It doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally an angry contact, usually trying to persuade us not to write a negative story, will explode with “You’re not The f*&#ing Wall Street Journal“!

I found the best answer is usually, “Well you’re not [f*#&ing] Jeff Immelt either”. Undignified? Well, yeah…

Even so, the usefulness of our angry reader’s insult might be waning. These days we’re all the Wall Street Journal, or none of us is, not even the Wall Street Journal.  So why aren’t we all taking advantage of this moment, instead of constantly carping about what we are losing? As a spokesperson for media companies that aren’t  The Wall Street Journal, I can see that we’ve never had a better opportunity to enrich our readers’ experience. Most of us are not doing it.

We spend a lot of time in the media worrying about the business model, but too little time focusing on relevance. Relevance is someone getting so angry at your publication that they will resort to silly insults to try and shame you into capitulating. When people stop caring, they stop yelling, and then stop reading.

Relevance is not demonstrated by ad dollars or circulation metrics alone. It is better tested through the relationship of the reader to its outlet, and in all the metrics that we evaluate - from page views to  uniques to good old fashioned pass-along readership - don’t bring us closer to understanding what we need to do to stay relevant.

I believe that many publications are growing more and more out of touch with their communities, even as we seem to be that much more engaged because of the immediacy of our digital networks. We are losing the personal connections that foster truly great journalism. Reporters are so busy blogging and twittering they don’t have time - or, rather, they don’t take time - to venture out and sit across from a table (or bar) from a contact and get at the unexpected, and the real.

I’m not going to round this off with a pithy answer. I just feel in my bones that we are missing a trick, as a media community, at a time when we don’t have to follow the herd to succeed. I hope to delve into this more during the coming weeks. Please note, there are no links in this post. In my all-too-sporadic blogging efforts, I was way too caught up in finding good stories to link to. I almost forgot that I have plenty of material without them.

I have been a terrible blogger, as the redoubtable Wes Pedersen would be the first to tell you. The basic reason for this is I have always done my writing in the mornings. But my lifestyle (enter baby) no longer cooperates the way it used to, so I  must refocus my energies to other times of day. Let this be the first entry of the new era…

David Carr’s in Monday’s New York Times struck a nerve, celebrating a whole new approach to reporting that is finding its way into newsrooms everywhere, citing a colleague’s recent story: “On Saturday, Mr. Stelter’s wonderful article in The New York Times on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience.”

PRWeek’s own excellent reporting team is using Twitter, and blogs, contact management systems and social media, and myriad other methods to explore topics with the public relations community and beyond. No doubt these tools have enabled already great journalists to find even better ways to work. Thus did word processing replace the typewriter, only a true Luddite could object to the progress that continues to be made.

But reporters risk becoming their efforts becoming commoditized even further than they already have been if they avow that these tools are changing the fundamentals of journalism. In fact, part of the challenge for journalism ongoing will be to tune out the clamor and find the hidden stories, the unwilling sources, the unpopular topics - the “boring but important” stories, to use The Week’s wonderful section name - that no one but the most dedicated reporter will commit to seeking out.

Sorry, but I don’t think so . Rather, media has turned the primary race INTO entertainment. American Idol move over, Tim Russert is the new Simon Cowell. The ABC team was excoriated for going lowbrow in the debate, but the fact is that coverage by and large has pandered to personality and drama. Ask voters to define the differences in the health care plans of Obama and Clinton, and most would be stumped. But their bowling scores? Oh, sure.

But is that fair? Personal tidbits are always more interesting to readers. Any columns I write that have a personal anecdote always get a bigger response than those without - the personal is an irresistible hook, and often provides invaluable insight into character, which does count in a political runoff.

But once a media outlet moves down a particular path it will find it very difficult to reassert a more sober, policy wonkish tone. With an Obama/McCain battle looming (sorry, Hillary), how much further will media go in order to keep their audiences entertained, rather than simply informed? 

Those of us who hire journalists are fortunate, because reporters are generally not in the profession for the big paychecks. It is also a tough job, so it tends to weed out the lazy. Generally you are working with passionate people who feel a sense of mission about what they are doing, whether it’s writing about semiconductors or the Iraq War - or PR, for that matter.

But in the last five years or so a new imperative has informed the journalists’ career. That is the need to build your personal brand. The branded reporter transcends his or her outlet - however well positioned by it they are. The branded reporter speaks, writes books, and waxes on in the land of punditry.
At times, this brand building can work in direct conflict with the media outlet you ostensibly represent. Remember Bob Woodward failing to tell his employer The Washington Post, that he was told about outed CIA operative Valerie Plame by a senior Bush administration official? That was a case of brand conflict - the Woodward Brand taking precedent.

Media outlets have to help their stars develop their brands while harnessing their firepower - a tricky task for companies without deep pockets, or that are lower down on the prestige food chain. Often a small outlet will help foster a brand journalist, only to lose them to a bigger competitor. Such is life.

This week’s issue of PRWeek includes our first annual Media Survey, produced in association with PR Newswire. There is a lot of great data in the survey, and I’ll let you read most of it in the feature. But I’ll be picking up on some of the key themes this week, starting with the conundrum of the editorial workload.

We asked journalists if they are being asked to work harder today than they were during the past few years and 57.3% said “yes”. By comparison, only 10.2% said “no”.  And what are they being asked to do? It doesn’t take a media genius to know that the work is expanding online.

PRWeek, too, has reporters now running online exclusive sections, and contributing “cutting room floor” content to online feature extensions  - the journalistic equivalent to the deleted scenes on DVDs. Now this extra video content is actually being produced with the sole purpose of going in the DVD only. The same is happening in reporting.

I think we have struck a very good balance at PRWeek, balancing the needs of the print edition, the website, the blogs, the e-newsletters, the podcasts, and online exclusives. But as innovation continues to occur online, it will be difficult to resist the temptation to pile more and more onto existing editorial teams, at the possible expense of quality and depth.  When video is ubiquitous, will reporters be asked to do both broadcast and narrative versions of their stories? It’s coming, I’m telling you.

We are fortunate in the trade world that there is not an unlimited universe of content that will be relevant to our audience. Sure, we could get a lot of hits online if we started posting videos of Britney Spears  pumping gas, but we would ultimately lose our core audience. Mainstream media have no limitations to their content possibilities, and will have to police both their staff tolerance and their content relevance vigorously, hopefully avoiding burnout in either camp.