Thanks to the ever vigilant Larry O'Brien, I have a new post for the PR Wall of Shame.

From the blog post:

This isn't tied to any specific release. But if you've done this, you know who you are.

I regularly get press releases from PR firms and from vendors directly, which are in PDF.

Now, Adobe Acrobat is a very nice program, and it looks nice.

But friends, this adds a step to my ability to post or print your release. I have to get it out of PDF and into Word or InCopy or our CMS.

Recently, I have been noticing that the number of poorly targeted email press releases I'm receiving has been increasing.

I've also noticed what I call pseudo-targeting. The PR firm can't be bothered to research the media outlet they are targeting so they send out something like this:

Dear Walt:

So what's the first thing you want to know about an event you might be interested in attending? Just went through a two-page press release touting what sounds like a really interesting and useful training session. The release told me all kinds of things about the subject matter, the presenter, the company sponsoring it, etc. There's only one thing the flak left out: The dates. Doh!

Okay, all you PR folks who are calling at the last minute trying to find out if I'm going to ISA...yes I am, but I am not making any appointments because I will only be there a day and a half. I already have several appointments and if I want to actually see things, I need to do booth drivebys and nothing else. Sorry, you should have called last month...and try reading the script with some enthusiasm, okay? Sheesh.

It's been quite a while since I posted a salutary lesson on this blog, but I couldn't resist this one:

Dear Editor,

We haven't had any new entries for the p.r. wall for some time. Don't know if folks are getting better or we just haven't been paying attention. But today's package deliveries brought back memories of the halcyon days of the late '90s when I was covering manufacturing software, the Internet was just cranking up and everybody had more money (especially if it belonged to a venture capitalist financing a cocktail-napkin business plan that had .com somewhere in the verbiage) to spend than was good for any of us. 

News on the PR Wall of Shame front has been sparse of late. (Good job, people!) But our friend Andrew Bond, who digs up the dirt on process control in the U.K. and the E.U., shared a note with me that deserves some kind of award in this category. He got it from a fellow European editor. Recipients of a particular news release got this note TWO MONTHS AFTER the press conference to which it relates.

This is what happens when you don't check your languages... My predecessor in this chair, Paul Studebaker, now editor of Plant Services magazine, called it "the unfortunate acronym of the week." I think he's on to something.

 EuroBLECH 2008:Innovative solutions for sheet metal working

From a press release off Business Wire (and thank God, not an automation industry release):

Testifying at last week’s Food and Drub Administration’s hearing, Steven Havas, American Medical Association’s (AMA) vice president for science, quality and public health analogized that the number of U.S. deaths attributable to excess salt intake "is the equivalent of a jumbo jet with more than 400 passengers crashing every day of the year, year aft...