Beer Review

PR maven - a word I've always imagined describing a raven with a speech impediment - Andrew Smith has noticed my formula for getting coverage on ZDNet UK. Fellow PRs have immediately latched onto the beer component - and I'm glad to see this remains as important to them as it does to the industry as a whole.

However, it's important that a few details be embellished. For starters, it's my own personal formula. There are around ten other people on editorial you can pitch to, none with the same foibles. Then, I freely admit that the formula actually makes no sense if strictly applied - if, for example, you don't mention 'leading' or 'leader' in the first paragraph of the press release, then the formula would seem to indicate that you'd have an infinitely high chance of getting your story on the site. In fact, precisely the inverse is true.

Likewise, the effect that beer has is strictly limited. A good story will prosper regardless, a bad one will not float no matter how great the beverage tsunami disgorged on its behalf. The best that beer will do is a chance to dissolve some of the encrusted prejudices in which my sensitive psyche is embedded, and make me realise what I'm missing from the big picture. Or big pitcher.

I'll return to this later, and within the limits of unformattable ASCII will strive for greater accuracy in the formulation.