from www.tattle.xxx/blog – It’s rare that I sit down to write an editorial; and even more rare for Patrick (our wonderful editor) to allow it to be posted — but he’s away and as they say — the mice we shall play.

So what you’re wondering could ‘ol Simon be up on a soapbox about? The past week Patrick has been on holiday and while he’s away I’ve been doing my best to tend the store. You would expect that the bulk of the work we have here at Tattle is digging you consumer lads up some juicy stories, trailers and photo galleries — oh how I wish that were the way… in reality we spend our days pouring through Press Release after Press Release from would-be Publicity Agents and Agencies working in the adult entertainment industry like a ferret up a drain pipe.

According to public relations lore, the press release was born following a train wreck on October 28, 1906, in Atlantic City, N.J., that left more than 50 people dead. The train was owned by Pennsylvania Railroad, a client of a young man named Ivy Lee.

In response to the disaster, he convinced the railroad to issue a statement about what had transpired. In doing so, he set in motion a practice for companies to address issues important to them, or, in the case of the railroad, to offer an explanation of what had happened. The New York Times was said to have been so impressed by Lee’s release that the newspaper printed it exactly as Lee had written it.

Cut to 100 years later and interject the concept of spam the porn business built and you my friend have arrived the process of Press Releases.

Now I’m not saying there’s nothing of value in Press Releases; and quite frankly it’s our job to sort through the deluge and find the tiny nuggets of interesting to present to you the consumer… but the piles of bullshit that are heaped on these releases is just amazing. The problem is a bit two fold; when a Porn Star or company hires themselves a PR Agent they expect some results (damnit!); and immediate ones at that… so they cough up their $300-$500 a month for these PR Agents to spin stories about them to the media — problem is there’s not that much to tell.

PR Agents have two approaches to this issue — the first approach is to send out a release a week about their client regardless of if there’s any kind of news or information. The second approach is to attempt to manufacture news stories out of absolutely nothing. We do you the readers of Tattle the favor of simply deleting these releases — or if we’re in a good mood we built a special home for these releases called “News We Didn’t Use”.

Then there’s the PR Agents that put out multiple releases about the same story trying to spin it different ways… for instance this morning self-titled “Fan-loving BBW geisha and performer / director / producer”, and I think also PR Agent and Social Media Guru, Kelly Shibari put out a two page release entitled “‘Kelly Shibari Is Overloaded’ Releases on VOD Exclusively on HotMovies.com Friday, June 14″ — this is a movie that came out last summer and now it’s on VOD — Wow that’s NEWS! I’ll have to go back and count but I’m pretty sure that Ms. Shibari has put out more Press Releases about this movie than they even pressed DVDs over at Monarchy Films.

The biggest offender in my mind is the “sources be damned; let’s make shit up” Press Releases. Last week we got a press release from the owners of MyPornProfile.com; through Erika Ikon [pictured] at The Rub PR. The release contained these quotes:

Twitter has officially approved MyPornProfile.com as a trusted partner.
“We’ve worked very closely with Twitter to make this happen. We’re the first adult company Twitter has granted this access to…”

Well that seemed fishy to us… Twitter working closely and approving a Porn project? So we reach out to Erika for comment; her response “I took the info they gave me and wrote the PR”.

She was to forward our interrogatories, specifically who did they work closely with at Twitter, on to “Sam” the owner of MyPornProfile — we never received a response from “Sam” or any further comment from Erika.

We reached out to Twitter and our good friends over at PornStarTweet (who as you might imagine knows their bloody shit about Twitter). Twitter would not comment officially but the person we spoke to there said it was “unlikely they would partner in developing a application specific for use on an adult site”.

Pete Housley over at Porn Star Tweet said he had no first hand knowledge of the MyPornProfile app (even said that “Sam” was a friend and they’d spoken often of doing some things with the two companies), but assumed that by “working closely with Twitter” MyPornProfile.com meant they were given access to the Application Programming Interface (API) which PornStarTweet also makes use. He did say that they had been waiting for about six months for Twitter to approve a program they have been developing for a Paid Tweeting platform.

So what the fuck? Did Twitter officially approve something? Seems like if you “worked very closely with Twitter” you would at least know the persons name at Twitter you worked with… Hell a response from the issuing company would have been not only professional but nice… Yet our contemporaries over at AVN ran this, which is verbatim from the original Press Release:

MyPornProfile Twitter Approved, Launches Pay-to-Tweet Program

So now we can just make shit up in Press Releases and no one is held accountable? Where’s the accountability in news reporting? Can’t blame the PR people here… they’re just spewing out the “facts” their clients are sending them…. it’s the job of the PR Agent to hype up bullshit and get consumers to read it.

So that’s my day; mired down in bullshit up to my eyeballs – some repetitive, some completely lacking in substance and some so fake you can hardly find the truth… How appropriate that this all started with a train wreck; and has ended up as a train wreck.

I can hardly wait for Pat to get back…

Cheers.