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SPOTLIGHT ON: MEDIA RELATIONS
In a previous life, Dan Forbush must have been a matchmaker. The man who founded ProfNet knows how to make people happy: Every week his online clearinghouse redirects 500 media requests for sources to PR pros across North America.
"ProfNet makes my life ten times easier and my stories twice as good," says a testimonial from one U.S. News World Report reporter.
"Our agency uses ProfNet aggressively, and a week hardly goes by when we don't have hits as a result," says Craig McDaniel, APR, with Dallas-based PR firm Michael A. Bums & Associates, one of the 7,000 colleges, universities, corporations, PR agencies and think tanks that subscribe to the service.
Todd Sedmak, media relations director with American University (AU) in Washington, D.C., began an ongoing relationship with CNN as a result of a ProfNet query. The news network sent out an e-mail via ProfNet to find a law class that was following the Oj. Simpson case. When Sedmak told him a class at AU was doing just that, CNN came and filmed the class. CNN has been involving students on a remote feed nearly every week since then, mostly for the "TalkBack Live" program. "This opportunity would not have been possible without ProfNet," he says. "Most likely CNN would have used a college close to them." Because of the ongoing relationship, Sedmak was able to successfully pitch the network to follow an AU political science class over the course of last fall's presidential campaign.
Why does ProfNet work? First, coverage: Forbush began the service in 1992 while still vice president of public relations at the State
University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, on Long Island. At the start, ProfNet was a collective of 200 of Forbush's closest contacts, all public information officers (PIOs) at 130 colleges across the country. He combined the names and posted them as a Listserv on a journalism forum maintained at the time by CompuServe. "We began with a simple announcement," recalls Forbush "saying `this is who we are. If you're looking for sources, come to us.' I knew we were going to be a success when the first request came through from UPI [United Press...