New Front Opens in Battle Between Flacks & Hacks: Bing vs. Jarvis

In Jeff Jarvis is a twit, Stanley Bing takes Jarvis to task for suggesting:

1. The press release is dead.
2. Journalists do not need PR pros.

I've written before that I don't think the press release is dead. It is evolving. It is interactive, multimedia and SEO'ed, but not dead.

And I also think journalists do need PR pros -- and PR pros, of course, need journalists.

But there's long been a tension and a war of words (on Twitter, that's a war of 140 characters) between flacks and hacks.

Technology hasn't changed the battlefield.

It's only made it easier for everyone to watch and participate.

Read Bing's rant. It's a good defense of PR. Of course, when he's not a columnist, he's the head of corp comm for CBS. So read the comments, too, to get more of Jarvis' perspective (he responds on Bing's blog).

But the most important point is Bing's final sentence: "nobody benefits when the hacks attack the flacks." I would add, flacks don't benefit when they attack hacks.

What we really need to do is respect each other.