It's a classic startup strategy - find an industry that's is need of disrupting and then do just that. So what's on the cards for the guys behind Pitchspace? Nothing too unambitious - the public relations industry.
Photo by Peter Kaminski on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
The idea is to offer a platform for PRs and journalists. PRs seed stories and releases, and journalists can pick up the stories they like and use Pitchspace to organise the material for that story. The system also ranks PRs (and, I assume, journalists!) according to the relationships they build up with journalists, so the more they work together the more contact details they get, and so on.
This is very early stage, but an idea that is worth getting out there for discussion before the beta version launches so that the guys can refine what they are doing.
From a journalist's point of view, the appeal is crucially that this means bypassing cursed email. If the Pitchspace feeds can be organised in an RSS reader, that would overcome the problem of having to integrate yet another piece of software into my daily news process. On the other hand, it's a system that has no way of capturing the most valuable leads - off record, late night and confidential - and I'm not clear how you could negotiate anything exclusive on here either.
From a PR point of view, it's another outlet for reaching journalists, so the appeal would be in the volume of writers that use it. But perhaps I'll let the PRs themselves weigh in on that side of things.
I'm prepared to be generous with this idea and this project, even though this is very early days, because they are tackling some very interesting ideas here: email is broken. Incredibly inefficient, untargeted, abused. If they can devise a system that communicates information more efficiently - using what we have learnt from Twitter - we could all benefit.
Secondly, the idea of wrapping reputation management around direct professional relationships is very interesting. (Until someone gets bombed, but let's not think about that yet...).
Thirdly, there's the more nascent idea of content management in here, a sort of Basecamp-style store for stories in development. Again, on a website (and this is just the MediaGuardian) with a turnaround of 30 news stories and 15 blog posts a day (not to mention podcasts, video and extra stories first published in the paper) - building up a project portofolio is aluxury of time we just don't have.
This follows some of Robert Scoble's recent rants that PR is dead, Steve Rubel noting that a lot of journalists prefer digging out stories themselves and a great piece by ReadWriteWeb on the pros and cons of PR. The good, the bad, and the downright ugly.
We all have an interest in how these issues to develop, so I'd like to hear your ideas on what needs to change, what needs to be fixed (if anything) and if Pitchspace are thinking along the right lines. Any chance of any tankers being turned?
• Hear Pitchspace's co-founder James Cox on the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast.
