Last week, Wired editor and Long Tail boffin Chris Anderson was fed up with having to sort through a daily avalanche of "PR Spam," primarily irrelevant news releases sent blindly to long lists of journalists' e-mail addresses. So, he not only blocked a huge batch of offenders, he also made their e-mail addresses public, inciting a mass tantrum within the world of flacks.

Never a fan of such mass-tactics, Jack Flack could not resist asking Anderson about it. Here's the e-mail conversation.

JF: OK, Jack Flack has gotta know, what was the e-mail pitch that made you decide you needed to act?

CA: There wasn't a single one that I can remember. It was just after another morning of blocking the sender address for dozens of random press releases, none of which would have been sent to me if the PR person had given it a moment's thought, that I realized that such solitary blocking really wouldn't change anything. Only when such filtering is shared do network effects kick in, and the only way I could think of to share was to publish my blocked list.

Let me explain: Thanks to Cloudmark Desktop, which uses collaborative filtering, I get almost no spam. I was inspired by that model. Cloudmark works best with real spam, because if hundreds of people identify an email as spam, the software will automatically delete it from the inboxes of many thousands of others before they've even had to look at it. Every time you click on the "This is spam" button, you feel a little pleasure of revenge, since you know that that action will help others avoid that email. But press releases don't get sent in large enough numbers to fit a general-purpose collaborative filter like Cloudmark and anyway I don't want to mark a press release as spam just because it's not right for me--after all, it might be useful content for someone else.

So in the absence of a good collaborative filtering technique, I didn't know of any way for those of us who are drowning under untargeted press releases to share that information in a way that could have an effect. When you want to share but don't know how, the first thing to do is publish and see what happens. Which is what I did.

I actually only published about three week's worth, which was enough to make the point, but not so much that is screwed up my blog format or pissed off my RSS subscribers with an endless column. Since then, I've accumulated another few hundred addresses, but I doubt I'll publish them--my point has been made and there's no need to pile on.

JF: When was the last time one of those mass messages was of interest to you? Does it happen very often?

CA: I probably find two or three press release a week interesting enough to read, and maybe one every other month worth responding to. The problem is that I get hundreds each week and a couple thousand each month. Again, I'm not speaking for Wired or anyone else on my staff--this is just me. My email address is not the general one for the mag, and actually don't see why anyone should be sending me press releases at all. The only place my personal email addresses appear in public is on my blogs and side projects, such as BookTour.com, and all unsolicited email from them should be relevant to themes discussed on those places. Given that each one of those side projects is more narrow and geeky than the last, it's a rare press release indeed that is focused enough to be relevant.

Personal emails are pretty much the only way to rise above the noise for me, and as anyone who took the trouble to compose just an email (showing an actual understanding of my interests and an offer of something relevant) can tell you, I'm pretty good about responding to those.

JF: in the commentary on your blog, there are several references to the fact that many publications actually run the flack-spam verbatim. Do you believe that's true? If so, to what extent?

CA: I've got no idea, I'm afraid. Maybe some trade pubs?

JF: Yeah, Jack Flack's experience has been that generally only micro-trades use it, and most other journalists feel roughly the same way you do. And that would seem to question the effectiveness of the tactic. Assuming agencies are acting as rational businesses, why do you think they do it?

CA: My economics answer: "negative externalities." It works because they don't feel the pain of all the time they're wasting directly.

JF: Ah, negative externalities.

Here's another reason. It's easier to sell clients activities than it is to produce results. And so it's a nice thing when your invoice can say you contacted 75 tech journalists. It's particularly appealing when you can say "opinion leaders." As your Long Tail concept picked up fame, did your levels of flack-spam escalate?

CA: Hard to say. Basically my PR spam has been growing every year and is now at its highest point. If it were due to my Long Tail fame, I could at least credit the PR people for paying enough attention to have actually targeted me. But I think most of the people who are spamming me with press releases don't even know or care who I am--I'm just another entry in a list they bought somewhere.

JF: Anything surprise you about the response?

CA: I was particularly amused when PR people attempted to organize a class-action lawsuit against me--in my own comments! That's in addition to publishing my home address and hacking my Wikipedia entry. Turns out that PR people can be very effective when they want to be--I only wish they'd targeted me so efficiently on behalf of their clients, rather than just for themselves.

JF: Did you hear from other journalists?

CA: There are loads of them in the comments, and I got a few nice emails, too. Predictably, most were in the "it's about time" genre.

JF: Have you started a blocking trend?

CA: Judging from my comments and those on other blogs, it was well underway before I posted.

JF: You obviously knew revealing the addresses would draw a lot more attention to your complaint. Have you ever considered becoming a flack?

CA: ;-)

JF: One last question. The term "PR Spam" doesn't really seam to capture what we're talking about. And the "flack spam" I've been using seems so cumbersome. "PRam" would confuse our UK friends. So what do you think about "flam" instead?

CF: I like it!

JF: Hmmm, "flam." Maybe Jack Flack can even get a book out of it? Would your magazine/newspaper/blog/Facebook page be interested in publicizing it?

Chris?

Chris, are you still there?

Chris?

# # #