Monday, May 5, 2008

I hadn't heard from the director of EurekAlert for the past few days, so yesterday I e-mailed their communications officer again to find out what was going on. I hadn't heard anything by the middle of the day today, so I gave them a call. I got a hold of the communications officer and he told me that he really couldn't talk about their decision and the director was making a judgment call. That sounded really bad so I spent a little time today compiling the e-mail address of every media relations director at every institution I posted a release from over the past week. I sent them all a precautionary request asking for permission to republish their releases on my site. The response was an overwhelming "YES," however, the Field Museum and Columbia University had reservations about it and I'm still in talks with both institutions.

I think it's kind of crazy they'd object to free PR on a website that targets their audience specifically. Yes, I understand that the essence of a press release is to get some reporter to call the scientist and interview him and blah blah blah, but the majority of these press releases are stand alone articles. All the journalist is going to do is reword some of the sentences and republish it.

The director did get back to me today; however, and said that I could only publish the releases if I got permission from the institutions that wrote the releases since EurekAlert doesn't actually own the content. Good thing I got a head start on this. Although I think its well accepted, as observed by a number of the responses that I got from my e-mail to these institutions, that the whole point of a press release is to get it republished...

Regardless, it looks like the featured articles are safe. I was actually getting kind of worried about it ;)