The first publicity campaign is starting for the GLBT Bookshelf; we've got a press release out to a few sites, which is pretty cool. Hopefully the site will get a nice wave of people wandering through. (Here's my main page for anyone who missed it the last time I posted about this. [cough])
The weirdness, though, came just a few minutes ago. Mel Keegan, whose brainchild this project is, e-mailed all of us who've signed up on the site about the press release, which says in part:
Frustrated by the infamous "AmazonFail" fiasco of early 2009, in which the online retail giant was suspected of attempting to deny GLBT literature the benefits of its promotional systems, Keegan conceived of an online community in which all such systems were circumvented -- replaced by "community promotion" with direct links to authors’ and publishers’ pages.
There's another mention of "AmazonFail" later on as well. But Mel mentioned that one of the sites to which the press release was submitted, PR.com, would only run the story if the mentions of "AmazonFail" were removed. o_O Umm, excuse me? None of the other sites minded the mention at all; "AmazonFail" was big news a couple of months ago and mention of it will only bring more traffic. So one has to wonder whether Amazon might not own a chunk of PR.com, and be trying to squelch mentions in the news of their more embarassing moments. Only speculation of course, but it's definitely suspicious.
Angie
4 comments:
It's hard to know what corporations have their fingers in what pies these days. Could well be that Amazon has an interest there.
Charles -- right, the big players do tend to send tentacles off into other companies and even other industries. There's no proof or anything at this point, bit personally I can't think of any other reason why a company whose business is news would refuse to accept a press release on the base of two mentions of a recent newsworthy event.
Angie
I wouldn't presume that Amazon owns a piece of pr.com's pie at all. There are many reasons they could be leery of citing amazonfail, and to my mind, an agreement with the principle of shoving GLBT issues under the proverbial carpet (e.g. prejudice or right wing religious tendencies at a corporate managemnet level) are a more likely cause.
But it really is difficult to know what financial and legal connections corporations have these days.
WW -- that's certainly possible too. [nod] And someone elsewhere suggested that Amazon might be a large advertiser on the site, and management might be afraid of annoying them.
Either way, my view is that the news organizations should spread the news. And a news organization whose business is posting press releases drops in my estimation if they try to wield the exacto-knife on their clients' announcements. :/
Angie
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