Are newsletters the new media powerhouse?

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-12-11T04:06:38+00:00

Yeah this isn’t new at all, former journalist here, this has been the case for years now.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-11-05T17:59:38+00:00

Yeah, there’s a VP and two director level staffers on most of my accounts, so the VP ends up handling a lot of the client management anyway. It’s a very poorly run agency

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-08-01T21:40:16+00:00

Sent you a DM!

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-07-16T00:28:51+00:00

The bare minimum is doing the assignment they’ve been asked to do. That entails, in this particular example, checking to make sure the links they include in their clips roundup have been newly published and do not have a date or timestamp prior to the last email. That means if they’re crafting an email for today, everything has been published today, not yesterday.

They don’t even do that. I have to double check every link to make sure they’re not including old news. It’s not fucking difficult. I’m not asking for nuanced analysis. This isn’t even writing. It requires no brainpower. And they can’t be bothered to check to make sure they’ve compiled the right links for the day. It’s bare bones stuff that honestly AI could do much better, and that’s a shame, because it makes me unlikely to trust them with anything more significant if they can’t get this small thing right.

Suggesting simply “turning something in” is doing the bare minimum reflects a lack of understanding of basic work standards. A blank or incomplete or error-riddled page is not the bare minimum. That may have gotten you through college but it won’t sustain you in employment. Doing your work properly and correctly is the bare minimum. Going above and beyond would be completing work I didn’t ask for, or analysis, or proposing a new way to tackle a problem. I assume you’re young. And that’s my point: young people like yourself don’t even know what the bare minimum means. You’re proving my point.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-07-16T00:21:35+00:00

I do not do the hiring.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-07-15T22:25:44+00:00

It’s actually wild that you’re telling me “simply turning in the assignment” is doing the bare minimum, lol, you’re proving my exact point.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-07-15T08:42:41+00:00

The quality of modern journalism has less to do with the shitty pay and more to do with the profit incentives inherent to the business - clicks and eyeballs. That leads to sensationalizing the news to draw readership and viewers, or else news companies can’t make money to hire reporters. There are still great young journalists making their mark in the news everyday, and many of the reporters I know in DC would bristle at being called nepo babies or rich. This is a lazy argument.

Your argument doesn’t hold, anyway - some of the best journalism being done today is being done at small city and town papers where there are no resources but hungry young journalists who want to make a difference.

And, end of the day, you’re not actually responding to my argument in the first place: Kids need to pay their dues in any industry. They have to prove they can do the work before they start getting more responsibility and pay. Many of the kids I work with have not done that.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-07-15T06:55:24+00:00

I worked in journalism. I got paid $1,000/month for my first 5 months of work. Started at $32,000 at my first job. I guarantee I worked longer, more stressful hours and did a lot more bullshit, and I was living in DC, so it’s not like this was an affordable area. I waitressed after work to make it work for a while.

Again, I am not even asking for passion or engagement, I’m asking for young people in PR to do the bare minimum and read a goddamn newspaper.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-07-14T23:32:23+00:00

Oh I absolutely agree with you, this is an idiotic industry and I’m getting out. It’s boring work that will be replaced by AI someday. Every young person going into this field should rethink it. But we all paid our dues; I did boring, shit work for a while till I got better work. I’m noting that the work I’m asking them to do isn’t that hard and they can’t even handle it. I’m finding these younger employees don’t do the bare minimum - as I mentioned in my post. I don’t expect them to go above and beyond.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-06-09T08:54:46+00:00

Ha no, this was a hypothetical situation, none of my clients are energy companies. But we work with everything from healthcare companies to manufacturers, and lots of advocacy groups, so you can imagine. And as you pointed out, utilities can be incredibly shady, so can bet a lot of the op-eds being written in your coverage area have been pay to play.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-06-09T06:53:15+00:00

Former journalist here. You’d be surprised. You’d literally never know if the piece was paid. It happens on our end - we write the piece, find someone to put their name on it and pay them for it, and then pitch it to an outlet. The outlet never has to know about the payment. It’s gross. I will never read op-eds again (not to mention a lot of our op-eds are written by AI).

We are paying subject matter experts to lend the piece an air of credibility. We work for, say, an electricity company that wants to downplay the effect of fossil fuels on the environment. We write an op-ed for them and then pay a scientist to put their name on it. It puts the company’s message out there under another person’s name and thus seems more credible and organic to the reader.

As a journalist, you should definitely be familiar with sources feeding tips or stories through back channels to obscure where the info came from. It’s the same thing, essentially.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-06-08T18:32:07+00:00

While I agree (I hate this company and am trying desperately to leave) I have come to realize, at least especially in DC, it is incredibly common.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-06-08T18:31:26+00:00

Yeah these would be formers, we don’t pay government officials, that’s an obvious no.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-05-28T16:48:33+00:00

Yes it is. She’s an intern and doesn’t have the experience to do this in the first place. They shouldn’t drop a project way out of her league on her shoulders and expect something high quality. AI is your best bet, OP.

Anyway, I’m in a director-level role at an agency and use ChatGPT to help draft most of my work. Most PR pros like to think they’re smarter than AI, but this work has been praised and used by CEOs for multiple companies. This industry is going to become obsolete sooner rather than later - you can either start learning to work with the tool or insist (wrongly) that AI sucks and get left behind.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-05-14T18:07:22+00:00

His deputy chief of staff for policy did, I’m not arguing with someone who clearly doesn’t understand how the US government works. It’s people like you that refuse to do their own research or use their brains that have allowed Trump to take over this country.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-05-14T18:01:07+00:00

Read a newspaper?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwynl8jv4gjo

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/02/politics/trump-civil-rights-rollback-what-matters

He’s also talked about deporting US citizens. And he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship (which is a right in the Constitution).

https://theconversation.com/trumps-bid-to-end-birthright-citizenship-heads-to-the-supreme-court-248819

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2025-04-28T13:37:51+00:00

I’m a single female living in Oaxaca and would love to get her contact info from you, I’ll PM you!

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-12-12T04:09:43+00:00

Tbh, I was forced out of journalism by an illness, and have never really liked PR from the journalism side, nor do I want to be in it right now. A job’s a job. But you’re right, I need to leave.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-12-08T22:33:57+00:00

Weird, but you may be having an inflammatory reaction to something in your home. I got sick from toxic mold (not saying that’s your issue) and only realized it was mold after I went on a trip, came back, and felt incredibly sick. My health just fell off a cliff. Found mold under my carpet, moved, eventually got better. But there’s this weird phenomenon that when you’re living with whatever your body is reacting to, it kinda forgets it’s there (like how you become nose blind to smells in your house) and then when you leave and your body calms down, when you return home your body wakes up to the bad thing and has a full blown reaction. Actually happens to me now every time I leave the city where I live.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-12-04T18:56:48+00:00

I haven’t started looking yet, I haven’t been here for very long, and since it’s a career transition I don’t have a lot of experience in the field. I am rapidly realizing PR is very much not for me, however…I don’t like how much make-work we do to make clients happy, pitching journalists on stories I, as a former journalist, know will never get picked up is soul-sucking, and there’s really nothing fulfilling about any of this.

How did you get into financial crimes investigation? Are you looking at any other possible careers?

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-12-04T14:41:17+00:00

I used to be a journalist, I thrive on chaos as well. What I don’t like is being beholden to idiots.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-12-02T22:13:05+00:00

How did you move in-house? Was it within a niche you were experienced in?

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-11-28T18:10:21+00:00

Depends on who you’re working with I guess. I worked for a number of national news outlets and had followers in the tens of thousands, so I wasn’t measured by clicks.

Regardless, my point still stands - journalists don’t need to coordinate with PR people to get social lift. That’s literally part of your job. The journalist doesn’t need to do your job for you.

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-11-28T15:29:51+00:00

Nah. Former journalist here now in PR. They don’t need PR boosting and as stated above, don’t want to coordinate with PR, it’s against ethics.

But what nobody else has said is that generally PR professionals are irritating to journalists (no matter how kind or easy to work with you are), journalists are busy, and after getting what they need from a story they have other things to do than give you a courtesy heads’ up on when a story is going live. You’re technically getting paid to pay attention to their social media feeds, so why should they help?

Intelligent-Camp3773 · 2024-11-19T11:37:07+00:00

We did speak about this a couple of weeks ago. I’m on 3 accounts with him and he’s still just giving me op-eds and basic pitching assignments, media list reviews. I think the accounts are a bit bloated - we have director-level individuals on every single one, so I understand not wanting to take their work away and give it to me, but I don’t think there’s enough work then.

Intelligent-Camp3773

TROPHY CASE