Paul Graham just posted a new essay about PR. I wrote him an email with the comment below, then decided to post it here.
Paul excerpted the following as an example of plain-jane mainstream newspaper writing, which he later contrasts with the more authentic voice of many bloggers:
Joshua Schachter used to be a lot like the rest of us online. When he surfed the Web, he’d zip through interesting articles only to find that days later he couldn’t remember where he had seen the stories or sites that had caught his interest.
I went to Northwestern, which has a top-notch print program. Every journalism major had to go through Basic Writing, a grueling class that teaches you to crank out an incredible amount of articles in a very short period of time in a format that the mainstream newspapers prefer – i.e. the example above.
The Daily Northwestern newspaper was, as you might expect, staffed mostly by journalism majors. Which means it was incredibly dull to read. The only interesting writing was the weekend section, which was written by people who were into the arts and music, not necessarily journalism per se.
Nonetheless they were probably heavily influenced by PR. I once interned at an alternative record label, and our single biggest expense was mailing out freebie records (this was right before CDs became ubiquitous), often to college newspapers.