Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your quarterly dose of journalist pet peeves on Twitter.
Why do we do this, you might ask? They say there’s no better way to learn than by making mistakes. And when PRs make mistakes, journalists like to make that public. We don’t take it too personally, after all PR is a people business, so technically these are not real, hard mistakes like in science. But we do like to try and make it a bit of a science. In fact, we see it all as a bit of a social experiment, and these ‘pet peeves’ are like findings. Findings that feed our understanding of journalists, PRs and their relationships.
We don’t take it all at face value though. We do have our own reasoning capability. And we do have to admit that journalists’ complaints are not always legit (sorry journo friends!). But anyways, the point here is that we can all learn something valuable… if only someone could collect, analyse and make sense of all these pet peeves.
Oh, wait! We do! And we did! If you’re new to pet peeves, we’ve been doing this since May 2020. To skip reading through hundreds of pet peeves you can also check out this piece on Maddyness, where our founders Mauro and JJ summarise some 300-plus pet peeves from tech journos over the last few years.
So without further ado, here are the pet peeves from January, February and March!
Circling back is the Voldemort of follow up language.
Another classic – messaging via Instagram or channels other than email
We do love a good “super”, but let’s keep in mind that your super duper LinkedIn posts shouldn’t all start the same.
Interesting, why would anyone contact journalists from a noreply@ email? But good to know you don’t lose all your lives for blasting!
We all love kimchi. It was just an informational email!
This is PR extremism.
So bad it’s like it’s on purpose. I guess if you write for the BBC, and there are millions of PRs, the infinite monkey theorem starts turning into reality.
This is so bad that we love it (not PR though).
“Beats the purpose” comes to mind.
“Monkey see, monkey do” doesn’t work in PR.
If what you’re selling sounds like a commodity, there won’t be a market in media.
Timing is gold.
Exclusivity is the biggest prize.
Nothing quite as effective as making someone feel like they are second choice.
At least it wasn’t 17!
If in doubt, email is the absolute king.
Can’t get enough pet peeves?
Check out Mauro and JJ’s piece for Maddyness UK summarising lessons from years of pet peeves from tech journalists and our previous pet peeve summaries:
