleagues and I uniformly have little reference to any ZD publications, print or online. That there would be a competition between a ZD editor and an incompetent PR agency is no mystery and no news.
Mozilla is an Edelman client? Why? I have to stop donating money to Mozilla if they’re going to waste it on PR firms. Mozilla’s best PR comes from the users and the features, not the old game of using a PR agency.
Also, why does PC Mag need to be pitched about Firefox at all? Can’t they find out by themselves? Especially about Mozilla products: the development couldn’t be more public and there’s no non-disclosure agreements to sign.
Or does it work like a payola for trade magazines? PC Mag only writes about Mozilla if the PR firm keeps bugging them about it?
I wish I knew more about how this all worked. I will be researching it in the next few days, trying to be more aware of conversations I haven’t been invited to.
And thanks to Steve Rubel and Jim Lauderback for opening my eyes to this sub world of influence.
TooMuchTravel — Let me get this straight. At some point you noticed that PC Magazine (aka ZD) — a magazine about PC’s and for PC users (stemming from the Microsoft OS supplied IBM “PC”) — didn’t cover big iron, operations centers, or Apple and the Mac?
Brilliant! I’ve made this same observation and also wonder why they so ignore oil refining, cardboard manufacturing and import-export legal issues.
We just have to suffer.
John,
Let’s see… PC Magazine. Ought to be about PCs, right? A PC is defined by them as a Wintel box. There are others, but they are ignored at best, maligned at worst. Enterprise computing? Yes, that’s what’s done with PCs on a personal level…. hence ‘personal computer’ and the ostensible abbreviation. Big iron? Yes, that’s what we all connect to, in one way or another. Covered by eWeek? Not really. Macs? Yes, some people use them, as they’re personal computers (now in the Intel, but not Wintel) family.
Certainly one can ignore oil refining, et al; they have nothing to do with CPUs, mother boards, AS-400’s, Solaris, and so on.
Do we suffer? Yes. They are unwitting idiots, under the ruse of technical journalism. Lots of Pulitzer Prizes there. Instead, there are a lot of chiefs and few subordinates (subordinates are a revolving door; save for John Pallato…. and the dismay of no more Stan Gibson or even John Dodge, all three of whom had a few shreds of integrity along with Peter Coffee).
At PC Magazine, Michael Miller held sway, and took a magazine as thick as a phone book and let it slide right into the flyer it is right now. That Louderback is trying to rejuvenate it is laudable, but the basic premise and direction need investment. Yes, ZD was the product of a horrible mess started when its assets were sold to Softbank. Eric Hippeau (spelling?) was able to delightfully rape most of the assets of ZD and the Interface Group properties. Left bleeding on the ground after both were horribly mismanaged, it’s probably no wonder that advertiser perogatives were on the plate most of the time.
Way to go, Too Much! You didn’t let J.D. intimidate you.
I thought PC Magazine was a product catalog for an ever-shrinking mail order company and always throw my copy away too, though I do salivate over the special issues devoted to “50 Solitaire Plug-ins for Firefox!!!”
By the way, when is Dvorak going to learn when not to include an apostrophe in the word “its”:
“Does Edelman even have a blogging policy for it’s people?”
It’s 2007, and the Dvorak-o-matic is losing its wits.
#18: John’s spelling and punctuation mishaps are legendary among us editors. Fixed!
Dvorak has some standing to write about this because he’s one of the few in the tech press who actually seems to write about obscure products on their merits — stuff from small companies you haven’t already heard of and that doesn’t have PR and big ad budgets pushing them.
Four years ago, I was one guy in a room and wrote to him about our new web browser, and he actually didn’t ignore me and raved about the browser in an Inside Track column. Of course our product never got coverage anywhere else in PCMag or most other outlets, despite being in many ways far more innovative four years ago than any other browser is today.
Other notable attention we got was from James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly (a general journalist with a side-interest in computers, and a very nice guy), and from the old TechTV “ScreenSavers” show, which came as a surprise to us.
We briefly hired a sleazy PR guy and dipped a toe into those waters, but gave up that angle after being amazed at the prostitution that goes on in the tech press. I got better results writing personal notes to complete strangers than the PR guy got schmoozing.
Payback list:
1. Uncle Dave
2. Podesta