Today in This Guy Has a Pretty Cool Job News: on Monday we reviewed Newark Mayor Cory Booker‘s suggestion that politicians should act more like PR pros with the ultimate goal of engaging their constituents via social media and interactive town hall meetings rather than just hiding behind lecterns and tired press releases.

In addition to having a nice beard, Justin Herman runs social media at the U.S. General Services Administration’s Center for Excellence in Digital Government. This moniker may read as a joke to cynics, but Herman, like Booker, clearly believes that a more engaged government is a more effective and efficient government–and that politicians and administrators are mistaken if they see Twitter and Facebook as mere “announcement platform[s].”

Sound familiar?

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Earlier this week we made a big deal over The Washington Post‘s decision to enter the ongoing brand journalism sweepstakes by featuring sponsored advertorials on the front page of its website. That was an important step in the evolution of paid content, but today Fortune took the industry-wide shift in a slightly different direction: the magazine plans to write honest-to-goodness editorial pieces on behalf of its partners/advertisers.

What does this mean, exactly?

Fortune calls the project “Trusted Original Content”, and it will involve the magazine’s editorial teams creating Fortune-branded articles and video/other media content for marketers and PR pros to distribute on their own channels. So these pieces will bear the Fortune name and be written by real journalists, but they won’t qualify as native advertising. And brand reps won’t see them until they’re done–according to Adweek, Fortune’s editors will “have the final say”. Capital One will be the first party to participate by soliciting complimentary stories about small business.

Will promoting posts backed by the power of Fortune give a brand greater credibility? Time Inc. thinks so.

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Note to Taylor Swift: if you’re looking to improve/maintain your reputation or get more sympathy from the public regarding your perpetual boy troubles, engaging in bitchy spats is probably not the best way to go about it.

Responding to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler‘s (completely appropriate) Golden Globes joke warning her to “stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son” lest he turn up in thinly-veiled caricature on her next album, Swift dropped this bomb on her Vanity Fair interviewer:

“You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people, because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’”

Yes, those two are such Regina Georges, aren’t they? Oh, and that quote was from former secretary of state Madeline Albright, who doles out wisdom in between her free jazz drumming sessions.

Poehler and Fey’s responses displayed their superior media relations savvy.

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We have a feeling the team responsible for promoting the upcoming Disney flick Oz the Great and Powerful cringed when watching this BBC interview with star Mila Kunis, in which she and a very nervous correspondent discuss Jägerbombs, Baywatch, UK football and the art of pouring a pint with no foam.

At the same time, we have little doubt that this was indeed the most interesting interview Kunis gave on her press junket–and it even makes us slightly more interested in her movie. Shouldn’t we all encourage clients to be a little more personable when speaking to the press?

On second thought, we probably shouldn’t…

Paid content–it’s not just for blogs anymore! The Washington Post, currently known as the sad husk of one of our nation’s most influential and respected newspapers, just launched “Brand Connect“, which its editorial team describes as “a platform that connects marketers with the Washington Post audience in a trusted environment”. In other words, paid content. Sponsored posts. Native advertising. Brand journalism. And it’s not in a special advertorial section–it’s on the paper’s home page.

We could all see this coming, of course: print ad revenue at the Post has reached record lows. Sure, we still encounter the occasional impressive Game of Thrones promo printed with ink on honest-to-God paper–but print advertising should probably consider intensive therapy at this point.

You may ask why this is news, because lots of other publications do the very same thing.

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Have you been following the latest, dumbest political media scandal? We hope you answered “no”, because this one is a real doozy. It’s a classic case of “hack” vs. “flack” that will feel very familiar to anyone who has spent some time in PR or journalism.

To summarize: Bob Woodward, the veteran reporter who was one-half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation, had a mildly testy exchange with a White House rep over the pending “sequester” drama. Essentially, if the two parties can’t agree on a mix of new revenue and spending cuts, a big rash of cuts that they set up last year precisely to avoid this sort of showdown will go into effect. It’s basically President Obama versus the House of Representatives, so…politics as usual.

Alright, now what’s the “controversy”–and how does it relate to PR? Glad you asked!

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Consultant/speaker/PR expert Peter Shankman has announced that he will no longer be associated with journalist-to-source matching service HARO (Help a Reporter Out), which he created less than five years ago. He will leave Vocus (NASDAQ: VOCS)–the company that acquired HARO in 2010–at the end of March.

According to an email to PRNewser, Shankman will continue his speaking schedule–he will be “doing some high-level consulting on some major brands in the customer service/marketing arena” as he awaits the birth of his first child and prepares for the coming launch of his third book, Nice Companies Finish First.

To review: like all good publicists who understand relationship equity, Shankman often helped journalists find sources even when he had no dog in the fight. As Facebook attained liftoff in 2008, Shankman created a group to help journalists crowdsource their needs by submitting queries for PR pros to refer them to experts on given topics. It was similar to the older, staid Profnet, but it was free–and Shankman employed his Karmic rules to keep the desperate, spammy flacks away from his media subscribers.

HARO quickly outgrew Facebook’s ceiling at the time, and Shankman adjusted, moving the membership to a sign-up site HelpAReporter.com and ostensibly turning his network into a business.

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Today we came across a very interesting post from PSFK founder Piers Fawkes, who believes that PR firms need to abandon the concept of the “press trip”. Why? Because the practice of paying for reporters to travel in the hopes that they will offer positive coverage of a client is no longer sustainable–and Fawkes writes that “public relations executives are impeding media by failing to understand” that the modern digital newsroom requires journalists to publish every day instead of chasing stories about clients.

We have a few questions, the first of which is: Why haven’t we been invited on press trips? (Just kidding.) Seriously, though: How often does your firm send reporters on trips? Is the investment worth the return? Should PR teams stop expecting the media to come to them and start knocking on more doors? Will the press conference itself become irrelevant?

We’ve recently noticed a good deal of dialogue about the future of the press release. Some seem to feel that the press release–with its self-lauding and company-specific spin–is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant in a media world that runs on in-the-minute social media. Others, however, feel that PR professionals may simply need to tweak the way they approach both the releases themselves and the journalists they pitch. We tend to find ourselves in the second camp.

Lisa Gerber of Big Leap makes some good points in her recent blog post on the subject. While she concedes that journalists are wary of PR-generated press releases because of potential bias, she still feels that writing them and putting them out there is worth it–assuming you have your finger on the pulse of the audience you want to reach and an understanding of what writers do and do not find newsworthy.

“…please, stop asking your PR agency to crank out another news release on the upgrade of your manufacturing equipment; something in which only your mother and your CEO will take interest…”

Amen! The more spammy/niche/look-what-we-can-do information you send, the less likely writers and editors are to pay attention when you send them something that’s actually relevant to their audience.

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This week brings more evidence that publishing giant Condé Nast is remaking its PR/communications team for the new year. Last month we reported on the departure of Maurie Perl: industry leading light, Barbara Walters confidant and veteran of such titles as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

Now we’ve learned of another big-name departure–and the arrival of some new blood.

Shannon Eis, who led internal and executive communications at Condé , left last week for a new role as senior vice president of corporate communications at top PR firm MMW. Eis previously worked as senior vice president at Kaplow Communications (and yes, she will continue making regular appearances on The Late Show With David Letterman as a parenting expert).

This week brings news that Patricia Röckenwagner has been named Condé Nast’s senior vice president of communications. Industry vet Röckenwagner previously served as senior VP of marketing and communications for McGraw-Hill Companies and corporate comms director at Paramount Pictures.

It would appear that Condé Nast is reshaping its communications team as part of a larger strategic shift. Expect more announcements to foll0w.