During the two days or so in San Francisco I happened to get a chance to check out Sony's Gamers' Day playbook. The thick notebook was filled with all of the news set to be broken at the event, the pre-written answers to questions frequently asked by reporters, itineraries, maps to the different locations of the event and spec sheets.

It also happened to have a section filled with reporter dossiers and a source let me look at them. Well really it was a glance, but still kinda intriguing.

Before you start freaking, you should probably know that all of the big companies, and many large companies in other high-end industries, typically create similar reporter dossiers.

The dossiers typically give execs and PR people a run down of who the person is, how important they are and what some of their interests are. Most often, the reporter has no knowledge of what is written about them.

In this case, most of the listings in the dossier section were pretty dry. I didn't get close to seeing all of them, but what I saw showed typically one to two longish paragraphs that described a person's background and beliefs.

While I wasn't listed (What? I'm not important enough Sony?) I saw listings for CNN Money's Chris Morris, MTV's Stephen Totillo and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal. I also managed to read one of the listings up close and personal. It said the reporter in question had shown a "lot of interest" in the Playstation 3 and was working on a big news story about it.

Hello? Isn't that true of everyone a month before launch. Sheesh, if you're gonna have a black book on people the least you can do is fill it with smut like: The reporter broke his hand working on a computer. I'm sure we can win him over by threating to expose his nasty temper.

For the record, none of these particular dossiers seemed to contain the least bit of dirt. Brian Crecente

Contact information for this author is not available.