Up against deadline

One of the things that senior account executives do at Bad PR companies is to tell their junior charges to ring up journalists and ask what the deadlines are for upcoming features. I assume this is the case because I’ve been on the receiving end of this pointless and irritating question ever since I started working on trade magazines.

True, the question is sometimes embellished as: “What are the deadlines for submissions for your upcoming features?” It’s still a pointless thing to ask. How will knowing the deadline date for features, or submissions, help you or your client I wonder? And what are these ‘submissions’ that you speak of?

To be fair, some of the junior PR execs specifically state the feature that has caught their eye. Unfortunately, this does not alleviate the overwhelming feeling of ennui that the dreaded deadline question brings. I invariably make up a date, put the phone down, and know that none of us is any the wiser for having this ‘conversation’.

But sometimes I don’t put the phone down. Sometimes I ask follow-up questions to try and elicit some meaning, some purpose. You know, things like, What do you have in mind? Who is your client? In short, do the job of the Bad PR exec.

I then courteously point out that you have got next to no f**king chance of getting anything in the feature by simply e-mailing some stuff that might be loosely connected with what I’m writing about, especially when no plan of action has been agreed beforehand.

Sending the stuff before ‘deadline’ does not make a blind bit of difference.