Really interesting article on the front page of the New York Times’ business section this past holiday weekend. From the headline and lead, I thought it was going to be about the transformation of the public relations business:

“This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.”

The protagonist of the story is an impressive woman who clearly has a speed dial to be envied. Larry (Ellison)? No problem! Michael (Ovitz)? We vacation together. We see her shepherd a start-up through its launch, by putting its CEO in touch with her “dear friends” at Amazon, Twitter, Digg and elsewhere.

Yet, as I read it and read it again, I realized that the article was not what it purported to be, i.e. about “turning the entire idea of P.R. professionals as gatekeepers on its head.” The woman with the amazing speed dial is just as much a gatekeeper as the hardboiled stereotypes of yesteryear. My goodness – she even embraces the term “publicist!” The cast of influential characters may have changed, from reporters to CEOs and VCs, but what’s going on is the tried and true business of cultivating important people and leveraging those relationships on behalf of your client.

There’s nothing wrong with that model – but it’s not transformative. What interests me even more is the way that the social Web will embrace compelling content – no matter who it comes from – and give fascinating but heretofore unknown soldiers their day in the sun.

I’ve seen this happen twice in recent months in a social network I follow: e-Patients.net (http://e-patients.net/). In the first instance, one of the blogs most prolific writers, the self-styled e-Patient Dave, took it upon himself to test the new services such as Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health that purport to store your medical records in a secure environment. Dave was brave enough to risk his personal privacy for a greater purpose, and what he discovered was little short of shocking. The records his hospital uploaded to Google Health were rife with errors, including procedures he’d never received and diagnoses he’d never had. The revelations not only made Dave a hero in the Health 2.0 community, they attracted the attention of the Boston Globe, which ran a feature on his tribulations. Pretty good PR results there!

The second, tragic tale is that of Regina Holliday, a blogger and newly minted activist whose husband succumbed to cancer last month. Regina blogged about her efforts to get a complete copy of her husband’s medical records so she could seek a second opinion. She was told it would take a month and cost her $.73 per page. She had neither the thousands of dollars required, nor the month of time. While she fought the system, her husband Frederick lost his battle with renal cell carcinoma. Regina’s story helped galvanize a group of healthcare stars to create the Health Data Declaration of Rights. The Declaration got coverage in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post. Again, not a bad day’s work for a previously unknown mom/wife/poet/artist.

There’s room for all type in this big, wide world of ours – and room for plenty of schools of public relations. But if you want to see how the Web is truly moving the force, don’t look to traditional publicists, even if their rolodex IS on their Blackberry and Twitter account. Look at the power of words, images and ideas to break through the clutter in a radically democratic and exciting way.