Today’s guest post comes to you courtesy of our friends at PressDoc, the (social) media-friendly press release distribution, tracking and measurement service. To celebrate the release of PressList, a new service designed to help users pitch stories to journalists, the PressDoc team conducted a series of Q&As with experts in the field.

Their first interview subject is Kevin Dugan, a veteran of both the journalism and PR disciplines. He is the co-author of the Bad Pitch Blog, winner of an Award of Commendation in the Blog category from the Public Relations Society of America and a listed member of the AdAge “Power 150“. He tweets under the @prblog handle. 

From your experience, which email pitches do journalists pay attention to, and what makes them read the press release?

Pitching success boils down to relevance. In fact, the list is more important than the pitch. If it’s relevant? It can be long. It can have large attachments. I don’t care because I’m focused on the relevant content and not how it was packaged.

How often is it relevant? Rarely.

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For a “lighter” take on 2010 PR industry predictions, we turned to Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan, founders of “The Bad Pitch Blog.”

On business prospects for 2010:

Kevin: According to economists, we’ll be eating Ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner until 2015. But I think PR business will be flat and any growth will be from companies simply doing more with less. Translation: longer hours for the same pay — if you’re lucky. But it’s how these things go in the service industry. It keeps us all thinking, reinventing and learning.

Richard: I will be up in 2010. Thanks to Viagra.

Kevin: Let me guess, you’ll be stiff competition?

On PR M&A activity in 2010:

Kevin: There will be more mergers and acquisitions in general. TV will see the biggest shakeup. Perhaps We and SyFy channels will merge and become WyFy? OK, probably not, but TV’s decline is following newspapers in short order.

Richard: Nothing will merge because no one has the money to spend on an agency. Many will close. Some will merge with small shops. Some will do both. PS: Big success story: AOL! Yeah.

Kevin: You mean “Aol.”

Richard: Oops. They could sue.

Kevin: I see more lawsuits in 2010!

Richard: Hmm. Yeah, it’s the new blackmail.

The biggest PR story of 2010 will be…

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The following is a guest post from Kevin Dugan, director of marketing for Empower MediaMarketing and co-founder of the Bad Pitch Blog, where this post originally ran. Follow Dugan on Twitter: @prblog.

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year” …for bad pitches. Our email boxes have been stuffed with a few politically correct holiday cards and a metric ton of bad pitches desperately trying to tie-in to the KwanzmasHann season (yeah, I skipped Festivus, save it for the airing of the grievances).

Seriously though, lawn chairs in December? OK, nothing that blatantly off season. But there’s a good way and a bad way to tie your client to the most over commercialized season with the slowest news cycle known to modern civilization. Here are three tips:

1) Christmas in July: Retailers figure out what they’re doing for the holidays six months in advance. The earlier the planning process, the better your odds in finding the best, most original and on-brand tie-in. Pick something you can own.

2) Be Inspired, But NEVER Copy: There are more holiday campaigns than consumers it seems. But which ones really stand out? Why do they stand out? There are core elements that make a story, or even an annual gimmick, resonate with a crowd. Consider this as inspiration. Just don’t try to Elf Yourself or Talk to the Moose. It’s been done.

3) Don’t Force It: If your tie-in doesn’t feel right, don’t force it. This may be a sign you should focus on a different holiday where you can do something that has a bigger impact for less effort.

There may or may not be an opportunity during the holidays for your client to shine like the North Star on Christmas Eve. The key is directing their efforts to a spot on the calendar that makes more sense.

Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer, the PR execs behind the Bad Pitch Blog are going beyond writing about the bad, and getting in to teaching the good by way of a webinar next Wednesday. The Crappy PR URL is to get your attention.

What caught our eye is the focus on pitching, rather than on things like how understand metrics, or build a Facebook page, or managing your Twitter feeds.

Much of what’s lost lately among the many Tips & Tools blog posts (including within our own category), whitepapers, and vitural conferences is getting to the Why. As Dugan explained in a recent post, understanding Why over What–or “tell me why I give a sh&#” as I sometimes say–is an important exercise.

For 50 bucks you get to tune in and interact with the bloggers, and you get an e-copy of Laermer’s Full Frontal PR book as well. Plus there are ten scholarships, or freebies, available: five for students, and five for the unemployed. Chosen scholars will get a chance to pitch Bad Pitch Blog’s readers sometime after the webinar. I guess for jobs.

BuzzStream, a CRM/contact management service geared towards social media, launched in private beta today. One of the cool things about the service is how it can be installed into your web toolbar, allowing you to easily bookmark a blog post, article or tweet into a contact record for that blogger/reporter, complete with a variety of influencer metrics and contact info added automatically. You can then filter your contacts on a variety of levels as well as track all previous interactions with the contacts in e-mail and Twitter. Strategic Public Relations blogger Kevin Dugan may be disappointed to find out he only has a “medium” influencer rating.

One of the things BuzzStream doesn’t do is provide a media list database service. So, you will still have to import your lists from Cision, Vocus or your good ol’ homemade Excel or Outlook contact lists. The other option is tagging content and building as you go. Founder Paul May told PRNewser that the service is in beta for the next six to eight weeks and “we’ll launch as a paid product” after that.

PRNewser has 100 beta invites for our readers to test out the service for free, available at a first come first basis until June 19th.