Making Money Out of Misery
This is why I'll never work in PR. There are the constant jests about PR practitioners having no soul but in this case they prove it.
What am I on about you ask?
Let me refer you to this story which ran in the papers today. The poor bastard dies from anaphylactic shock after having an allergic reaction to something in his food. Pretty tragic, and one can imagine his family are having a pretty rough time at the moment.
So what do the people at Addenda Publishing do?
They put out this press release.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE: 26 April 2007
Tragic Allergy Death Should Not Deter Allergy Sufferers from Eating Out – Author
Allergy sufferers should take a lesson from this week’s tragic death of Auckland man Grant Freeman from a suspected allergic reaction to a restaurant meal, says Kim Koeller, author of Let’s Eat Out: Your Passport to Living Gluten and Allergy Free.
“But that lesson should be to take care and be thoroughly prepared, not to give up eating out from fear,” she says.
Koeller and co-author Robert La France have produced an award-winning book series that shows allergy suffers how to eat out safely. Through their consulting practice, they also educate the restaurant trade in safe food practices that will prevent the sort of tragedy that happened this week.
Koeller and La France will be back in New Zealand in August to address a major conference on the subject of allergies and dining out.
Koeller and La France are available to New Zealand media for comment. For more information or to arrange an interview or review copy, contact the New Zealand distributor Addenda Publishing
There's nothing like trying to make a quick buck out of the illfortune of others is there. I hope some journo' gives them a right royal rocket for trying to pull this shameless and scurrilous plug.
2 comments:
That is totally appalling!
Are you trying to convince me to think again about moving into the seedy world of PR when I make the move to London?
If so, your efforts haven't been entirely ineffective.
I really could not bring myself to write a press release like that. It's even worse than being told, as a journo, to do a death knock. Or maybe on a par.
What about the fact that commercial radio, TV and the print media all charge money for the news. Therefore, if we report what happened to that poor man, ring up and hassle his family as the media are always doing, aren't we making money out of his and his family's misfortune?
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