Gawker

Gawker obtained an internal Burson-Marsteller email that plainly asks senior management to use CEO Mark Penn's latest Wall Street Journal "Microtrends" column as a marketing tool to pitch potential clients.

This particular column was about "Glamping," i.e. glamorous camping. BM EVP and former Bill Clinton speechwriter Josh Gottheimer sent an email to the very top people suggesting they use the column as an excuse to call the national campground association, Coleman, "or emi ll beam etc." and set up meetings for "mjp." I assume he meant L.L. Bean, and either REI or EMS.

Illustrating what I call the "Denton Model" of blogging, former PRWeek reporter Hamilton Nolan weaves solid reporting with a full-dredge of all negative news Penn has been involved in, most notably his being spun out of the Hillary Clinton campaign for conflicts of interest. Once you're in Gawker's crosshairs, you can't get out.

Business development is a bare knuckle game so we can't really fault Gottheimer's tactic. Nolan also takes a shot at Dow Jones and their Code of Ethics, and makes a stronger a point about the business of these softer trend op-eds.

What never fails to surprise me about these emails though, is the needless typos and errors for the sake of looking really, really busy. It's better to be clear.

Apparently Crockett, Tubbs, and not even Spencer were for hire in the case of pesky blogger Hamilton Nolan from Gawker. Two private investigators have been snooping around his home town in Florida seeking information, saying it's a background check for a potential job.

The former PRWeek reporter joined Gawker in January of this year to cover advertising, media, and PR.

I checked with Nolan and he said "I have no idea who it is," but did confirm that about 10% of his posts are about the public relations industry.

What is clear though, is the PIs, or "dicks" involved, Steven Brown and Rachel Singleton don't investigate many people who have the ability to publish their email addresses and cell phone numbers for the entire Manhattan media scene to see.

Feel free to send information on this incident to us here, or use the Anonymous Tips window on the main page. Discretion guaranteed.

Being the last of the mediabistro.com blogs to write about the NY Times magazine cover story penned by former Gawker, and current Galleycat blogger Emily Gould, we're taking a different tack.

Are you in PR? You have something in common with the tat-clad blogstress. If you have ever emailed a blogger, put your name on a press release, or blogged under your own name you are in a sense, a public figure. It's an important change (and not all that new) in our industry and it's critical to understand it.

The new rules of engagement are there are no rules. A blogger or even a mainstream journalist can paste your name in a story whether you like it or not. This is a good thing as long as you know when and where to respond. The best thing to do now is to read the classic Fast Company story "The Brand Called You" and start gently steering your own brand toward the type of PR you want to do.

To illustrate the spectrum of personal exposure online, Gould relates a story illustrated by cutlery on a table, where people without Google traces are the fork on one end, and the ubiquitous Julia Allison are the spoon at the other extreme. It's getting harder for PR people to be the fork. The full excerpt of the example is pasted after the jump:

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(Guerrilla domain squatting begets very douchey counter-squatting; image found on RonnTorossianPR.com at press time)

Leaks, lawsuits and cyber-squatting continues in the saga of the Fastest Growing PR Agency ever, 5WPR.

CEO Ronn [sic] Torossian as he's known on Gawker, is threatening another enemy with a lawsuit. This time it's his own recently departed head of HR over help she may have given to a colleague's job search.

The scoop belongs to former PRWeek reporter Hamilton Nolan, of course.

Hamilton can forget launching a website using his own name as the URL. Guess who bought the domain? Yes, 5WPR!

We're looking in to the merry prankster behind RonnTorossianPR.com which at press time conveyed quite a clean and refreshing message.

Get good interviews and the hits will come. That sentence could describe PR video maven Doug Simon's strategy to bring traffic to his D S Simon Vlog Views video blog.

Simon's interview with Associated Press entertainment editor Jesse Washington, now well known for having Britney Spear's obituary written and ready to go, landed on Gawker.com today.

Disclosure: This PRNewser counts Doug Simon among his former bosses.

(yup, still available on WireImage)

After dutifully (some areas of the PR beat are just, dutiful) reading Gawker's items about flackstress/felloness Lizzie Grubman's inability to vote, or not, we logged in to WireImage.com and briefly became excited by not seeing that sun-scorched images of her from last summer. We thought maybe she had them removed. Alas, you'll find three if you scroll.

Sigh. She's taught the business two things about the persistent nature of media. One, don't do anything to get on the Smoking Gun. Two, don't walk the line if you're orange.

Then, an epiphany upon reading the deliciously baked poetry of commenter BettyCrocker: Is Gawker's traffic mostly from addicted supercommenters? Betty commented 19 times yesterday, and 19 times the day before. Damn, we really need comments back on PRNewser.

BettyCrocker's delightful poem about Ms. Grubman is after the jump:

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