How Far We Have Come…
Despite how young I feel and how much I continue to learn about my industry every day, the truth is I have been a public relations consultant for more than 30 years. From time to time, I regale my younger colleagues with tales of how we did it “back in the day,” usually invoking mumbled comments like “he can’t be serious!” or “good God, how old IS he?!?”
For those of you who haven’t been at this quite as long, here are a few examples of how we went about “communicating” back in the day.
- Here in Chicago, PR firms were always located on Michigan Avenue to be near the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and other major media outlets. More on this later.
- I wrote lots of press releases. On typewriters. IBM Selectrics if I was lucky. I edited each release in pen and walked it to the team administrative assistant, who re-typed it in proper format. I made final edits, and the admin re-typed it again before copying it onto client letterhead using a photocopier the size of a Smart Car.
- The admin stuffed each release into an envelope, pasted on mailing labels and ran the lot through a noisy postage meter before dropping it all into the outgoing mail. Three days later I started calling media to follow up on my “breaking” news.
- If the release was more timely, I would phone the local messenger company, and a sweaty kid on a bicycle would pedal the releases to media outlets around town.
- If the release was really hot, I would call up a close media contact and make a quick “pitch” over the phone. If the reporter liked my pitch, I would grab my coat and the release and walk across the street to the Trib or Sun-Times. I took the elevator unescorted to the newsroom, shook hands with my contact and made my case for the story and a client interview.
- When I did land an interview it was face-to-face and often over lunch at the hottest restaurant of the week. Even if there was no interview, I took reporters to lunch all the time to build relationships and pitch our clients.
- One day, the owner of the firm where I worked called us into the conference room to introduce us to a “state-of-the-art” new technology that would change our lives. It was called a facsimile machine and it looked like something Ben Franklin built in his barn. It took 10 minutes to transmit a single page, and we had to use it sparingly because of the hefty long-distance telephone charges.
- Press conferences. We had them all the time. For just about anything. And reporters came!
As I write this piece on my tiny laptop and upload it to my SharePoint account before posting it as a blog entry, I am indeed reminded of just how far we have come.