The Inquisitr » pr

Dante’s Inferno in hot water over baby-killing Achievement

Chris Greenhough — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:37:59 +0000

If there’s one thing people have been talking about in the build-up to Dante’s Inferno … it’s not Dante’s Inferno.

Whether it’s the Twittersphere venting about EA’s “objectification” of women, or EA mailing replica severed hands to the press, the focus has kind of been away from the merits of the game. This post is sort of about the game, but still probably not what EA’s PR department had in mind.

The story so far: last week, Dante’s Inferno Executive Producer Jonathan Knight revealed that the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions would award a “Bad Nanny” Achievement/trophy to players who slaughter a certain number of unbaptized infants. Surprisingly, some people found this idea of killing babies offensive.

Today, the International Nanny Association (INA) stepped in and sent EA to the naughty step, saying that the Achievement was “created out of poor taste and bad judgment.” Here’s the INA’s official take on things:

“INA is opposed to video games that promote and encourage players to “kill” babies, even in fantasy play. It is our opinion that this type of play may promote violence towards children. The name of the trophy or achievement, “Bad Nanny,” is offensive to our association in that we strive to promote and educate the public regarding the selfless work nannies do to support families by providing quality in-home child care.”

While the claim that this will somehow discredit real nannies is tosh, I will say it all seems like a deeply unnecessary inclusion, not to mention a bit tasteless. Then again, if you’re sending out detached human appendages to people, I suppose taste is taking a back seat already.

[Via GamePolitics]

EA sending out severed hands to the media

Chris Greenhough — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:19:47 +0000

And: eep.

In its ongoing PR campaign for Dante’s Inferno, EA has started sending selected members of the media a severed hand, like the one you see above. Obviously, it’s not a real severed hand, silly, though it is an impressive replica.

But hey, what’s it all about? Well, there’s a bit of a backstory, as there should be when detached human limbs are involved. A few weeks ago, EA sent several game journalists a check for $200. This, declared EA, was to educate people about Dante Alighieri’s famous poem, and in particular about the fourth circle of Hell, Greed. Would the journos who received the check cash it?

Well, because most game journalists subsist on ramen and tap water, of course they did (or most of them did, at least. Kotaku’s Brian Crecente self-righteously burnt his). Nick Chester of Destructoid was amongst those who cashed in, only to receive this grisly appendage. The following message was enclosed:

Foul Horder, The Fourth Circle of Hell Awaits

A hand that clutches gold cannot reach forth to help his fellow man. You have hoarded the wealth of the world and incurred the debt of greed, and the wages of your sin were paid by the innocent. For the wealth of one shall always come at the suffering of another.

And then Nick Chester went forth and bought a load of sneakers. Also, for the record, I’d have cashed that mother faster than you could say “How about Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box next time, EA?” Yeah, I’m full of integrity like that.

[Via Destructoid]

Batman: Arkham Asylum sets dubious world record

Chris Greenhough — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 01:05:53 +0000

Batman: Arkham Asylum has reportedly been awarded a Guinness World Record, but not for anything that’s actually relevant. Instead, Guinness has named it the “Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever.” Sorry? That counts as a record nowadays? Even the Riddler may struggle with that one.

Nobody can doubt that Arkham Asylum has been spectacularly received by critics; indeed, it was the title’s Metacritic score of 91% that bagged it this very specific accolade. It’s just a bit too specific, though. I smell shenanigans.

More precisely, I smell a marketing stunt from Eidos, which has already basically admitted that it asks outlets for favorable review scores. “Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever” is a quite ridiculous “record” (and nor is it an impressive one, for the superhero genre isn’t overflowing with quality releases, with Superman 64 the hilarious low point).

Besides, Viewtiful Joe (which I’d count as a superhero game, starring as it does a superhero) has 93% on Metacritic. What a load of crapola.

[Via Destructoid]

The Parasitic Newspaper Industry must stop leaching off PR

Duncan Riley — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:34:45 +0000

Inspired by Brian Mitchell

Dear Editor

The parasitic nature of newspapers continues to confound most reasonable public relations (PR) professionals. Here we have an industry that by its very nature trades off the hard work of the PR industry, passing off our hard work as news, even when we don’t ask them to.

Some 80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers are at least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy, according to research released in February. In Australia the figure is “as much as 80 per cent of media content is derived from public relations material” according to a May 2009 report.

This has to stop. The livelihoods of PR professionals across the globe are under threat by a parasitic newspaper industry that rarely links, and often copies our work.

This content is available on sites such as PR Web, and often on the pages of our clients. Why then must the likes of News Corp, the NY Times Company, or other newspaper groups steal our good work?

The future of PR is undoubtedly online: the distributed media release has had its day; resource-wasteful, expensive to produce and distribute and dated. We should charge for access, and slap copyrights even on a short extract (fair use and fair dealing laws mean nothing to our lawyers) because we are the originators of news, and we alone hold the eminent rights to it.

That we could do something as simple as exclude indexing by newspaper sites by one line in a Robots.txt file, or a general IP block for newspaper companies is besides the point: just because we could block access doesn’t mean that we should do so now.

I implore President Obama and others to think not only of the newspaper industry at this time of need, but of the PR professionals that have their work stolen en masse by greedy parasitic journalists.

Yours sincerely
PR Pro.

This is somewhat tongue in check naturally, but at a time that Mitchell in Australia, and media reps (including the head of AP) in the United States are making outrageous claims about new media, it should be noted that little of what they report is originally sourced themselves.

For the record, as someone who has worked for one of the biggest blogs online, co founded a multi-million dollar blog network, and more recently founded this site, while some of our content is undoubtedly uncovered by the mainstream media, a lot of it is directly sourced or via PR pros. When I was at TechCrunch for example, the whole 80% PR thing would have most definitely have held true, as I’m betting it would for many professional blogs. That we don’t do more of that content on The Inquisitr is not because we don’t receive it, indeed I could fill 20 posts a day at a minimum here with the PR we receive, instead we’re more picky on what we like. And that’s before we even start on the fact that there are a ton of online only sites doing original reporting, from TMZ, through to even The Huffington Post and more.

Duncan.

It’s all about the pitch

Duncan Riley — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:38:30 +0000

I’m in Seattle for Gnomedex this week and I’ve had the opportunity of meeting a range of new and interesting people (along with catching up with some familiar faces.) Among the various conversations I’ve had, one interesting debate came up: the idea that a great startup will rise to the top based on merit alone. Perhaps as I’ve gotten older I’ve become too cynical and have lost some of the idealism from my youth, but they way I called it is this: it’s all about the pitch. The greatest product in the world will always remain undiscovered if nobody knows where it is.

The pitch can vary. I have the upmost respect for Andrew Baron for example, not because I like Rocketboom the show that much (it’s ok, but I’m not a regular viewer) but because he mastered the art of distribution in online video. Many may have arguably believed that Ze Frank was better, but Rocketboom had the viewers because Baron mastered the pitch to maximize Rocketboom’s presence on sites and services. In terms of a startup, the concept that you can do it all alone and PR is dead is verging on a joke. PR isn’t dead, it’s the greasy hand that spins the wheels of EVERY MAJOR BLOG ON THE PLANET. Besides, consider it logically: you’re writing for a large blog, you’re swamped with emails and calls, who are you going to pay attention to first, the PR rep you know who delivers you great stories in a format you can work with, or some guy you’ve never heard of who couldn’t write a decent pitch to save his life and is email 512 in your inbox for Monday. Now I’d note that I wouldn’t ignore your direct emails, but I have missed stories in the past based on a poor pitch. If you can’t sell your product, unless it’s the greatest invention of all time, it will never sell itself, at least initially.

Of course the flip side of the spin cycle is that those who truly master the pitch can be rewarded quickly along the way by targeted manipulation. Take for example the folks behind JustHackIt, a Slinkset hosted social voting site for hacking jobs, or as TechCrunch so delightfully described it “JustHackIt: It’s Like a Dating Site For Hackers.” In mastering the pitch, they’ve hunted extremely well. They targeted the author with zero real world experience, knowing that he was incapable of noticing basic things, like seeing the site had no Alexa rating then automatically checking the registration to notice that the site was less that 24 hours old! Better still, the URL resolves to a Slinkset sub-domain, so they’re not evening hosting the site themselves! The site is now for sale on Sitepoint, and you can guess the headline: “JustHackIt – Featured in TechCrunch.” This is proof that it’s all about pitch, where a site thrown together on a whim can get this sort of public attention where others who invest millions and years can’t get a post.

My advice to those working in the startup world, or even thinking of entering it: the moment you delude yourself into believing you don’t need to be pitching your product, you shouldn’t be involved in a startup. You have to sell the idea or product, and you have to do it well so that you’re product or site does stand out in a sea of competition.

(in part via Centernetworks)