"The milk just dried up"

Big-league political blogger John Aravosis on the neverending topic of irrelevant pitches:

There's been a marked recent increase in the number of people asking me to write about their organization, campaign, or client. Whether it's a non-profit with some new-fangled incredibly-esoteric project, a politician promoting their latest highly-interesting-to-them but-kind-of-boring-to-you policy proposal, or a public relations firm being paid big bucks to push the lame ideas of yet another client, the volume of "give me free publicity" requests has skyrocketed of late.

Interestingly, at the same time, the number of ads these same groups are running on blogs has plummeted.

Want to reach the thousands of DC opinion-elites that read John's blog, but don't have something that interests John?

Buy an ad. In fact, you should put blog ads in your project budget. They're better at targeting very specific policy-elite audiences than most trade publications. Ask your average twenty-something or thirty-something congressional staffer or agency political appointee where they get their news, and they'll rattle off a list of blogs.

And I understand why people would prefer to get premium space for free, but it doesn't work that way.

(see, moms? at least you're not the only ones getting irrelevant and annoying pitches from us.)