Well here we go, the weblog. The bane of the elite media right? Well, the next article hopes to show this NOT to be true, but nonetheless, the blog has created a spin in journalism, the likes of which even the best public relations professionals have been unable to craft out.
And that’s where I come in. I am John Guilfoil and I have worked in media and public relations for 10 years. (Which, for me, is a much longer time than it sounds.) I started in 1997 when I became a software reviewer for Shareware Junkies, an old and respected software review portal owned by Mike Dulin. On the site, 156 of my reviews are still online including a very old review of the Opera Web Browserand nifty little games like THIS.
Many of the articles are short and to the point but it was a long time ago and I certainly hope that my verbosity has come to a point.
In 1999, I founded The Review Center which was maintained for five years before it was sold to it’s European counterpart a few years ago. That was my first real foray into journalism and the high technology field.
I have also contributed to Gamespot in the old days and served as a Geocities community leader back in the OLD days of the internet. Geocities is perhaps the biggest damn shame to ever come out of the dot-com bubble. It was a truly safe haven for all internet denizens, offering free webspace in a regulated environment. All that remains now is a shell of dead links and broken dreams.
The reason why the reviewcenter.com did not work as well as it should have (besides the fact that I often relied on free webmaster work from people that owed me favors…) was that it was not a full-time job for me or any of the other reviewers that wrote for it. This was the time when blogs were just starting out and at that time, weekly updates were not only normal, they were considered cutting edge. Today, a site like that needs to be updated several times a day to keep up with rapidly changing news and thousands of competitors trying to gain some sort of edge.
Now I work in freelance public relations and layout/graphic design.
This blog’s mission is to cover what is being covered. You’re going to read about the “latest hot topics,” but not just the topics themselves; this blog will trace the buzz back to it’s source, the public relations and advertising guys and girls! PRrag.com will analyze successful product campaigns, crisis management and advertising/corporate image campaigns and try to figure out why some work and some simply don’t.
You’ll also see a few traditional articles and pieces out of my portfolio and any graphic design jobs I work on.
So enjoy, and stay tuned!
By the way SHOP AT THE SHOP