What a Good Publicist Can Do

I use a personalized excite.com page as my browser home page. I choose to get the AP Entertainment News headlines among the available categories. Today, the headline Israeli Sings for her Estranged People caught my eye. The lead paragraph reads:

"A mainstream pop album is an unlikely place to encounter an ancient tongue known to a total of 705 people in the Holy Land. But tucked between the smooth chords and Hebrew vocals on Israel singer Sofi Tsedaka's debut CD, listeners can hear the lilting language of the Samaritans."

The article goes on to recount the Samaritan background of Ms. Tsedaka, an apparently well-known Israeli actress, seen in soap operas and children's TV. She left the ancient sect, now numbering 705 by their own count, after finishing high school and converted to Judaism. The Samaritans excommunicated her.

My interest was piqued, and I googled "Sofi Tsedaka" to find out more, but the same AP story came up on different sites, with the one from the Boston Herald containing a photo. Now, I'm no where near famous, but there are more hits when you google my name than hers--even when you discard the German pages that deal with Marilyn Monroe and "Some Like It Hot." ("heiss" is "hot" in German). So there was no presence of her as an actress that I could find. And if you want to listen to her, you're out of luck. I couldn't find a place to buy the cd nor could I find a download.

Now, maybe some AP reporter in Israel needed a human interest piece and found her. Excuse my cynicism, but it seems more likely that this story was planted. She knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, etc., at the AP.

I wonder if this will pay off, and news of her music spreads. One piece of advice to her manager. If you're going to plant an article internationally in order to influence people to listen to her music, you shouldn't include this quote from Ms. Tsedaka, "I'm not a great singer - I'm not Whitney Houston." I'm glad she's no Whitney Houston, but I don't know how smart it is to admit your failings as a singer when you're publicizing your new cd. . .