Holy Kaw! (as in "Holy Cow!")

Git off mah porch 'for ah blow yer keyboard ta hell!

Wow. Really makes you wanna find what they're *really* interested in now, doesn't it?

I don't see anything wrong with this at all. It saves time and is straightforward. Kudos.

Looks like a very reasonable request from a reporter.

Agree, this is well done, direct, and doesn't waste your time.

You can send requests like this a thousand times back to PR people, and the blast email service will just keep on coming ...

I think that this message is great - straightforward, no leeway for misunderstanding. Also agree that they may not be removed from blast email services, sad to say...

I suppose the request is reasonable, but it's not like it's John Q. Public getting Viagra spam.

Maybe I don't understand the complex world of reporting, or I underestimate the amount of e-mail a reporter gets every day, but isn't getting story submissions (even those you may not be interested in) part of the job?

Who knows when something might come in that wasn't a topic in your Delicious queue but has an element you could build on?

I am not a smart man, but I know where the delete key is. :)

That's a whole lot of words when all they want you to do is not send them everything, just send what they would want. Um, isn't that what the 'delete' is for?

I would remove them from the distribution list and not let them know. Let's see if they notice then.

perfectly normal, from an austrian point of view - almost makes the impression to try helping the poor guy who got this back; AND one has an appropriate vector if you could give him something on his deli queue... not that bad.

I'm the guy who sent the e-mail.

Sparky Firepants writes: "Maybe ... I underestimate the amount of e-mail a reporter gets every day... "

I suspect you do. I get 50 pitches from vendors looking to get me to write about their company every day. I don't even have time to read all of them. The simple matter is that I get better stories if I ignore all of them than I do if I take the time to even skim every one of them.

Had I suspected this e-mail was actually from Guy Kawasaki, I would have at least taken the time to write a personal response. But I figured it was just some flunky using Guy's e-mail account, the same way Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are not reading every e-mail in response to their occasional bulk mail to their millions of customers.

At this point, I'll probably go back to just ignoring PR pitches that I'm not interested in -- which is what I did for years, and which is what most reporters do. Seems like no matter *how* I respond, somebody gets torqued. OTOH, people get torqued if I ignore the pitches too.

Mitch, it sounds like you're extremely busy like most of us. I can't help thinking there's a better solution than simply ignoring everyone or dying a slow death from reading story pitches.

In the age of Twitter, blogs, posterous, Digg, Delicious, feedburner, etc., is skimming 50 e-mail pitches a day is any different?

Or, maybe you could hire an assistant to skim pitches and cull the ones you might be interested in?

That's what I do with job requests so I don't get overloaded. My assistant forwards the ones she knows I'll want to respond to and those who want full page art for $15... I'll never see them.

But asking them never to contact me again because they're not worthy? I would be shooting myself in the foot.

Just a suggestion. Different industries, similar problems.

Once Mitch responded to this post - it got really interesting!
Unlike "Bill Gates and Steve Jobs", Mitch is is following twitter!

My suggestion is that ALL OF YOU watch the Tech Crunch "coffe chat" interview with Marc Cuban.

Haha! Nice one!

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