I added the parentheses to a quote from a Tom Foremski article over at Silicon Valley Watcher:

Go read Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!

The site starts with a question:

Every day I'm faced with a decision: do I "tell on my peers" or just ignore the fact so many people who do PR just plainly suck.

Check the answers for yourself at The Bad Pitch Blog.

Over at Media Guerrilla there's a useful post on traditional public relations versus do-it-yourself PR / blogging.

The subject is Web 2.0 early stage companies, but the advice is equally relevant to most new companies.

Marketing strategist Steve Rubel issues a call to action for public relations professionals to begin learning about the changed media landscape.

For all of the hype about blogs and citizens' media, the PR community still has a long way to go before we can say that we've learned the bare minimum to stay afloat in these new waters.

The good news is that interest in these subjects has skyrocketed. Attendance at industry events on blogging, podcasting, and RSS has been very strong this fall. The bad news is that we're stuck in the pen-and-paper stage. It's critical that the PR industry – particularly firms – start mobilizing and training its communicators to work hands-on in this new world. It's time for us to go the distance.

How many who are stuck in the pen-and-paper stage will end up going the distance? Perhaps Rubel should quote them Oliver Cromwell's injunction to the rump of the Long Parliament:

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

That equation sums up much of what's wrong with the real estate "public" relations community in Chicago and other major cities.

If PR people know anything (and the more exposure you have to them, the more debatable that proposition becomes), they know how to reach the press.

We all know that reaching the press, and the people who read the printed press, is a game of rapidly-diminishing returns.

Restate our starting equation: traditional PR = poor returns.

HousingNewswire will take PR news releases to the media, to industry influentials, and directly and pervasively to the public.

Housing news releases, whether sent by snail- or e-mail, have been non-public documents that yearn for but seldom receive public exposure.

We're about to change that, and make news releases available to everyone everywhere the instant they're sent. You can see the start of that process at HousingNewswire.com, which exists in skeletal format only today. The site will be live and interactive within a few weeks.

Housing news releases are a lecture, often a very dry and boring lecture that no one wants to hear. We'll change that too, and make a housing news release the start of a richly illustrated conversation that people look forward to. Compare this news release with the ones you're used to seeing (click on any release) for a sample of what's to come.

Housing news releases have been static documents that can't be changed once they've been sent. We'll change that too, and make it easy to update a news release in real time.

Housing news releases have been unaccountable, with no one having any real idea of how many times they've been viewed and what kind of response they generated. We'll change that too, so that anyone can see how many times a news release was viewed and how people interacted with it. Look at this news release and click View activity on the left nav bar to see what I'm talking about.

Some public relations people have a strange disregard for how the public views their product. Their clients will either demand that they change their approach, or send them to sleep with Lucca Brazzi.