Most of us could agree that the advent of the internet has brought lots of great things, especially for communications professionals: email, social networking, youtube, rss, instant messaging et al. Not all that glisters is gold though, and the ubiquity of cheap mass communication has had a downside*, especially for journalists; rubbish PRs sending rubbish press releases out indiscriminately.
I work for the Soil Association, editing our membership magazine Living Earth, and managing our small publications team. I also write a blog about my allotment here. For the benefit of any PR reading this the Soil Association is concerned with organic, healthy and sustainable food and farming. It's a fairly broad subject, touching many different issues. But that doesn't mean I need press releases about, for example, taking dogs into the workplace (in fact I'd go further on this point; no one needs a blog about taking dogs into the workplace).
That said, I have nothing against PRs sending this stuff out - after all they're just doing their jobs. So, while I can't use lots of this stuff professionally, this blog is an opportunity for some of these finely crafted press releases to see the light of day.
(*So yeah, I'm obviously leaving aside the real downsides of the internet like nasty porn, pedophile rings and splash pages with rubbish animations.)
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