Michael Atmore is dancing as fast as he can. As editorial director of Fairchild Publications' weekly Footwear News (20,000-circulation), Atmore also oversees the six-times-a-
year WSA Show Dailies (in concert with the World Shoe Association) and the bi-annual WWD Accessories (along with Footwear News' corporate sibling and Fairchild flagship WWD.)
Footwear News and its ancillary products cover all of the markets tied to shoes: wholesale, retail, design, ready-to-wear collections and accessories markets. Atmore handles a lot
of content and steers a lot of stories, but PR people are not as cooperative as he might like.
Atmore's Bugaboos
- Pitching a story that has already run, which Atmore says happens way too often. "These are PR [execs] who are just not paying attention," he says. While Atmore has
verbally jousted with PR people who insist that the story being pitched hasn't run, the flip side of the coin (see second Bugaboo) is even more frustrating. - Insisting that a story has run when, in fact, it hasn't. Atmore says this has eaten up more time than he cares to count. "I once got into a heated argument with a PR person
who insisted that we had already run a story," he says. "It was quite an intense battle of going back and forth. At the end of the day, it was learned that this person was new and
didn't have his information accurate." - Promised exclusives that do not materialize. In one case, Footwear News was promised an exclusive and Atmore soon saw the same story in a competing publication. This didn't
win the PR firm any favors with him. "They claimed the other publication broke its vow" not to run the story just yet, Atmore says. For PR people, "you're only as good as your
word," he says. Promising exclusives that go by the boards is "not the way to build relationships."
What works: Hammering home the "exclusive" angle that is a mantra at Fairchild Publications, Atmore says the publication "loves people who provide exclusives. The best thing a
PR person can do is give us access," he says. PR execs who are "honest, fast and responsive and can deliver we say, Bravo."