Cut and Paste Journalism

I found this interesting article on LinkedIn.

Cut and paste journalism ...

This past year I had a conversation with a former journalist turned PR consultant that still makes my head spin. I want to know what you think. As a former journalist I couldn't conceive of using publishing a press release as is. But this former major city editor claims that newspapers do this all the time. She said she often checked the writing for AP style and OK'd whatever it was, if it interested her. She also claims that newspapers do this all the time.

I don't believe it.

But what do you think? I really would like to know if your experience mirrors mine, or hers.

John

SparCode, Inc - just launching our commercial site last week and we pushed a major PRWeb release (the most expensive package you can get) to all US media.

I also did write to about 16 specialist journalists directly which know about the Groupon Group Purchasing model, where we come in with a very unique twist - changing Today's Deal into a social media marketing tool, enabling all customer to share with friends and get a 20% cash back. And instead of local deals, we offer global deals in Euro and USD (depending on location).

Here are the poor result from the US market PR (1.100 USD cost):

1. ZERO journalists did ever bother writing a single line created by themselves based on the PR release

2. ZERO top journalists that got a personal message ever got back to us - from Mashable, Fast Company, TechCrunch to many others.

3. ZERO journalists have contacted us asking for anything

4. 100% of all postings copy/pasted the PR release word for word

5. 10% of our international traffic/US Traffic to http://www.sparcode.com/ came from the US Press Release which was the top package

6. 90% of our traffic came from a small local Danish web site mentioning us with a REAL JOURNALIST write the story about it.

It is kind of scary to think that no one really cares anymore, no matter what has been invented, they only want to write about innovation, from already existing major famous companies launching new services or products from Microsoft, Apple and Google.

Well we are a real genuine startup in a basement in Copenhagen, but we have a world class team to make it happen and the Queen of Denmark is our neighbor...if that should ever help..:-)

No matter if anyone cares about us now - we will make an impact on this world somehow. We don't know how exactly at this point, but we will find our way :-) - and when we make it big, the journalists will probably discover us eventually. We will just have to be patient and work very hard.

Yours Sincerely

Ivan Solvason

Founder and CEO

SparCode, Inc

http://www.sparcode.com/