My first PR job was at a nonprofit with no money for 'real' PR. This book helped me use the few dollars we had without comprosing quality required to make a good impression to publications.

It explains the basics, what make a good PR person, and how to pull together the job of convincing others to cover your stories. How to get pics published, media visits, controversy. Logically written, it outlines options and reasons for responding to various situations.

A great asset.. this book has a solid directory of resources to help you get your job done.

No essential is left without guidance. However, missing from it is a "new" essential, the web. Maybe a newer edition will come out to cover this?

7 of 7 found the following review helpful:


Great resource for beginners  Jul 05, 2000
I've done press work for a number of years, so I was familiar with a great deal of the material covered in this book: how to approach the media, how to compile crash lists, etc. I think that this information, as it is presented by Yale, would be very helpful for newcomers to the field.

What I appreciated as a more experienced person was the inside information and advice on handling difficult situations. I also found the end-of-chapter checklists useful and enjoyed reading the many quotations from reporters and PR professionals. These appear throughout the book and they tie the advice given to the opinions of people in the fields.

If David Yale is considering revising the book for the year 2000, I would recommend a whole section on the internet.

This book, even without much on the web, is worth the twenty bucks. The behind-the-scenes information and media relations do-s and don't-s make it a worthwhile purchase.

9 of 10 found the following review helpful:


Great on Non-Web Publicity Techniques  Aug 21, 2002
Yale and Carothers have a great one with The Publicity Handbook, New Edition. Tons of super-useful stuff, ideas! But, not exactly web-oriented, unlike Michael Levine's Guerrilla PR: Wired, which fully takes the Internet into account in how to get publicity.

While The Publicity Handbook is great, it's lack of useful stuff about the web does hurt it. If they'd release a Newer New Edition dealing with the Internet, then I'd really really get that.

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:


Understanding the media  Jan 10, 2007 By Upa Ruiz "Upa Ruiz"
As a handbook should, this one is full with practical tips and ideas, all useful whether you work for a corporation or a small organization. What interested me most is that it gives a wide insight of the journalists' reasoning and helped me understand why publicity has to be done in a certain way to make it successful. (Sorry for the grammar and spelling, English is not my native language. Feel free to correct any mistake).

2 of 2 found the following review helpful:


A bit disappointing  May 23, 2008 By E. Karasik
I had hoped that this book would have some original and unusual approaches instead of just being a standard primer, but there was really very little of use for someone who is familiar with the basics of how to write and distribute a press release. If you've never been involved in publicity before, it might be an OK place to begin, but I would still look for something that is less traditional and includes more information on publicity via the internet.

See all 12 customer reviews on Amazon.com