Man Tries, Fails to Promote New Website 'Aimed at Women'

Good PR pros know: you have to understand and appreciate your audience in order to craft messages and content that will truly speak to them rather than at them or—even worse—around them.

The journalists on our Twitter feeds spent much of the last week mocking the “glorified press release” that web entrepreneur Bryan Goldberg wrote to announce the fundraising achievements and subsequent launch of Bustle.com, his new “high-revenue [publication] aimed at women”. We’ll take a moment here to observe what, exactly, he did wrong—and how he could have avoided the poor response he received.

Goldberg, who regularly contributes to the tech site PandoDaily, wrote the announcement as a blog post and Q&A that that initially earned the Internet’s ire for quotes like this one:

My job, as CEO, is to hire the right people…Knowing the difference between mascara, concealer, and eye-liner is not my job.

And