Last week, PR Secrets From a Media Insider returned with a typically eclectic assortment of attendees: two citizen activists, a healthcare practitioner, a communications specialist, a furniture store owner and a representative of a stained glass studio.

Among other points that I emphasized:

For many publicists, sending an e-mail often marks the extent of their outreach.

But based on my years as a reporter as well as in the PR realm, e-mails take on a markedly different life when they are accompanied by a verbal heads-up and some professional rapport. What guides my approach is how I always preferred to be treated as a journalist.

If someone was pitching a story to me for the first time, I was happy to get a call first so that the e-mail didn’t arrive out of the blue. (Later, once a publicist and I had built some trust and mutual respect, I welcomed e-mails any time, and calls in advance weren’t so necessary.)

Even though I was open to introductory phone calls, my patience had its limit. I had neither the time nor the interest to have my ear talked off when my real interest was in seeing, by e-mail, how much groundwork the publicist had done for me.

In my years on a newspaper staff, I had my beat or beats to tend to. As a freelance journalist, I was paid for completed articles, not the passage of time. So the swifter, more complete and more concrete a pitch, the more likely I would hop on a story.

When we give the media what they need, they will give us what we want. And who knows? They might even return more of our e-mails.

Growing up in journalism, I would periodically hear of the profession’s learning curve, which included making your first mistakes in smaller markets. The key was to learn from those missteps and thereby become less prone to major blunders at larger publications.

That was in the 1980s, when a story I wrote in the Marshfield Mariner took days to appear locally and wouldn’t show up globally unless someone boarded a flight at Logan International Airport and hauled a copy of the paper to another country.

Now, an inaccurate (or at least premature) report of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s death goes from a student website (Onward State) to CBSSports.com in the blink of an eye. And from CBSSports, of course, it goes viral….then backfires, due to the national site’s lack of independent corroboration.

It’s about 11 p.m. on Jan. 21 and Onward State has issued an apology by Devon Edwards, who announced his resignation as managing editor at the same time.

CBSSports.com, by contrast, hasn’t issued an apology–though it should, especially if all it did was re-hash Onward State’s erroneous report without any independent verification.

While Onward State’s mistake might be something you would  expect from young reporters and editors, how can a major outlet get so lax that it is drawn into such a sophomoric slip-up?

The gaffe will surely be dissected in the days to come, but I’ll bet that near the heart of the problem is one or more individuals’ desire to put being first ahead of being sure.