Back in my day we used to say, “Any PR is good PR.” We had no need for crisis PR or Twitter customer service. So your tragedy ended up on the front page of The New York Times? At least it was above the fold! In a few days from now, no one will remember what happened.

But they will remember that you were in The New York Times. That is one hit you will never forget.

You know what else we didn’t have — new-fangled interactive polls. We had the old fashioned kind – the kind where we made up the results. That’s right, men don’t really prefer women that wear glasses but that optics company really needed some hits. And let me tell you, the press was eating up those results. Even the the wires didn’t bother to fact check that one. Where would they fact check it anyway? We didn’t have Google back then.

[Editor’s Note: Mr. Publicity is an ‘old-school’ flack, though not old.  They will be offering some tidbits from time to time about antediluvian flackery (or at least what they claim to remember of it) — when press releases actually got  printed and mailed, phone (or smoke signal) was the best way to build a relationship, and people actually ran into newsrooms yelling “Stop The Presses” (ok, I’m not sure that one ever really did happen)]