I am having a very strange day. For the first time, the PR shoe is on the other foot and I'm trying to get PR and talking to reporters. Right now, I'm waiting on a callback from our local NBC news station. They've been calling us all day about showing up to do an interview in my living room tonight. They were in a big hurry to book it, but now we don't even know if they're going to show up.

Stay tuned. Whether I get covered is anyone's guess.

Anyway, the fuss is about a press release I sent out about my new book, <A HREF="http://www.emailsgone.com">Where Have All The Emails Gone?</A> The official press release went out yesterday and we've been gearing up to let you, our readers know about it this week.

In any case, the headline was "Is Osama bin Laden reading private White House email? New book shows it's possible." And that got NBC's attention. But was it enough to get them to plop a camera in my living room tonight? Don't know yet.

And, so now, the shoe's on the other foot. Rather than calling each individual news person (which is how I like to be approached), we just blasted out the release to a list we bought. Now, I'm the one mailing to a list. Not exactly my idea of best-practice, but given my total lack of time, it's what had to happen.

I'm beginning to understand a little more of the PR challenge. Our accumulated list is something like 99,000 people. If we were to try to figure out who on that list should get the release, it could take years to go through the whole thing. But one email takes a short time. Of course, now each individual editor has to deal with the PR UCE that comes flowing in. My email box is always filled to the brim with this crap.

And now, I'm doing it, too. So weird.

By the way, <A HREF="http://zatzhq.zatz.com/stories/storyReader$61">here's the fulltext of the release</A>, just for kicks. -- David