Yeah, that paragraph was really just a couple of examples to point out the fact that reporters are just people at the end of the day. This was written a few years ago and was recently ported over to Medium, where it started taking off, hence mentioning Scoble and Tsotsis. I should update, but I wouldn't read too much into it.

The process definitely works, I've used it for a dozen companies when I used to work in marketing, and it has worked for my company as well.