Yesterday our friend and PR veteran Peter Himler wrote a Forbes article with an intriguing headline: “The Journalist and the PR Pro: A Broken Marriage?” Given the chatter over Monday’s guest post by a former journalist turned PR master, we thought we’d explore the idea a little further.

Himler’s main point: a significant number of the students in the journalism program where he spoke last week don’t want to write for The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal–they want to go into PR and advertising. They want to write sponsored content, not investigative journalism. Of course this makes sense, because journalism can be a very tough and often underpaid pursuit.

Himler, like many in the industry, believes that the always-challenging relationship between hacks like us and pitchmen/women has taken a turn for the worse. Yet we agree with his conclusion: this marriage may be strained, but it’s hardly broken.

On Monday Lindsay Goldwert called on her journalist friends to make a list of “do’s and dont’s” for PR pros. Himler’s piece includes both sides of the equation, so we’d like to flip the script: how should journalists and bloggers interact with PR folks? Himler’s suggestions and our comments after the jump:

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Today we bring you a guest post courtesy of Leslie Campisi, managing director for global communications consultancy Hotwire PR. Like every PR agency around the world, Hotwire wanted to use the best available tools to connect its clients to the most influential individuals in their respective fields. But the Hotwire team found that the available technology didn’t meet their needs as directly as they would like, so they did what any truly enterprising business would do: they made their own!

I wish I could take credit for Listening Post, Hotwire’s new influencer analytics platform, but it was in development long before I arrived. What I can do is to draw a line under why it’s so important to our business here in the US and what I think it says about our agency.

Data has a big role to play in PR.

There are lots of influencer management tools already available to communications pros. It’s easy to dismiss the proliferation of dashboards, scores, and workflow tools by the sheer number of them that are on the market. (And, in some cases, by their complexity, price point, and lack of understanding about how PR people actually do their jobs.)

But a booming market for influencer management software is testament to just how unwieldy the challenges of effectively managing important relationships have become. The volume of data contained in the social graph, and where it intersects with proprietary client–and agency–information is too rich to be ignored by PR folks. In many cases, it contains the very proof that we’re doing our jobs effectively. Who’d want to ignore that?

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Sometimes the key for a startup or other new business venture looking to break out can be a single article in a big-name magazine or newspaper. What startup founder looking for “Angel investors” wouldn’t want to say “did you see us in the Wall Street Journal?”

Of course, in order to receive such press mentions, businesses usually require the services of people called publicists or PR professionals who specialize in pitching the story of the scruffy startup to big name glossies, trade papers–or even lowly blogs like ours!

But for those who want to get all those press mentions on your website without actually, you know, doing the work, we present The Startup Legitimizer–a single webpage that can fill all your startup PR needs with a few simple clicks. Which publications would give your cred the biggest boost? The New York Times? TechCrunch? BuzzFeed? TED Talks?!

These famous names, divided into the “kind of legit” and “really legit” categories, even come in pre-organized bundles like “innovators” and “game changers”, which are totally different things. Just choose your favorites, copy and paste the HTML code and say goodbye to pesky PR flacks forever! Check us out!

(Just kidding. Startups absolutely should invest in PR services. And thanks to Digiday for the tip.)

It’s all about “gamification” these days, right? Video games don’t just entertain us and distract us during down time on the train–they also help brands publicize new campaigns, encourage user engagement and even develop new products and promotional materials.

But can games truly educate the public in the interest of facilitating widespread social change? Games for Change certainly thinks so. We’ll refer to what they do as “advocacy gaming”–and it makes a lot of sense.

The brand’s latest, most visible project is a collaboration with New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, best known for his reporting on international human rights and gender equality abuses. It’s called “Half the Sky”, and it’s truly a multimedia effort: the Facebook game debuted this week, but it all started with Kristof’s book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (co-written with his wife and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn).

The book inspired a spinoff series on PBS–and then Games for Change got involved with the help of social gaming leader Zynga and other big-name sponsors.

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In case you missed it (because we somehow did!), HBO ran a massive Game of Thrones ad in last Monday’s New York Times. At first glance, this spot may have sent readers ducking for cover or calling out for the nearest sword-wielding resident of Winterfell.

We’d say this promo campaign, complete with fictional stories that ran parallel with the show’s plot points and an ominous dragon shadow splayed across two pages of newsprint, proves that newspaper advertising can still generate some serious buzz when it’s done right.

Of course, HBO isn’t relying on print alone for its major GoT marketing campaign; in a follow-up to the NYT ad, the premium cable giant decided to take the duck-and-cover dragon shadow to the next level by featuring the image on the facade of its own Los Angeles high-rise last Tuesday.

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Last night Yahoo issued a belated response to The New York Times on the totally unnecessary “no telecommuting, ever” controversy by releasing a statement that effectively read “Mind your own business; this doesn’t apply to you.”

The brand spokesperson’s words:

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

That’s it. No further elaboration, because “We don’t discuss internal matters”. A little translation via inside sources: Marissa Mayer “is in crisis mode” trying to fix the malfunctioning culture of a company that until recently sponsored “work from home” policies loose enough to allow employees to launch startups while still technically working for Yahoo full time.

Yahoo clearly doesn’t want to take part in the larger debate about telecommuting, internal cohesion and working mothers. One thing is clear, though: anyone who doubted that the company’s culture is in serious trouble can now rest assured that the rumors are true.

Also: Here’s an interesting post on the subject from KMSPR CEO Kathleen Schmidt. She argues that, while the “blanket memo” was not a great idea, this “controversy” is really all about the fact that Mayer happens to be a woman–and many in the corporate world would applaud a similar decision coming from a male executive.

What do we think?

Yesterday The New York Times Company announced plans to rename its 125-year-old Paris-based paper The International Herald Tribune as…you guessed it, The International New York Times.

We understand this move: While the Tribune is a well-established name in international journalism, the Times brand is more valuable than ever in an era of shrinking revenue–and its executives are eager to expand its influence by tying its various properties together under the general NYT banner.

Still, something about this new name bugs us. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, and readers will understandably be confused about the differences (if any) between the publications. The New York Times already boasts some of the world’s best international journalism, so why even make the distinction?

Maybe this “new” merger just needs a catchy, less clunky nickname. Any bright ideas?

It’s a perfect 21st century PR conundrum: You’re a big company. Your servers got hacked. Now you have to make a decision: Go public? Hold back? Deny everything? More and more big-name brands are taking the “strength in numbers” approach by admitting that they were “compromised”–as long as their competitors do it first.

Google was the first big brand to call itself the victim of cyber hackery back in 2010, and since then others have joined the growing chorus: Earlier this month it was Twitter, followed by Facebook, Apple, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times. (Burger King and Jeep had their Twitter feeds hacked this week, but that’s a different thing entirely.)

Some brands, like Bloomberg, continue to issue less-than-believable denials. We understand the desire to avoid saying “Yes, we were hacked by China”–but this kind of stubbornness can make brands look worse, especially when third-party sources confirm the reports.

Should companies go public after being hacked to get ahead of the story? Or should they hide in the shadows and issue no comment until the time is right?

On Monday, Politico posted a story with the traffic-bait headline “Obama, the puppet master“. Why is it relevant to us? Because it’s really about the administration’s masterful use of modern PR tools and techniques to get its message across to the American people–whether the press likes it or not.

So what makes the Obama team’s approach to public relations so brilliant? Let’s review Politico’s assessment of its strategy, point by point:

1. Choose friendly media outlets and avoid tough questions. This is an old chestnut followed by all politicians, and it doesn’t just relate to ideology: Obama went on Fox News more than once. But, as Politico puts it, why answer tough questions from The New York Times or anyone else when you can go on The View?

This is an important point: Obama has given more interviews than any other recent president, but he largely refuses to sit down for print queries with the NYT, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal in order to avoid “tough, unpredictable questions.”

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On Wednesday we advised Tesla founder/eccentric weirdo Elon Musk to stop insisting that The New York Times auto critic John Broder intentionally sabotaged his Model S test drive because he hates electric cars.

We are shocked to learn that Musk did not take our advice, instead releasing another lengthy statement in which he critiqued nearly every element of Broder’s highly detailed follow-up to his initial post.

We won’t get into the technical specifics as others have covered them extensively, but here’s a good example of the nature of this tit-for-tat showdown: Musk accuses Broder of driving in circles in order to intentionally run down the car’s battery; Broder says that he was simply trying to locate one of the company’s poorly-lit Supercharger stations. He said, she said.

Again, we understand Musk’s desire to protect his baby.

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