We’ve all consumed the horror stories from journalists recounting tales of PR folks sending off base pitches, cc’ing journalists on inappropriate emails, or getting irate when an editor won’t take a briefing. The wind blows two ways, however, so we’ve cobbled together some stories from across the agency of some less-than-savory encounters with the media. Believe it or not, there were many stories to tell, so this is a two part series. Read on, and feel free to share your own anecdotes!

Bill Bourdon: Follow through is a key requirement of any successful PR program, or business for that matter. This includes following up with team members to ensure accountability on everyone’s respective roles, following up with clients on their deliverables, and also following up with media around pitches, client interviews, etc. The latter obviously involves a good deal of tact. For example, bombarding a reporter after a client interview via phone, email, IM and Twitter is a surefire recipe to agitate them and potentially get blacklisted. However, tactfully following up with a reporter a week after an interview with a client about a major launch to determine the status of the story and offer further assistance is a necessary part of what we do.

This is why I was shocked to receive a three-paragraph rant back from a certain editor in chief at a certain knowledge management trade publication upon following up with him very tactfully after arranging interviews with a client and one of their customers. Both my client and their customer had taken a lot of time to prepare for the interview and naturally wanted to know if the story was still planned. After politely following up more than a week after the interviews had passed, I received an ALL CAPS diatribe back from the editor threatening to blacklist me and my agency, and inform my client of my incompetence. Little did he know that little email temper tantrum put him on my own blacklist and I’ve never communicated with him ever since.

Elissa Ehrlich:  A former mobile client had us put out a globally generated press release about an analyst report that named their company as having top share of the CDMA handset market worldwide. A mobile trade publication called us to verify the numbers and asked us to speak to the analyst. When we went back to the client, well, it turns out that the report was not yet issued so they didn’t want to speak to any media about the story. We had to go back to the publication and tell them not to publish the story yet, even though we put out a release about it. The editor of the publication called me, yelled at me and said never in all her time has she ever experience such a travesty of PR (really? never anything worse than that?!). Moral of the story – don’t put out a press release about an analyst report without first checking that it has been published!

Amy Ziari: When good news turns to just plain awkward and sad: An editor from one of the largest national dallies called to say that YES, she would take me up on my offer to do an exclusive story on my client. Cue Amy trying but probably failing to contain her excitement! The high was very short-lived though when she then burst into tears, mumbling something about having a family member recently die, and then immediately hanging up on me. To this day, I can’t believe she still did the story.

Tyler Perry:  We were launching a client out of stealth mode. PR was obviously a major component of it, and the debut was happening at an RFID tradeshow in Vegas in a coordinated sales, marketing and biz dev effort.  Leading up to the launch, we lined up myriad pre-briefings, including one with the venerable Don Clark from WSJ. All were completely in agreement with the embargo, and we were very careful to make sure that each journalist got something “unique” for his/her story – a customer reference, an analyst, supporting product detail and images, etc.

So imagine my surprise when I received an angry call from my client a two weeks before the launch- the blog from a major IT trade had written an article on the company! I quickly scrambled to read it and discovered that the journalist had written a piece with language that looked eerily familiar…from my pitch. We had corresponded about the launch, and after he agreed to the embargo we sent him some additional information. He passed on a briefing as he didn’t feel it was right for his column, but obviously changed his mind. Fortunately we hadn’t sent him anything particularly damaging to the launch, but it did make for an awesome weekend of trying to hunt him down and request that he take the story down. He refused.  The launch went incredibly well, but I have never worked with this journalist again.

I am sure there are many more stories to tell…stay tuned for our second installment, but post some of your craziest scenarios in the comments below!