"Day Job" is actually a misnomer for what I do. When you work at home producing a frequently updated website, 20th century concepts like "day" and "night" (not to mention "sleep") lose much of their meaning.

My employer is Infocom Group, an Oakland, Calif. publishing company that serves the PR profession. My primary activity is Bulldog Reporter's Inside Health Media (IHM), a daily online trade publication for PR people in health and medicine. My readers work for a wide range of organizations, including medical schools, hospitals, pharmaceutical/ biotech companies, non-profits and PR agencies with large healthcare practices.

It's an advertising-free subscription publication, so I can't provide a link, but you can read the promotional material here.

IHM is even more specialized than the name might indicate. Almost all of my coverage is based on interviews with health journalists who discuss their work and their preferences for dealing with PR. I've talked to people at high-profile outlets like The New York Times, and ones that are not so well known, such as Medicare Secondary Payer and Predictive Modeling News. I've done pieces on Yoga Journal and Vegetarian Times along with Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. If someone writes about health in any conceivable way, I'll talk to them.

We launched the site in February 2005, and except for a brief hiatus late that year, I've been the sole editor (and web producer, copy chief, cafeteria help, etc.). In that time, I've talked to hundreds of journalists of all descriptions. I've even followed some as they moved from one publication to another. Sadly, I've also had a front-row seat for all the downsizing in newsrooms around the country.

Learning the lingo   The job has been quite an educational experience, especially for someone like me who previously wrote about computers. When the site launched, I thought a "clinical trial" was something you watched on Court TV. Now biotech writers can say things like, "I cover large-molecule development strategies except for RNA interference" and I sort of understand what they mean (that was a real quote from a reporter with a PhD from Stanford).

This is a natural part of being a journalist in a highly specialized field — you talk to enough people, and you begin absorbing knowledge by osmosis. A few years ago, a Forbes writer told me he liked getting advance word of "PDUFA dates" from PR people at drug companies, and he had to explain that this refers to the deadline for the FDA to make a decision on whether to approve a medication.

So now I can sprinkle terms like "large-molecule" and "PDUFA dates" into my conversations and sound like I know what I'm talking about. I think I can safely say that I'm the only California-based health media editor who writes for a PR industry trade publication who can make that claim.

Turning the tables   One of the odd things about this job is that it turns the normal journalist-source-PR relationship upside-down and inside-out. After all, I'm interviewing people accustomed to asking the questions for an audience accustomed to making the pitches.

Most of the journalists I've interviewed have been gracious and forthcoming, partly due to enlightened self-interest. They're typically bombarded with poorly targeted pitches and press releases, so they realize it's to their benefit to help educate PR people about constructive media-relations practices.

But it's not uncommon for me to run into journalists who refuse to talk about their work, even though they generally demand transparency when they're the ones working on a story. And every now and then, they show a surprising lack of media savvy when the tables are turned — I can't tell you how many times someone has asked, "Am I being quoted on this?" in the middle of an interview, even ones I've set up in advance.

When they do talk, the conversation often becomes a form of therapy, because they're able to express their frustrations with much of PR they see (and believe me, the frustrations are many). I recall a New York Times editor who paused in the middle of a complaint about PR spam, and said, "Do you want me to keep venting?"

Automatic writing   Although IHM is a big change from my previous editorial work, my computer background hasn't completely gone to waste. I've developed a lot of custom tools, mostly MS Word and Excel macros, to automate the grunt work needed to produce the site.

One automatically generates "Fast Moves," our term for news items about job changes involving journalists. Fast Moves follow a formulaic style, so I can just paste the journalist's name and outlet into a form and hit a button indicating what happened (hired, promoted, left, etc.). The program then spits out something like this: "Los Angeles Times hires San Francisco Chronicle reporter John Doe as Fresno correspondent."

The macro also queries a database containing the email formula for the publication and automatically plugs in the journalist's contact info. If the news involves a TV station, I just paste in the call letters and the macro looks up the TV market it's in.

If you're a writer, it might be scary to think you can be replaced by a piece of software, but it sure saves me a lot of time.

Another set of macros helps me produce a listing of health-related press releases from PR Newswire and BusinessWire, typically 150 to 300 per day. I dump the links and headlines into a spreadsheet, then run a macro that applies HTML formatting and tentatively assigns them to categories based on keywords (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, pharmaceuticals, information technology, etc.).

It doesn't always guess the categories right, but I can easily go in and change them. It generally takes 20-30 minutes from start to finish, and it's proved to be one of the most popular parts of the service.

Healthy lifestyle   One side effect of the job is the impact on my own health. The site includes links to daily headlines about health news, so every day I'm exposed to reports about the benefits (or dangers) of some food, household substance or daily activity.

I won't go into too much detail, except to say that whereas before I would have seen a juicy hamburger and fries as a potential meal, now I see a heart attack waiting to happen, and I've changed my diet accordingly. (I still have the occasional hamburger, but fries are a distant memory.)

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A Special Note for Members of the PR Profession

I work for a company whose customers are PR professionals. We appreciate your business, and I especially value the support and encouragement of those in healthcare PR who have subscribed to Bulldog Reporter's Inside Health Media. Infocom Group, the company behind Bulldog Reporter, has a "customer-first" philosophy, and we all work diligently to ensure that we are delivering high-quality products and services.

At the same time, I am a journalist, and like most journalists I get bombarded with press releases and PR pitches. We are well known within the PR profession, and thus it surprises me how many of these pitches come from people who clearly have no clue about what I cover or where my interests lie. They send random email blasts to media lists they've bought or rented, hoping that a small percentage of the recipients will be interested. I'm tagged in some directories as being a health and media journalist (instead of the intersection of the two), so it's a double whammy. This is a bad way to do PR, as other journalists have told me time and again.

What's worse is when PR people call to see if I received the email, especially if the call comes at 6 a.m. because they don't realize that I work at home and "510" is a West Coast area code.

These are common pet peeves among journalists, especially those tagged as covering health, because it's such a large PR category. But it's doubly ironic given the nature of my job.

Another problem arises in situations where I need information or help setting up an interview with a health journalist or producer. Most PR people are responsive, but some don't return messages in a timely manner (or at all). I'm not chasing scandals or doing "gotcha" journalism. My mission is to inform my readers about the most effective ways to interact with journalists — in the words of the journalists themselves — and both parties benefit when this happens.

That said, here's what PR people need to know about working with me.

1. The only "health coverage" I do involves health media. I don't write about medical treatments, consumer products, books, experts or anything else that typically falls under the rubric of health journalism, whether it's aimed at consumers, doctors or executives.
2. My coverage of health media is strictly limited to topics of interest to PR professionals, and virtually all of my interviews are with journalists or other media producers. If you can set me up to interview a health journalist, I definitely want to hear from you.
3. In addition to Inside Health Media, I handle most media news coverage for the company, regardless of whether it's health related. This generally involves news about editorial hires, departures, promotions, beat changes, etc. I also write about new outlets and changes involving existing ones: new sections, redesigns, cutbacks, etc. Again, if you have news of this nature, I definitely want it.
4. If you try to pitch something other than items 2 and 3 above, you are almost certainly wasting your time (and mine). The key consideration is that the information must be of practical use to PR people seeking coverage in media outlets.
5. If you do have something relevant, you should send it to my work email address. Do not send it to my personal email account, which is listed in some media directories. Unless you're in my personal address book, those messages will go into a spam folder.
6. Inside Health Media is a daily publication, and I work at a fast pace. If you have media news, I want it as soon as it happens, and I also appreciate timely responses to interview requests. If you issue a press release related to my interests, please be available to answer questions (other journalists will appreciate this, too). This includes releases distributed on PR Newswire or BusinessWire.
7. If you agree to help me, please follow through. Don't tell me you're going to put me in touch with a journalist and then drop the ball. If the journalist decides they don't want to talk, call (or email) and tell me that. Don't leave me hanging.
8. I do not cover news about PR or marketing agencies, such as new hires, accounts, campaigns, etc. I get a lot of these press releases, which is understandable due to my "news editor" title, but they generally go into a black hole. These items are most appropriate for our free online trade journal, The Daily 'Dog, which is a separate operation with its own staff. Send them to this email address.
9. In addition to my full-time job as a Bulldog Reporter editor, I do some freelance work related to computer graphics, mostly software reviews. My only active client now is HOW Magazine, and my editor there makes all the assignments. PR pros representing developers of graphics software can send me press releases, but I do only a few articles per year and the chances for coverage are slim. I have a personal interest in 3D graphics, video effects and photo-editing software. If you want to put me on a distribution list, use the contact form to send me a message, and if I'm interested I'll send you an email address you can use.