Dear Social Studies,

While I agree that pitching bloggers is riskier than pitching traditional reporters, increasingly they are one and the same. In the tech world, many of our key reporters have now launched blogs too, giving them a place to say what they really think, or to use a story they have written to start a thread online. Because their blogs are usually maintained by the publications they work for, they also have instant readership and credibility.

What it means for us is that while in the old days we might have seen a journalist as simply a conduit to the ultimate target audience we sought to inform or persuade; now we often have to seek to shape the opinions of the reporter/blogger too. Industry analysts are also jumping on with blogs, which give them a place to express opinions more informally and perhaps with less academic rigor behind them, than in their research reports. The reality is that the world is a lot more complicated and folks no longer fit neatly into mutually exclusive buckets. We certainly can’t blindly blast out emails based on automatically generated Cision lists and expect to accomplish our clients’ objectives. And this isn’t a bad thing.

–A committed reader

Editor’s Response:

Dear Committed Reader:

You’ve honed in on a great subject and likewise called us out on being incomplete in our “A Tale of Foreboding” post last week. It goes back to a previous post about bloggers in general. At this point, the type of blogger you describe above — key reporters that have launched blogs — are worlds apart from other sorts of bloggers; I prefer to call them unfettered journalists. However, there is a strain of bloggers that follow different rules, who want no part in public relations and who do not welcome our advances, no matter how courteous. Our last post addressed that particular ilk of blogger and we should have made that clearer. We appreciate your calling it to our attention.

Coco.