MediaGuardian’s My Media with PR Week’s Danny Rogers

Danny Rogers, editor of Haymarket’s PR Week (UK edition) is the subject of today’s My Media column in the MediaGuardian. For someone who edits a magazine about communications his choices are conservative to say the least.

But it also gives a possible clue about why PR Week has being getting steadily worse over the last few years. Instead of broadening his knowledge by sampling some of the trade magazines from a diversity of different sectors he prefers to mainly read his own publisher’s titles.

His new media outlook is even more depressing citing brandrepublic (Haymarket again!) and the best he can come up with for “interactivity” is the BBC.

He also complains about the lack of good PR blogs in the UK at the moment. He doesn’t cite any non-UK PR blogs which he thinks are better. Some UK PR blogs that Danny might try are:

Tony Bradley, President of CIPR – a late-starter but definitely worth reading

Stephen Davies, PR student (graduate?) and author of the world renowned PR Blogger

Philip Young, PR lecturer at the University of Sunderland

Simon Collister, another Yorkshire PR consultant who was inspired to start blogging after attending the first of our ‘New PR’ conferences – watch this space for the next date. Although Danny probably doesn’t like Simon’s blog as Simon did an excellent analysis of the UK PR magazines and PR Week came out worse – but nobody from PR Week bothered to join in the conversation.

Neville Hobson – a blogging Brit in Amsterdam which I think still qualifies him as a UK PR blogger.

And not forgetting Antony Mayfield, although Danny would probably prefer to as Antony writes an excellent column for PR Business.

This is only a small sample as there are also good PR blogs from many of the big London agencies (PR Week doesn’t like people north of Watford which apart from Antony all my examples are).

Side note to Danny – Sorry if you think I’ve been a bit harsh but blogs are about conversations. Your comments are welcome. I know at least one person at Haymarket regularly reads this blog as Haymarket appears in the logs nearly everyday. I don’t get the feeling that Danny uses simple PR tools such as Bloglines or Technorati so it might be an idea if you tipped him off.

UPDATE: Just seen that Antony has blogged on the same subject. Rather than waiting for Danny to read his blog he emailed Danny Rogers and got a response:

Thanks for sending me those links. You may be right and I simply haven’t seen some of the best ones yet.

I think it does matter. As a journalist, blogs are an invaluable source of opinion on the industry – and can provide very productive feedback [on] our content.

There is a danger that some people’s rather ill-considered views are given disproportionate attention, or that soem people make snap judgements on our editorial work without understanding the huge range of people we have to cater for, but that comes with the territory.

I wonder how you can know someone is making a ‘snap judgement’. His second point is more relevant but I do wonder if trying to cater for such a “huge range of people” is PR Week’s real problem. MediaGuardian covers an even broader range including PR, advertising, marketing and journalism yet does so in a more engaging way. I can read an article about consumer advertising (a 100 times removed from what I do) in MediaGuardian and still find it interesting.

Technorati : PR, PR Business, PR Week, public relations