Column on how business reporters and PR practitioners (don't) get a long

Edelman senior vice president Hope Heyman's list of aggravations regarding business reporting:

• Only covering the largest companies, and disregarding good story ideas from companies they may not have heard of before or smaller companies.
• In response to a pitch e-mail or call from the PR person (not from the client), taking the story idea, but bypassing the PR person completely and contacting the client directly.
• Sticking to the view that if a story idea originates from a PR person, it can't be very good or it's slanted and not worthy of consideration.

Daily Show journalism?

from a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, by Heidi Benson, in Monday's newspaper:

"Every semester, in my Mass Media class, we get into an argument about whether "The Daily Show" is real journalism. The students insist that it's journalism. I argue that it's satire. They don't do their own reporting -- it's entertainment wrapped around news.

I tell my students, "You may be learning something and you may be having fun while you're learning it, but you're not getting news." "