TechDay ends links with PR firm after ‘exasperating’ requests

afr.com:

Writing an industry gossip column sometimes requires pulling together various strands and weaving an amusing tale. Other times, it’s enough to point and say, “Look! What the hell?” This is one such occasion.

A blow-up between a tech news group and a PR firm is becoming a source of deep fascination for PR sector operatives.

TechDay owns a conglomerate of small tech news websites across Asia and the UK, and is the self-described “grand central station” for IT news in Australia (it is, it proudly states, updated “multiple times per day”). It has also had it up to here with PR firm Archetype.

After 17 years, it has severed its relationship with Archetype in what TechDay’s New Zealand-based publisher, Sean Mitchell, wrote was a “shocking turn of events” in a detailed article posted online this month.

TechDay tiptoes that murky line between journalism and sponsored content – it charges $1450 to “turn your press release into a news story and publish it” on one of its sites.

The relationship took a nosedive, Mitchell wrote, when Archetype asked TechDay to rewrite a brief “as if it were our original idea”, which would then be pitched back to its client.

He continued, accusing Archetype of booking meetings over “trivial matters” such as event dietary requirements. It was “nothing short of exasperating”, he wrote. These trivialities “appear to be a tactic to inflate KPI results or billable hours at the expense of journalists’ time (and maybe clients’ budgets)” he added, volunteering that Archetype took more than three months to pay invoices it owed the publication.

Lee Nugent, Archetype’s APAC director, told us TechDay had published “unfounded, untrue and potentially damaging claims” and the firm had tried to resolve the dispute