Day 97 - Meet with a Publicist

Date: April 13th, 2010

There are a lot of industries I don't understand at all.  Off the top of my head I'm thinking... shrimping, spool making, detergent safety testing and, of course, mercenary spelunking (that would be where you get hired by a foreign army to kill a cave).  On the other hand, my long and storied history of public BSing should, in theory, leave me pretty well cut out for PR work.  Despite all the informal training I received in the form of speech classes (go go high school forensics), I honestly had no clue what a publicist actually does, until yesterday.

I met with my friend, Josephine Nicholas, to talk about how the whole process works.  The behind-the-scenes aspect of a publicist's work is a marvel of modern science.  There are programs, software and other serious tools that help the publicist put together the right list of contacts for any given press release.  In other words, the days of spending hours and hours cold calling news organizations is over.  With some research and a few clicks in the right computer program, a press release can be sent to targeted news organizations with greater accuracy than all those calls could ever yield.

Not only does the software send you contacts in certain geographic areas - it sends you to the right desk.  Though I'm neither in my fifties, nor a retired publicist, I would image there was a time when publicists would call the news desk when they wanted lifestyles and the food desk when they wanted sports.  Not anymore.  It was incredibly cool to see exactly how it worked.  That wasn't the only reason I talked to her though.

I'd like some good to come of this little social experiment so we were talking about ways to get some press for this blog, at least in part, in hopes of raising money for a worthy cause.  You know, so I'm not the only one benefiting from my antics.

First things first - while I have some charities in mind - I would love some recommendations of worthy causes that any of y'all out there reading this have supported.  In particular, I'd like to work with a charity that doesn't already have a lot of money coming in.

Second things second - Actually, that's all I got.  The first thing is the most important.  I've been doing this for a little over three months and I know in my heart and mind that I can finish it and enjoy every day coming up just as much as I've enjoyed the ones that have passed.  So... how about finding a way to change the world while we're at it?  I don't think I've felt this empowered or had as much of a sense of purpose in a long time.  Its pretty darn fantastic.