Most PR people will tell you that pitching bloggers is a bit different than pitching mainstream journalists (although now that many mainstream journalists have blogs the line is blurring). If you pitch a mainstream journalist badly, say by misjudging his interests or poorly researching his beat and articles, he'll ignore you, or perhaps hang up on you. A blogger will often mock you publicly, publish your pitch e-mail and shame you or your agency by name. Thus this entertaining post from the recently very hard working Andrew Leonard, who writes the superb "How the World Works" blog for Salon.com. He flames a PR agency that badly misjudged his point of view on the current US financial crisis, and pitched an interview on corporate tax breaks to him. Leonard published the heart of the pitch and then writes:

[PR firm Dezenhall Associates] then offered to arrange a chance for me to speak with representatives of the Tax Foundation so that they could explain why lowering the corporate income tax rate is the right thing to do now. Alas, life is too short.

That's right, first let's authorize the spending of up to $700 billion to bring solvency to Wall Street, and then we lower the corporate income tax rate. It's hard for me to imagine a more stupid, insulting and flat-out enraging public relations campaign at this particular moment in time than this travesty from Dezenhall Associates.

Life is too short to take your interview. Ouch. Advice to PR people: Find ways to avoid "enraging" your media targets. And if you're pitching against the grain, by which I mean working against a journalist or blogger's established point of view, take the time to come up with some that is really creative and at least demonstrates that you are aware of the ideological hurdle.

Or, on the other hand, just take the easy route and stick to Fox News.