Today we’re happy to bring you a guest post by Lindsay Goldwert, a senior program executive at a global tech PR firm. Before she leapt to the dark side, Lindsay worked at the New York Daily News, ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CourtTV, Glamour and Redbook. In her spare time, she writes short stories.

As a communications vet who’s worn both the “journalism” and “PR” hats, she provides us with a very unique take on the delicate dance that we call “media relations.” Enjoy!

I have a confession: until very recently I was a working journalist–and I was very cruel to PR people.

Who could blame me? Tasked with writing and producing “life & style” content for the New York Daily News’s bustling website, I could not be bothered with endless email pitches that had nothing to do with my beat. I got snippy when people called to ask me if I had received their e-mail, yet every time I cleared my inbox it managed to fill up again within the hour.

By mid-morning every day, I already had a slate of content to work on–most of it stories that bounced off the day’s news. Yet PR people still called me (always when I was on deadline) to ask whether I might have time for a desk-side client interview or a three-hour lunch event.

Didn’t they know that, as a digital reporter, I never left my desk? Soon, I didn’t just ignore emails from PR people — I deleted them en masse without reading them. Eventually, I got so frustrated with the ill-timed telephone calls that I just stopped picking up my phone altogether.

Sound familiar?

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Earlier this week we delved into why PR services are a good investment for startup companies. Today we came across a related post in Entrepreneur magazine listing 10 questions that small business owners should ask themselves before hiring a PR firm.

The overwhelmingly positive response to Jane Porter‘s article tells us that it is extremely relevant to those ambitious businessmen/women wondering whether they should make the move. Because it approaches the PR “deliverables” issue from a small business perspective, we also believe it to be crucial reading for folks in the industry (and of course we agree that “a successful [PR] campaign can help you expand your business in ways you never could on your own”). Here are the 10 questions:

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