I'm getting married Saturday, so I won't be posting again for a week or so. And this is one time when I'm very glad that I'm not a prince (in any sense of the word.)

Poor Charles and, especially, poor Camilla -- who was criticized for everything imaginable in the run-up to the recent royal wedding. What I hated most were the commentators attacking Camilla for dressing in attire that made her look "dowdy." Hello, she's 57! Do you want her to dress like Cher?

Camilla handled the bad PR just the way she should have: by being honest and self-deprecating. "Just two old people getting married," she called the ceremony.

From Matt Smith of SF Weekly:

Publicists have a dreary and emotionally exhausting job. Daily, they must cold-call and suck up to journalists in attempts to forge relationships that are built, fundamentally, on dysfunction.

In an ideal journalistic world, you see, publicists wouldn't exist. Journalists would be resourceful, hardworking, and freethinking, never needing the press releases, story tips, staged interviews, and other "on-message" news that publicists provide. But because they often lack these qualities, reporters eventually wind up accepting at least some of the fare that publicists pass out, albeit with resentment and suspicion, even contempt.

Publicists' bosses don't make things easier. The official rules of public relations say it's the client or cause that's supposed to shine, not the PR agent. So most often flacks toil anonymously, disrespected, maligned, and ignored -- even in cases where their work is so good it generates a Pulitzer Prize.

That's right, a Pulitzer Prize. Last week the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism awarded journalism's highest honor to a series of newspaper editorials that resulted from the efforts of a Bay Area publicist -- but without giving her any credit.

It's a great lead. The rest of the story is here.

I would only add that, having been both a PR guy and a writer for an alternative weekly, I think the latter vocation is far more "dreary and emotionally exhausting." I won't detail all the reasons here; to each his own, I guess.

I've long believed that, with some exceptions, advertising agencies should lead product branding efforts while public relations counselors should guide corporate branding. Here's a well-thought-out article on this topic, from the PRSA Web site.

Conservative bloggers with too little to gripe about are actually bashing the Pulitzer Board for honoring the AP's photo coverage of the Iraq War. Some have whined that none of the winning photos showed U.S. forces in a "heroic light."

Setting aside the fact that this year's Pulitzer judges include representatives from conservative newspapers such as The Washington Times, these bloggers seem to come from the Jeff Gannon School of Journalism, where your point of view is all that matters. Don't confuse them with the facts; they're not interested.

I'm sure these are some of the same folks who complained that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. was not "heroic" enough, and successfully lobbied for the unnecessary Iwo Jima-style sculpture that stands clumsily next to the Wall -- one of the most timeless, powerful monuments ever created.

War is hell, folks. Don't expect the pictures to be pretty.

Jeff Gannon appeared at Friday's National Press Club panel on journalism and blogging -- called "Who is a Journalist?" -- and caused quite a stir. As this Editor & Publisher account describes the event, things got pretty heated.