When I was 21 I started a syndicated column, Small Business. The idea for it struck me as I was working for Texaco, a bloated bureaucracy of a place that had long forgotten it was once a small business.

Anyway, I had endless free time on my hands -no one there really worked- so I approached Newsday about the column idea, they liked it and I was off to the races. And surprise, surprise, the column worked and it was, just like that, appearing in dozens of newspapers. In a small way to the world, but an important way to me, I was THE media.
Given my column’s appearance in all of those newspapers every week, PR people circled. They wanted me to quote their clients. To highlight their products. To provide a channel for their philosophies.

And I ignored most of them. Why? Their arrows failed to hit the bull’s eye. In that case, the bulls eye what I was interested in writing about.
In learning about.

Yes, I was a representative of traditional media. But that was the only kind of media there was at the time. And surprise again, it is still the only kind of media there is. Digital journalists are still journalists.
The good ones don’t care about your agenda. They are focused on their own.

So the more things change, the more they stay the same. In digpr, the fundamental rule survives: there are too many arrows and too few bulls’ eyes. The gifted PR people put down their goals for a minute and think of the digital journalists’. What do they want? Each one individually. That’s the key.

When I wrote Small Business, of the 500 PR people who pitched me weekly, about 10 appeared in my column over and over again. The only agenda I ever saw on their parts was to land their arrows where I wanted them. And they did the research to know precisely where that was. And it was straight line to bull’s eye time. And it still is!

Mark Stevens
CEO

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