Wow! First off, plenty of people liked our Ragan.com article questioning the use of terms such as “media advisory” and “immediate release” on news releases. But others … you would think I wrote a controversial article about taxes, spending and the fiscal cliff. People complain how politicians turn negative and can not respectfully disagree. After reading some of the comments posted about our article, I’m beginning to believe some of the politicians learned such behavior from the public. Several of my critics depicted my attempt at humor as snarky and mean-spirited. I don’t care if you disagree with me, but what drives someone to verbally throw me off the cliff? I don’t dare claim to know the answers about society, but I gather I raised questions about some long-held practices. And instead of some of these PR pros seeing this as an opportunity to question conventional wisdom and at least for a split second consider a change of course, they decided the better approach was to depict me as an empty-headed jerk who must have stolen his awards and graduated by mistake from one of the country’s best journalism schools. But those folks don’t know my story because they didn’t take a few seconds to read it. Hey, the good news is a couple of people I haven’t communicated with in a long time read the article and got back in touch. We exchanged some pleasant emails.
