PR blogs on the increase

Constanin Basturea is doing a great job of tracking new PR-related blogs that crop up each month. In February, he found another 55 new PR blogs.

Check out the recent-launched IABC blog on measurement. I suspect this will start to gain quite a following.

The Guardian's Comment is Free project

Having assembled some 200 contributors, it will be interesting to see how the Guardian's Comment is Free project pans out.

A Journalism.co.uk article quoted the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Emily Bell as saying,

"There is no reason why a traditional journalist would take notice of the web,
she said, but that she'd be doing a disservice to the newspaper's columnists if
she didn't show them why their major competition is now online. One of the
strongest resources of a journalistic brand is its commentators."

It will be curious to see which columists embrace blogging as a new way to engage with their readers. As the article points out, there is still prestige associated with being published in a newspaper - but increasingly their audiences are moving online. In the same way that PR professionals who don't embrace blogging will be left behind, journalists could possibly face the same fate.

And newspapers face similar challenges. If indeed one of the strongest resources of a journalistic brand is its commentators, newspapers must tread the very fine line between giving valued content away for free (ie, via their commentators on blogs) and deriving revenue from that content either via premium subscription services or advertising.

Australia's controversial new advertising campaign

Most of the time I'm extremely proud to be Australian, but as I was catching up on the weekend papers, I was mortified to read about a new Australian tourism advertising campaign that asks potential visitors, "So where the bloody hell are you?".

The Weekend Australian reported that Tourism Australia was rethinking the campaign, and said that some words from the ads would be omitted in markets like Japan, Korea, Thailand and Singapore.

While there is no doubt that Australia is an awesome place to live and an amazing place to visit, I feel that this type of Aussie vernacular is inappropriate for an international advertising campaign. There is huge scope for the target audience to not only miss the point, but to be offended - and that's not the kind of message Australia needs to be communicating on the world stage.