[WikiEN-l] PR consultants: perhaps Wikipedia is not the ideal promotional medium

[William Pietri]

On 04/02/2010 12:51 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
> Here's the question: If you can't tell it's PR, is there anything wrong
> with it?
>    


Possibly, which is the problem. The main function of PR is to put the 
best spin on things in a way that everybody accepts that as the truth. 
By its nature, it's unavoidably POV and COI. Bad PR gets caught doing 
this; good PR doesn't.

Wikipedia has shifted the balance of power some: there are new ways for 
PR people to get caught, and importing their broadcast-media habits 
makes them look dumb. But I have every reason to expect that PR people 
will adapt. Even so I think they'll have a hard time shifting the tone 
much on articles that get a lot of attention; the room to spin there is 
small. But for more obscure topics, I think there's plenty of gray area 
within which they can construct an article that suits their purposes. 
Purposes that are necessarily different than ours.

William