Penn State fires Paterno, students riot: 5 media lessons learned

When I worked for a PR trade publisher, I always loathed this editorial approach, and my refusal to follow it contributed to my leaving the PR trade publisher.

It's the publishing equivalent of ambulance-chasing, a way to get a lot of traffic by having a faux-topical story. In SEO, topical beats relevant every time. But man does not live on SEO alone.

It's either intellectually mediocre, or condescending. It either says: Whatever everybody's talking about is what everybody should be talking about. Or it says: Our readers are intellectually mediocre and all they want to read on our site is a spin on the same gossip shit they're reading everywhere else.

It's wantonly atavistic. You can see the same story appearing in other trade publications: Penn State fires Paterno, students riot: 5 legal lessons learned … Penn State fires Paterno, students riot: 5 insurance lessons learned … Penn State fires Paterno, students riot: 5 law enforcement lessons learned … Penn State fires Paterno, students riot: 5 coaching lessons learned … Penn State fires Paterno, students riot: 5 human resources lessons learned … and on an gratuitously on.

Mostly, it's flat lazy. Instead of getting to know every single practitioner in your field and finding out about the unknown amazing shit that's happening behind the opaque corporate walls and revealing those brilliant ideas to amazed practitioner—the hard and unrewarding work that also contributed to my leaving the PR trade publisher—you just pick up on whatever's in the news today and poll industry bystanders, who say all the obvious things for the story tomorrow.

This stuff sucks, folks. And when you see it, you should let the publisher know you know you're onto them. Becauase they seriously don't know that you are.