Earth to Academia
Internet columnist Scott McLemee has some good advice for academic publishers: Get into cyberspace, fast! Having made the transition from a regular print gig with the Chronicle of Higher Ed to the Internet competition insiderhighered.com, McLemee claims university presses are near-Neanderthals when it comes to promoting their products through the Web. Get with it and exploit the blogosphere, he says.
My only rebuttal to this reasonable advice is that outfits with small publicity budgets are between a rock and a hard place in this regard: Sure, the Internet is where it's at, but where on the Internet? And what portion of scarce dollars should be devoted to sending out review copies and chasing down bloggers and Internet columnists? As someone who writes regularly for Internet sites and thinks it's the happening place, I am still sympathetic to the slow responders. Just ask advertisers: It's harder to gauge size and quality of readership in the New Media with the same confidence as the Old. Newspapers and broadcast have relatively dependable systems for tracking circulation and market share. They are the devil we know. Can you blame people for putting scarce resources in the old tried-and-true?
posted by Ellen Heltzel 12:57:00 AM
1 Comments:
When I was a university publicist, there was a website called profnet, which journalists could use when they wanted to find an expert on a particular subject. Adding university press authors would take about 10 minutes, and could result in some major media hits.
I had national TV shows calling for some of my professors on the basis of Profnet, simply because the producers went to the internet first to find sources.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home