This week’s Newsweek cover story — My Life in Pictures — is a fantastic look at the life of famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. The artist looks at her life through her art and her ability to capture image-defining portraits for celebrities including a very beautiful (and very pregnant) Demi Moore, an up-and-coming Michael Jordan and a dancer-tuned-activist Mikhail Baryshnikov.

This story made me think about my career and the evolution of public relations. I thought it would be interesting (read: hilarious) to look at my life through the press releases that I’ve mailed, faxed or emailed (totally depending on the decade).

Laffy Taffy searches for America’s Funniest Kid (Sadly, I mostly remember staying at the office until midnight stuffing press kits to *mail* to the press. These days, I’m sure the U.S. Postal Service has built a permanent shrine to eBay and Yahoo! Auctions who single handedly saved their business model.)

CyberTel Changes its Name to Ameritech (This is when cell phones were a novelty; I spent hours *faxing* the press release to 5 zillion journalists. Ahh faxing, what a highly effective way to make your fingers sore from endlessly dialing and destroy millions of trees on copious amounts of ‘transmission successful’ paper receipts. Although, the whole “this fax just came in for you” line from cinematic police procedurals and thrillers of the late 1980’s/early 1990’s was gold in heightening the tension and served as the critical moment when Michael Douglas finally identified the real femme fatale.)

Compaq Launches the Presario Home PC (Ironically enough, these releases were mailed and faxed to the press. We had to mail them, how else would the press receive the photography?

HP Launches the World’s First All-in-One Device (Not to be confused with a “multifunction peripheral,” but we did email these releases.)

HP Prepares for Y2K (Anyone else out there work New Year’s Eve? What bubble? This Internet boom is going to last forever…I don’t know what you’re talking about Alan Greenspan!?!)

Qualcomm Launches BREW (Wow, cell phones are getting fancy, and we are emailing like crazy!)

Stata Labs Launches Search-based Email (And Google quickly follows, and then Yahoo! buys Stata Labs.)

And then we move into Yahoo! and blogs… and press releases become less necessary and less frequent… but I’ll save that for another post…

SL

Technorati Tags: career, PR, old+school