Behind the Blog: Corporate PR Stonewalling and The Sandwich Simulacrum

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the corporate PR strategy of stonewalling the press, digital comradery, and the AI sandwich simulacrum.

JASON: I will write much more about this in a BTB at a later time, but we’ve been hustling on a lot of pieces this week and my brain is running out of neurons to rub together. So I’ll try to keep this short.

One of the more fascinating parts of being a journalist over the course of the last 15 years has been to witness how tech companies’ strategies for dealing with press inquiries has changed. Writing articles has stayed more or less the same, or, at least, my general strategy and posture has remained the same: I find a thing, talk to people, explain the interesting parts of the story, reach out for comment, wait a little while, then publish the story. 

The part that has changed is what happens during the “reach out for comment” part. I don’t have friends in tech PR and did not go to PR school, but there are very clearly many different strategies in the comms world about how to deal with journalists (and which journalists to deal with), and these strategies vary wildly from company to company and constantly change within the same companies over time. We try to get our information directly from workers or sources inside a company, but we always reach out to companies for their official statements, to ask hard questions, or to request interviews.

Already have an account? Sign in