I should, technically, love press kits.  It was a press kit, after all, that got me into restaurant PR.  You see, I was working at a restaurant and it was about nine months after it opened. The PR firm was hosting a Media Event.  It was Very Important.

Though a line cook at the time, I had a master's degree and a few years of white collar work in sales and marketing under my toque. So I was fascinated by this whole process of the media dinner.

While everyone was setting up, I did what any curious cook would do: I made sure no one was looking, sauntered by the table on my way to the walk-in, and stole a press kit.

"Poised to open in the hip new Randolph Street district ..." it began.  Whhaaa?? That seemed slightly insane and completely ridiculous.  Here we were, having this Very Important Media Event, and these people hadn't seen fit to update the press kit.  They hadn't even updated it for more than nine months.  I could do better than that.

And so I did do better than that.

Press kits can be monstrous projects to complete. If it weren't enough to write up compelling and accurate bios from a bunch of people who are harder to pin down than a mosquito in a windstorm, there's extracting the menu from the chef (with pricing, please. PLEASE!).  Add to it the delicate task of coaxing an approved logo out of the graphic designer (that is, if there is even a name for the place yet), and, yes, oh, yes, the overall design.  It's all the piece de resistance of pain, unless of course someone's sister-in-law has suggested dumping the whole thing onto a business-card sized CD or some such thing.

And to get the whole thing done, approved and out the door can be cause for celebration.  At least for the fifty-three seconds, precisely, it takes for the client to call you up and alert you that there has been A Major Change. 

It always happens that the minute any publicist hits send on a press kit (in the old days, the minute it was dropped in the mail box), the client changes some critical piece of information.  One of the more hideous moments I lived through in PR was when I distributed a press kit to more than 500 journalists moments before the chef was fired. More often than not it is a change in the hours or pricing.  One time the restaurant gave me (and thus everyone else) the wrong address.

All that has led me to the conclusion that press kits are dead.  Not the material, mind you. Having that kind of base of information is crucial to successful PR.  It is the delivery system I believe is essentially garbage. I don't care if it is in a folder, on a disc, sent via laser beams with a bag of jelly beans, or what.  If it can't change, daily, hourly, to respond to the current news at the restaurant, it doesn't work.  Because the news will change, a lot, daily even, and if the delivery system can't react and adapt to that change, well, then you are just sending out Yesterday's News, which incidentally, is my preferred brand of kitty litter.