There’s a new HARO in town. And the service is making news.

On Sunday, the New York Times published a story about the launch of the new HARO/ProfNet competitor, the San Fransico-based NewsBasis.  Ragan’s PR Daily picked up the story asking essentially why the launch was newsworthy.  “Who’s doing this startup’s PR?” mused PR Daily editors.

So…day one and you’re in the New York Times…Nice.

Wondering how News Basis works or what makes it different? Here’s an explanation from the Times article:

Journalists post questions or search for sources with a particular expertise or point of view. Reporters can ask questions anonymously to avoid tipping off competitors. They can set an expiration date for their question and remove it when it has been answered to avoid getting bombarded with pitches.

Companies, public relations agencies and academics search for questions or, if they choose, get notification by e-mail whenever someone posts a relevant query.

Services like these can be particularly useful for small-business owners who want to connect with reporters but “don’t have 10 grand a month to pay a giant P.R. firm,” said Peter Shankman, founder of Help a Reporter Out, a competing service whose membership is 70 percent small businesses.

(Let me just say that MopwaterPR has affordable retainers starting out far below $10,000/month if anyone is looking for a firm. But I digress).

Interestingly enough, News Basis seems to take the HARO model and improve upon it considerably. And while we’re on the subject of HAROs, the fact that NewsBasis can be edited in real time is pretty cool, too. Since Vocus acquired HARO in June, the service has remained virtually unchanged. However, I suspect changes will be coming. Now with this new competitor on the block, those changes may come even more quickly. The only question is, will journalists use the service? We know journalists use HARO because the queries come at you three times per day.

More on how it works (video courtesy of News Basis):

One last thing: Back when I was a journalist, we didn’t have HARO. We had the phone, our connections, our staff meetings and our feet. I can only imagine how many more stories I would have been able to churn out with a HARO-like service.

This News Basis platform seems to make it even easier. Like, what’s the point of even showing up to work? Just throw in your query and let two dueling sides duke it out on News Basis and you’ve got your quotes. Add some context, a bit of editing and you’ve got a story?

A part of me salivates as a PR professional because I know this helps everyone connect much more easily. However, I wonder if connecting easily is truly the point of journalism. There’s just something about hustling up a story, and going out there with your preconceived notions, only to have them overturned. Or better yet, to have the story you thought you were going to cover get upstaged by a juicer, more exciting, more salacious story that you didn’t even know existed.

What do you think? Do sites like HARO, ProfNet and now NewsBasis make everyone’s jobs easier? Do they make journalists lazy? Do they make spin more probable? Do they add too much sheen and gloss to the news process and somewhat diminish journalistic integrity?

I’m undecided. What do you think?

Update – Sadly, Newsbasis chas closed its doors.

Author, Speaker and Rockstar David Meerman Scott + Amanda Miller Littlejohn

CANCEL your meetings. HOLD your calls. BLOCK your entire day on Wednesday July 28, 2010. Vocus is hosting an online version of their 2010 Users conference: Retweet: Engagement Means Business — an event you shouldn’t miss – and you don’t even need to leave your desk to attend.You want to get this information.

And it’s free.

What?!?!

I attended the Vocus Users Conference in June and saw these presentations in person. Let me just tell you, the fact that Vocus is repackaging them and offering them online and for free is absolutely incredible. I am traveling part of the day on June 28, but I’ll be jumping on from the airports and wherever I can get a good Wi-Fi signal so that I can relive this awesome content all over again.
Here’s the line-up:

• Deirdre Breakenridge: From PR’s Past to Social Media Power
• David Meerman Scott: Game Change: The New Rules of Marketing and PR*
• Beth Harte: Integrated Marketing Communications: Engaging Your Audience Online
• Lee Odden: Optimizing PR for the Web in 2010
• Brian Solis: Engage or Die!

Date:  Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Engage! Author Brian Solis with Mopwater PR's Amanda Miller Littlejohn

Time:  9:30AM – 5:30PM Eastern

Cost:  The Online Conference is FREE. Free, y’all! The in-person conference started at $800 per attendee. Yes.

Click Here to Register

You heard it here first. Don’t ever say I never gave you anything

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Ceci Connolly, award winning reporter for the Washington Post recently participated in a media relations panel sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America’s National Capital Chapter in Washington, DC.  Connolly offered further evidence that today’s reporters are often chained to their desks, working longer hours on more stories: Gone are the days when reporters could grab lunch with sources-there’s just no time for that. Lunch has been downgraded to a cup of coffee. (I’ll drink to that!)

But seriously, Connolly brought up an important point that bears mentioning, and that is, news organizations are still trying to find their value-added especially with the proliferation of online content providers. So while you may think sending a pitch automatically means you can score coverage, sometimes it’s not that simple.

“It’s pretty rare for somebody to pitch me on a single story and you say here’s what your story should be and I turn around and do it…That’s just not how we operate any more,” Connolly said.

“We use [pitches] as the foundation for the story and we think about what more we can bring to this.”

Want more help with your media relations? Order your copy of the Mopwater Manual. And if you have a piece of news to distribute, try PR Web. They help you create instant publicity, online visibility & increase web traffic.

I recently had a conversation with a young lady, let’s call her PR Ingenue, who wanted to hear my PR Basic Principles because as she said, PR is so broad. We had an interesting discussion about the difference between public relations and media relations so I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts with you guys, and get some of your basic principles. Here’s the conversation:

Mopwater: A lot of people equate PR to media relations, but that’s just one part.

PR Ingenue: Could you explain the difference?

What are your thoughts?

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I hear this question more often than I would like to admit. What, exactly is public relations or PR? I even hear this question from people who are in the industry or trying to get into the industry.

Public relations is an overarching discipline. A definition from The Public Relations Handbook:

Public relations is a distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communications, understanding, acceptance, and cooperation between an organization and its publics; involve the management of problems or issues; helps management to keep informed on and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasizes the responsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management keep abreast of and effectively utilize change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends; and uses research and ethical communication techniques as its principal tools.

So many people equate public relations with publicity (media relations) but there are many other activities. Here is a rough list:

• Internal communications (communicating with employees through in-house newsletters, intranet sites and suggestion boxes, etc.)
• Corporate PR (Communicating on behalf of whole organization with annual reports, ethical statements, conferences, etc.)
• Media Relations (Communicating with journalists with press releases, press events, briefings, and increasingly social media)
• Business to Business (Communicating with other organizations like suppliers and retailers at trade events, exhibitions and through newsletters and e-mail campaigns)
• Public Affairs (Communicating with opinion formers and politicians, monitoring the political environment)
• Community relations and Corporate Social Responsibility (Communicating with local community, elected representatives, creating exhibitions, presentations, letters, meetings, sports activities and other sponsorships)
• Investor Relations (Communicating with financial organizations through newsletters, briefings and events)
• Strategic Communication + Reputation Management (Identification and analysis of situation, problem and solutions through research, planning and executing a campaign to improve the ethical reputation of the organization)
• Issues Management (Monitoring Political, social, economic and tech environment )
• Crisis Management (Communicating clear messages in an emergency as the PR people at Toyota or BP needed to do to deal with the media in light of recent crises)
• Copywriting (Writing for different audiences to high standards of literacy, writing press releases, newsletters, web pages, annual reports, crafting copy for tweets)
• Publications Management (Overseeing print and media processes like leaflets, internal magazines, and websites)
• Events Management (Organizing conferences, press launches, trade shows)

Was that overwhelming? It shouldn’t be. It should help you focus in on what you want to do, what you do best or a potential focus area. Most firms and/or solo practitioners pick 2-3 focus areas to specialize. Larger agencies can afford to pick more. If you’re just starting out, try a few things and see what you like. You can probably tell whether or not you’re interested in, for example, investor relations or public affairs which require an interest and deep subject matter expertise in finance and politics respectively.

Thoughts?

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At a recent Media Relations in the Digital Age panel, I heard and interesting tidbit from Nancy Marshall-Genzer, a reporter at American Public Media’s Marketplace program. Ms. Genzer described what I think is an innovative way one news organization is leveraging its audience and using social media to shape the news.

American Public Media has created a “Public Insight Network” where you can go on the American Public Media website and sign up to be considered a source for stories. APM describes the network this way:

Public Insight Network is a new approach that journalists with American Public Media shows like Marketplace, Marketplace Money, American RadioWorks and Weekend America are using to find diverse sources and a broader range of information. It involves partnering with the public and, at its heart, is our Public Insight Network – a group of thousands of people who have agreed to help us cover the news.

Many of our public sources have told us about their work, education, passions and expertise. Almost daily, we ask some of these public sources in the network to share their observations and knowledge with us on specific stories. Our public insight analysts take that information, distill it, and pass it on to our reporters and editors. Analysts may follow up with a request for more information, or perhaps an interview with a public source.

We also ask public sources to tell us about stories that we should be covering – stories that matter to them and are not on our radar. And we ask people to participate in online interactives where they share ideas and stories and reason through tough issues.

These public insights help us set our agenda for coverage and inform our reporting. We believe this partnership creates more diverse and in-depth news and cultural coverage. It also makes American Public Media programs even more trusted and credible sources of news and information.

I went ahead and signed up to join the network and immediately got an auto-respond note thanking me for signing up. The email also informed me of another aspect of the network, the “Trading Floor” which is essentially a blog. Each post poses a question (I’m assuming from a story one of the APM journalists is working on) and to join the conversation and be considered for a story, you simply comment on the blog post.Check out the Trading Floor.

Overall I think this concept has great potential and could be a cool way to use social media to source stories, kind of like HARO and ProfNet’s alerts on Twitter.

Maybe American Public Media has created these “networks” because they’re stretched super-thin and need to be smarter and more efficient in finding sources for their stories. Maybe they were only tapping into a certain demographic and wanted to open the perspectives up to more readers. Either way,  crowd-sourcing does increase the diversity of voices , so it’s a win-win either way.

The PRSA panel was the first time I’d heard of the netowork. The comments on the site were sparse,  and there were only 15 queries since April, so some awareness should probably be raised. There is a Twitter Account that’s basically a feed of all of the queries. So add it to one of your Twitter lists and monitor it daily.

I wonder how many PR pros have signed their clients up to be sources on the network. Have you? If you’re not signed up for the Trading Floor, check it out. It’s free, and there’s nothing to lose. It may be a great way to find another story. I’ll let you know if I come across any queries that pan out for me.

This morning I met with Renae Merle, business reporter for the Washington Post. We talked about a lot of fun things, growing up in the South, our mothers, and the changing landscape of media, social media, the web’s influence on journalism and of course how public relations/PR professionals should be approaching media in this new media landscape.

I captured Renae’s perspective for you all on my Mac. Enjoy.

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“It doesn’t matter what story I’m working on, it always begins with a search…”

I heard an amazing presentation last week from Lee Odden of Top Rank Marketing who is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) genius. I literally could not keep up with all of the tidbits he shared in his awesome presentation. Luckily I captured it all on my Flip.

I have been working on improving my SEO game for months, and listening to Lee was just the bit of inspiration I needed.

Here are the first ten minutes of the presentation for your listening pleasure. Just press play and listen since you can’t see the slides. And if you aren’t already subscribed to the TopRank blog, get it in your RSS reader ASAP.

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