Laziness is one of my pet hates. Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no stretch of the imagination a morning person and I don’t spend my Sundays ironing the pillowcases while training for a triathlon. But within a work context, it’s the root cause of most problems for me.

The web has created all kinds of opportunities to feed people’s laziness. Email allows you to copy & paste to your heart’s content, contributing heavily to the ‘different name in the body to the email address’ fail, or the gaping blank space following a very formal ‘dear sir/madam’. Yes, that still happens. Just last week, the team here each got sent a particularly vague email from a PR no less than seven times apiece.

But now, media distribution services even cut out the need to copy and paste. All you need to do is upload a release in the correct fields once, pick the verticals you want to send it out to (selecting as many as possible of course, even those that might even be slightly relevant) and you’re golden. The trouble is, the tone used within such a mail-out is almost impossible to get right. The journalist or blogger receiving the email gets sent something that’s almost immediately off-putting, with no pitch or introduction, no context, and often very strange formatting. To be able to pull that off, while scoring quality coverage on the back of it, is tough.

Then there’s the media database, which PRs worldwide rely upon to provide information on publications – which journalists they employ, beats, emails, telephone numbers, distribution sizes. The lot. The thing is, no matter how good the company running the database, there will inevitably be incorrect data within. I’m listed as the editor of Communicate magazine on one, just because someone’s read this column and been too lazy to check their facts. Unfortunately, this reflects badly on the PR that’s taken the information as kosher, and then sends me a letter or an email to that effect.

I hear the same shaky approach from some PRs via the phone today. I applaud the juniors who have the guts to just pick up the phone and test something out (within reason). There’s just no need to be rude, or dismissive, as a journalist. It’s an archaic approach that smacks of a feeling of superiority. Just as I wrote about PRs needing to be wary of the ‘god complex’ in new media age last week, the media need to be a bit more patient.

But I digress. In order for that mutual appreciation of each other’s roles, unfortunately a lot of the responsibility lies with the PR. The nature of the relationship means that communications professionals are generally the more proactive. A good journalist will get on the phone and keep in touch with their contacts, but a lot of the time it’s the PR that flags new stories.

It’s so easy to try and cut corners nowadays. Digital communication, let alone social media, means that if you’re a little lazy, you could sit at your desk all day without moving, and still carry out a basic, but passable campaign. Sadly, some clients that don’t know better might even think that that’s okay. PRs, I beg you to put the effort into targeting your message. Working with a smaller number of key bloggers or journalists, meeting them in person and taking the time to keep track of what they write about is worth so much more than a scattergun approach.

You should all know this by now, so it’s time to start actually putting it into practice. ‘PRs, I beg you to put the effort into targeting your message’