disintermediation...can you hear the screams?

Paul writes...

On the thread of disintermediation, it's worth taking a few minutes to look at the fallout from a recent blog posting by Stowe Boyd.

He commented that perhaps the endgame was nearing for the trusty traditional PR vehicle - the press release - and in doing so whipped up quite a storm in the blogosphere.

As we'll discover on Friday, the world of social computing is challenging on many levels and in many domains, not least the media. For one, social computing gives us the opportunity to ask whether we really need all those middlemen...well do we?

Are we not also growing tired of all the spin, rhetoric and misinformation that middlemen help to engineer (and before anyone shouts that is a general comment, not specifically aimed at the PR community)? Why not just let us hear it from the horses mouth? In the case of press releases would the consumer/general public/average Joe not appreciate that far more than some corporate engineered babble?

In a nutshell Stowe takes the PR community to task for much the same point, but focuses on their interpretation/distortion of 'social media'. But should we not applaud the PR industry for attempting to embrace social media even if they are a little misguided?

PC.