Australian freelance tech journalist Simon Sharwood wrote a strong post directed at the PR community a few days ago titled: "Worst pitch ever - AsiaRelease.com and how to ruin your reputation".

His beef was basically that a number of high-profile companies that he feels should know better, like Cisco, have been using the AsiaRelease.com distribution service to effectively spam journalists like him with irrelevant press releases.

Now, the first thing that most professional Australian PR pros would know is that Simon has a no press-release policy. And he certainly has no interest or no desire to receive press releases specific to Cambodia like the one he mentions in the blog. Simon, by way of disclosure, also writes MediaConnect's Epitome column.

In instances like this, there is no other way to describe what transpired in this instance, as anything but spamming. Just because Simon is a journalist, it does not automatically void every spam compliance rule that a company like Cisco would otherwise abide by. It's like saying just because Simon is a bloke it's ok to send him Viagra promotions.

The fact is there are a bunch of online services that companies can use today to distribute releases far and wide with little or no discrimination. Companies need to realise that just because a journalist's name is on a press release distribution list doesn't mean that they've opted-in to receive press release from that service. Obviously Simon has never been contacted by AsiaRelease.com, or he wouldn't be on any release distribution list because of his no-release policy.

It's been tempting for us to build a simply press release distribution service like a number of those that exist today where you simply upload your list, select a category of media to distribute to and click send. However, our belief has always been that our tools should encourage public relations professionals to build targeted lists based on the journalist's individual requirements rather than what doesn't amount to much more than a spamming system.

However, despite protestations from the likes of Simon, I don't think this problem is going to go away. Most journalists just grin and bare these kind of incidents, they've either gotten very good at filtering out the crap or they've developed general press-release blindness. It used to be a common rule among most journalists that they despised the follow-up phone call from PR pros asking if they had any interest in the press release that was sent. At our recent MediaSmart seminar a number of very senior, high-profile journalists said they didn't mind this practice because they seldom paid much attention to press releases in their inbox anymore.

Meanwhile, I can only foresee more and more "online services" being used by more and more companies to simply blast releases out into the Influencer realm and hope for the best.

It's for this reason that I see RSS becoming the dominant media release distribution medium. At some point, journalists are going to say enough is enough. It's very easy to simply ignore emails but if PR pros are then forced to start banging the phones again to pitch every release because of this inbox-blindness, that won't be tolerated for very long and I can see the media en-masse looking for a better way. RSS feeds gives power back to the reader because they can choose to subscribe or un-subscribe to any feed. So if a company's press releases aren't relevent to a journalist it's simply a matter for them to unsubscribe to that feed.

We've RSS-enabled all of our client's newsrooms, so they only need to post all of their releases to our system and they have an RSS-feed that they can publicise to journalists but we're putting a lot of attention to helping both communities to transition the press-release distribution model to RSS.

Incidently, Simon agrees that RSS could be the solution he's been looking for to get him reading media releases again. "So the chance to ‘pull’ them via RSS rather than have them pushed into email is attractive... I’d happily add those feeds to my feed reader, for companies I track. I’d be reading them in my own time, of my own volition which, (suprise!) could mean I read them. Which I do not now".