Look around any PR agency and you'll soon realize that this is a young person's game. Most staffers are under age 30. Sure, there are some "gray-hairs" in the management ranks, but it's rare to see an agency PR pro in their late 50's. It seems that many PR professionals start out in the agency world but wind up in a corporate marketing department...I love hangin' with the young whippersnappers; I applaud their energy & fresh thinking, but, I sometimes find it frustrating to see age-old mistakes being made because so few agencies have made training and best-practices a priority. This is an easy trap to fall into - lord knows it is a never-ending battle for us - because as an industry, PR is so laser-focused on the daily Client Service demands that we're usually happy to just have enough "arms-and-legs" to get the basic work done.
I wonder if "new media" resources like the BadPitch Blog, Forward, the Marcomblog and the Publicity Hound, et al., can ultimately help PR agency newbies to avoid youthful transgressions? Might we make these educational PR blogs mandatory reading? Maybe each agency-owned computer should come pre-configured with these RSS feeds already set-up for new hires?
Wouldn't it be great if esteem for the PR industry could make incremental gains, year over year, instead of playing defense so often, for the same rookie mistakes?