Isn't the New York Times Already Pretty Social?

You can read all about the New York Times new social media editor nearly everywhere today. Or, you can just follow Jennifer Preston on Twitter and hear from her directly. Of course, there's the original memo announcing her new role, the CJR article telling us, um... not much, and Mike Volpe's on target criticism of her hiring, pointing out that a single person can't do it all, that social media needs to extend through out an organization. Though, to be fair, when I read the original memo I felt that her hiring was as much an internal educational move as an external outreach play.

All that being said, if all Preston takes away from this job is a few ideas from the peanut gallery like creating standardized hashtags for breaking news, then I'd call this a failed experiment.

Isn't the Times already a pretty good community? They have content, people who come to read the content and the ability for people to comment on that content. In fact, they have multiple communities, not just the readers but also the various communities they cover. Shouldn't the Times be working to galvenize those communities and strengthen them, rather than simply trying to Tweet more?

The Times, and other newspapers, should start inviting their readers to be editors. Their model should be Facebook, letting people interact and use the information as the basis of that interaction. I touched on this concept back in 2005, but I think it's much more important now.

The social media world has taught us that people follow people, but that organizations such as the New York Times and its more localized sibling the Boston Globe command trust and respect from their readers. They need to build on that, but also let the people have a say.

And not just on Twitter.

Thoughts After Layoff

Update: Much of what I laid out in this post has been on my mind for the past several months. As of 10/7/09, I have teamed up with Todd Van Hoosear to create Fresh Ground Communications, a firm dedicated to changing how companies handle their PR.


As those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook know, I recently became a casualty of the economy. Yes, I was laid off from my job at Schwartz Communications.

I worked there for nearly 9 years, in various times as a Senior Account Executive, Supervisor, Director and New Media Strategist. I started during the last of the dot com boom, watched the fallout after a devastating round of layoffs, then saw business rise again as money flowed back into the technology sector.

So I thought I'd take this time to reflect both on my work, the industry and where I'm going. You'll probably see a theme emerging in my blog posts as I to through a bit of self-discovery.

While at Schwartz I started to lead the agency into the social media landscape, working with clients as far back as 2003 to get them blogging and participating in online discussions. While I often found myself presenting ideas that were nodded and smiled at but ultimately ignored, I achieved greater success internally getting people to try things out on their own.

I liked the teaching. I liked the discussions. I liked helping people think about new ways to approach getting their clients publicity with the right audience. Even if I couldn't get my specific clients to make the move, many other people could across many other accounts. The cool part is, I don't need to stop doing that, I just won't be doing it there.

I firmly believe that PR has a great future in the new media landscape. But traditional media relations is dead, as though you haven't noticed. Companies need to shift from being content pushers (pitching media) to content creators.

This raises a pretty basic question: can the same people to do that job? I come at this from a different perspective, having had a career as a print and broadcast journalist, plus being a decent photographer, but can agencies expect their current staffs to have or gain those same skills?

Interestingly enough, many people with those exact skills are scattered around the job market. A few weeks ago I watched layoffs at IDG play out over Twitter. Over the past few months a lot of great journalists have lost their jobs and a number of great publications have closed their doors.

Not only does this mean there is a lot of talent out there for the taking, but it also means that traditional media relations firms have to completely reverse their business model or face more cuts, just changing from pitching reporters to pitching bloggers is not enough. Basic fact: if you pitch to a channel and the channel dries up, then you're toast.

Smart companies know this has to change. But people still fall back on what's safe and known, so change will be slow.

As Kenneth Lerer pointed out in his speech to Columbia Journalism School students, the newspaper industry got caught in what Clayton Christensen calls "The Innovator's Dilemma." That is, they listen too closely to their customers in a time of change, only to find themselves overtaken by younger, nimbler and riskier companies. The PR industry currently faces the same problem.

In her survey, Jennifer Leggio points out that there is a gap between client social media and media relations needs and agency deliverables. It's a gap made more confusing when you consider that on the agency side, quite a number of people felt that their clients held them back from pursuing alternative media.

That is, customers want one thing but they're saying quite another when it comes to their PR firms. PR firms are meeting what their customers want, but are not meeting their needs.

I believe that while clients know that they need to change, they also want to see their names in print. They come to PR firms with certain expectations and that includes the ability to walk into a board meeting and put up a PowerPoint slide showing all the great "hits" they got that quarter.

But this is also what traditional media relations firms are comfortable doing. This isn't just about flipping a switch and saying "OK people, now we're going to get involved in conversations," but about changing the way that management rewards employees, how employees report to clients and how clients understand what their agency can do for them.

Part of the answer lies in measurement, but part lies in taking risks, trying new things and just seeing what works.

More importantly, clients and firms alike need to reward the risk and embrace the change, not look for quick fixes. Projects will fail, some experiments will work, others won't. But don't punish the failures.

Your Town's Ad Play: PaperG

An article in Sunday's Boston Globe asking "What Went Wrong" started with an interesting anecdote about how the Globe turned away a stake in Monster.com at the beginning of the Internet revolution.

One one level you can read the story as a lost opportunity. On another you can read it as a company simply doing what had always made it successful. Hindsight is always 20/20. If I knew then what I know now I would have taken jobs "coding" in the mid-90s when I really wanted to be a writer. At the time "coding" meant putting HTML tags on documents, I thought it was something more complex that I didn't understand.

The people who took those jobs went on to become pretty good journalists, but that's all hindsight.

So I found it very interesting to get an email from a young CEO named Victor Wong of PaperG touting how the Your Town section of Boston.com will be using the company's "Flyerboards." These are like local bulletin boards for Your Town sites like those in Newton, Wellesley, Needham and Waltham that tap into the local ad market.

You can read into it what you want, but here is a small, young comapny started by a bunch of smart guys that has managed to tap into the Globe. Though, given the Globe's current financial state I have to wonder if any money changed hands or if PaperG is just eating what it kills.

The Falling Influence of Blogs

Brian Solis has a great piece on TechCrunch in which he offers a much more researched and reasoned view of something I touched on over on the Schwartz Crossroads blog: the rise of microblogging on services like Twitter and Facebook are changing the role of the blog.

When people used to ask me about whether a blog was "for real" one measure I'd give them was comments. I can't do that any longer. Just because a blog has few comments doesn't mean people aren't commenting ABOUT it. Those comments can be scattered to the four winds of the Internet.

The story is worth a read.

Why You Won't Find Answers on Twitter and Facebook

As kids and teens, my brother and I used to occasionally accompany my dad to printing shows, as that was his industry. While there we'd grab a number of printed posters and see quite a few of my dad's colleagues. Me, being aloof, could never remember a person from one year to the next, but my brother had this wonderful inate ability to know a person's name, face and even something about them. One year, as a baby-faced teen, he asked my dad's colleague about his daughter.

"That kid's a natural salesman," my dad's colleague commented. Before you joke, he meant it as a compliment.

It wasn't that my brother understood how to sell. He didn't memorize reams of data about a particular product or have a knack for showing it off, but he could naturally relate to any individual through information.

Flash forward a few years and I'm a Resident Adviser at Brandeis when the head of Residence Life tells us her secret for making people think she knows everything. Before going in to bust a suite for illegal activity (like drinking) she would have information on the oldest person living in the suite, just their name and birth date. Then she'd say "I know no one in this dorm is legally able to drink until Bob turns 21 on March 3rd." Everyone would freeze and think she knew everything. She built a reputation for omnicience. Really, this information was readily available to administrators and she just read it before walking in. Neat trick.

This is what makes Twitter and Facebook so valuable. It gives you the information you need to make personal connections. I'm not suggesting you fake your way through these connections and feign interest in things you hate just to do your job, but these tools help you do your job better by allowing you to relate to people, not to products. The best part: people give you the information.

Too often when people ask about social media tools they want a quick fix. PR people want to know if the reporters they are following will say "today I'm writing as story about mobile media tools, can anyone help?" and then they want to be able pitch.

Sorry, it doesn't work like that. What you get is a little knowledge about someone that can help you forge a better relationship, then you can, by default, do your job better. Maybe that person is an auto entusiast and you know something about cars. Maybe they're a crafter specializing in jewelry-making and you know something about that.

Or, maybe, you can just ask how their daughter is doing.

Adorama's Branded Journalism

As noted by Chris Brogan, the publisher of JPG Magazine has been purchased by Adorama and plans to relaunch soon. Not only does it make sense for a camera retailer, but it makes sense for other companies as well. It's another example of the branded journalism concept I talked about here, here and here.

I want to make clear, this is not for every type of journalism. The fact is, political and business journalism still need an independent voice to make it work. However, for most other areas of journalism content is the loss leader. JPG Magazine will bring people to Adorama who are interested in photography. It raises their stature.

Now, every small retailer can't go out and purchase something like JPG, but there are things they can do. For example, why can't a local camera store Tweet information about photo contests and interesting photo exhibits? How about a book stores that publishes its own staff reviews? Today's publishing tools not only make this possible, but make it NECESSARY.

Journalists are on the market today looking for work. These are people skilled in writing, editing, shooting and reporting. Those skills will help grow just about any business in the future.

"Truth" Only Unto Its PR Parts

As a Brandeis grad I find myself following the Rose Art Museum PR disaster with particular interest. The most amazing thing about this story is how many people Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz managed to annoy with a single letter to students, faculty and alumni. Not only did he manage to annoy his own inner family of Brandeis people, but also the arts community, the journalism establishment and even the average person in Boston. People around my office who neither care about art nor ever set foot on the Brandeis campus are talking about this mess.

In a sense, Brandeis did the right thing by hiring Rasky Baerlein to help with crisis PR in this mess. The well-connected crew over there immediately put Reinharz in front of major local journalists to clear the air, including interviews with the Boston Globe and WBUR. Their strategy also included a letter to faculty and students (though, not to alumni) clarifying what the trustees actually meant when they voted on the Rose. That is, that the museum would be closed and they MAY sell some artwork over time.

The problem, however, is that the moves are far too blatant and haven't really changed anything. Rose Curator Michael Rush made the point early on in the discussion that Rose donors would not come back if they felt that the museum was in jeopardy, the Brandeis President has done nothing to assuage those fears.

As for the strategy, the Brandeis student paper called The Hoot says the following:

While last Wednesday, Reinharz told The Hoot that “we have no media strategy,” he said yesterday that the university has temporarily hired public relations firm Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications Inc. in order to “correct misstatements that are now floating all over the world about the rose.”

The President would not specify as to how long the university would employ the public relations firm. He also said that the firm has already helped the university in dealing with the Boston Globe this week when they convinced the Globe to hold a story a day so that Reinharz could clarify some of the details of the piece.

Rasky Baerlein’s vice president Melissa Monahan told The Hoot in a phone interview that the administration has been working directly with both her and the President of Rasky Baerlein. Other clients of Rasky Baerlein include the Boston Red Sox, North Eastern University and Toyota.

Neither Reinharz nor Monahan would comment on how much the university is paying the public relations firm for their services.

Monahan did say, however that the firm is helping the administration deal both with the national press and with the student press and Brandeis community.

The paper goes on to point out major discrepancies between the trustees' vote on the issue and the press release the school put out. In a way, Brandeis created its own problem.

The school completely underestimated the backlash this announcement would have. The best crisis PR is to avoid the problem from the start. (Note to Dennis Nealon, this may be a good time to find a new job.)

Right now the school has to focus on one person: Rush. He is the hero here, the person who was blindsided by the school and who has been speaking out about his displeasure. Any crisis PR program must focus on gaining HIS trust, then bringing him out to speak to the other constituencies. If you can't get him on your side, then it's lost anyway.

Though, according to Bloomberg, Rush's job is apparently ending on June 30.

Gatehouse and Boston.com Reach Agreement

The New York Times Company and Gatehouse Media have reached an agreement on the tussle over whether Boston.com violated fair use in how it links to Gatehouse stories. This is something that has had media watchers on edge for quite a while.

No word yet on what the agreement is, exactly. In fact, the story on the Wicked Local site right now comes from the AP.

When News Breaks, Where do You Turn?

Back in my newsroom days we had a series of feeds coming in on a regular basis, most were TV screens. Of course, we also had the AP wire on our computer screens feeding us breaking news as it came in. For people in the newsrooms this was commonplace.

But in the working world people didn't have this constant feed. People only got the news when they turned on the radio, TV or were told about something from a friend. Back in 2001 I had just settled at my desk with a cup of coffee when a friend IM'd me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center towers. I immediately ran to the TV to turn on CNN and for a good 10 minutes sat alone in our lounge. Over the next 30 minutes people filtered in to watch, as they had just heard the news.

Flash forward to today when a plane went down in the Hudson River. My first news came from Twitter, which feeds constantly onto my desktop from a program called Digsby. After seeing the news I jumped to search.twitter.com to see if anyone else was posting, then hit the major news sites. Inside of 5 minutes I had video streaming from CNN.com to my desktop.

The video was certainly compelling, but not nearly as compelling as a single picture that a bystander sent from his iPhone through Twitter.

This wasn't the first time today that I turned to Twitter and IM before the traditional news coverage. Earlier in the day I sat in traffic on Totten Pond Road and rather than turning on WBZ to hear that ther was an electrical fire, I turned to my BlackBerry to find out that Totten Pond Road was backed up all the way along my trip. 'BZ only tells me about the major highways, like 128. A quick IM to a friend told me of another open route and I shaved about an hour off my time to work.

That doesn't mean the traditional news venues are worthless, they're not. They give me the perspective and research I need to better understand an event. But for breaking news it's all about eyewitnesses and instant coverage.

It's no wonder, then, that today the Boston Globe announced it would cut 50 jobs from the newsroom. I know, I'm part of the problem.

I just don't know if there's a way to make money on this kind of information flow.

Eric Schmidt: Google Wants to Help Newspapers

Fortune Magazine's Adam Lashinsky has an interesting interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which they discuss the future of the newspaper industry. The bottom line? Google would love to help, Schmidt wants newspapers to succeed, they just don't know how to do it. It happens that Dan Froomkin has some good ideas.

I agree entirely with Schmidt on this:

They don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There's a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed.

Yes, that's exactly the point. People WANT information. They demand it. It's a strange industry in which demand is high, supply is strong, but it still can't figure out how to sustain itself.

For years the industry has been giving us the news for free while feeding us ads. Even when we subscribed to physical newspapers we never paid full value for the news. Those pages upon pages of classified ads, as well as the display ads paid for by the likes of Macy's, Filene's and Jordan Marsh managed to keep our news fully subsidized.

Those days are gone. The business model just doesn't work. We need something else.

Branded Journalism: It's already happening

Dave Chase has a great post on Reflections of a Newsosaur about the problems in online ad sales. He's right that news organizations need to make basic changes to their ad sales channels in order to maintain revenue in the short term. Boston.com admitted as much during the launch meeting for Boston.com/Newton in which the sales executive noted that many advertisers complained that ads on Boston.com were too high. The solution for Boston.com was to focus on a smaller geographical area in order to offer cheaper and more targeted advertising opportunities.

But as I mentioned, I still think the ad model is irrevocablly broken and the while Chase offers a short term solution, something else needs to happen over the long term.

I believe that long term news and information will be supported directly by brands. That is, thsoe brands will hire news people to work independently and they will start to offer information. While to the average consumer this information will appear to be the same as before, there will be a subtle bit of branding going on.

When I suggest this to friends the response is one of horror. The idea that a Coke could be supplying entertainment news sends a shudder through their system, leading them to use terms like "icky."

Of course, this move will happen slowly and will have to be handled carefully, but it's already going on.

Tonight while doing the dishes I turned on the MLB Channel to hear some Hot Stove chatter. The MLB Channel is, of course, owned by the Major League Baseball brand and there to promote MLB teams. Both the NFL and NHL have similar television networks, all look like copies of ESPN, often with former ESPN anchors and reporters doing the work, but focused just on one sport.

Sure, there is an advertising play here, but advertising is just one of the revenue opportunities, the rest are about attracting viewers to promote the MLB brand and that of its associated teams. This leads to other licensing opportunities and sales of MLB branded materials.

The "news" is the loss leader.

The Win/Loss in Changing Media

The Ideas section of today's Boston Globe has a great piece on what's lost when we move from color film to color digital images. Unlike a lot of pieces on the topic, this one doesn't try to lament the loss of film, but take an even look at what we gain and what we lose with the change from film to digital.

I still shoot quite a bit of film along with my digital images. I'm even playing with my pinhole Polaroid, just to see what I can get. My local camera shop greatly appreciates my film habit.

Unfortunately, the thing people haven't yet learned, whether it's film or digital, is how to edit. At least with film people didn't snap indiscriminately hoping for one decent shot. They aimed, shot and then forgot about it for a few months until they bothered bringing them into the local CVS for developing.

The change actually started long before digital back when we went from having to focus and meter to what my wife calls PHD cameras, as in "Push Here Dummy." When I give my son my old manual focus AE-1p, he spends time framing his shot. Hand him a similar auto-focus camera and he snaps much quicker spending less time on framing. It gets worse with digital when people think "I can crop later."

A photo teacher told me that he tells his students to crop with their feet. He also says a major problem with digital, for him, is that he only sees what his students want to share, he can't get a full contact sheet to see what they did right and wrong. One of my great "ah-ha" moments in photography was seeing Diane Arbus' contact sheet and noticing that she had blank images and some lousy exposures.

Not long ago I went to a local camera club meeting where a woman showed off pictures of her trip to Italy. Some of the shots were quite good, but the 20 minute presentation that involved her dumping EVERY SINGLE IMAGE SHE TOOK into a slide show program, then just hitting "go" was painful to sit through. Had she bothered to look through her image, think about the story she wanted to tell and then used the images to tell it, she could have had a beautiful and strong presentation. Instead, she left a lot of us longing for the end of the interminable show.

So while it's easy to click "send" on a few hundred images, think about what you want to say with those pictures. One or two images that tell a story are much better than 25 that say nothing.

Fundamentally, News Broke

During a recent podcast, Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen gave an overview of his recent HBR article on how companies need to change their business models to adapt to new threats. It's a very interesting concept and I plan to read the article as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

The premise, as I understand it so far, is that traditional business models don't work when new threats arrive. As an example he pointed to IBM, which focused on mainframe computers, but when mini-computers hit the market IBM opened an entirely new division in a new location with new profit and loss models to combat this. It did the same thing when PCs hit the market, opening a different office utilizing different skillsets.

During the recent podcast interview Prof. Christensen praised the Boston Globe for taking steps to change its business model to combat the new reality. Not having spoken with Prof. Christensen yet I have to assume he is referring to Boston.com and the digital arm of the publication.

The concept, as I currently understand it, lines up with something I've been thinking about for a while: the fundamental problem with the journalistic business model. Traditional journalism is built on the concept that it can be supported by advertising, but separate from it. The journalist reports on the news, the news brings readers, the advertisers then pay for access to those readers.

This model extends back to the penny newspapers of the 19th century. Why sell a newspaper for a penny when it cost more to produce? So you can get the readers and sell access to that distribution channel to advertisers. The more people who read the paper, the more you can charge for the ads. This concept has grown up over the years but it's fundamentally sound.

The New York Times, for example, earned $1,950,021,000 from advertising in 2007, compared with $889,882,000 from circulation revenue according to its financial statements. Advertising figures in 2006 and 2005 were certainly more robust, but the same calculation applies.

Today it's not just the number of people who read your publication, but the type of people. If you're the Boston Globe, for example, and have great penetration in the affluent suburbs, then you can charge more for access to those readers. Most news organizations regardless of medium use the same basic concept: gain an audience, charge for access to the audience.

A main reason this worked was the high barrier to entry for any new news organization. In order to start one you needed:

• Capital for production;
• Access to production equipment (printing press, TV cameras, etc.); and
  
• A method of distribution (broadcast license, subsribers, newsstands sales, etc).
  

Each one of these factors made starting a new publication an uphill battle. Sure, there could be a "lonely pamphleteer," but the chances of that person gaining the reach and scope of a Washington Post were remote at best.

Now flash forward to the Internet. Today instead of a printing press you can use a free and publicly available blog, Facebook page or Twitter account. Instead of capital you can simply use the computer at the public library, or the $400 computer you bought for the house. As for distribution, any blog is technically available to anyone on the globe, you just need to tap into the right search terms to attract the audience from Google.

In other words, the news organizations no longer have the monopoply on the audience, so the advertisers no longer need them to reach an audience. The fundamentals are completly broken.

So what now? More on that later.

Gatehouse v. New York Times

In just a few days the media pundits have jumped on the lawsuit between Gatehouse Media and the New York Times over Boston.com's hyper-local concept. Dan Kennedy is doing the best job at keeping us all updated.

At the heart of the issue is the question of whether Boston.com is simply linking to stories by Gatehouse media's local papers, like the Newton TAB, or if has based its entire business model on using content developed by another commercial news organization.

Adam Reilly has a great take on this when he asks:

Imagine that I decide to start a new, web-only newspaper devoted to the city of Boston. Then imagine I fill my new publication--let's call it the "Boston Gazette"--entirely with links to articles from the Boston Globe. Is that journalistically legit? Nope. It's just a lame, transparent attempt to repackage someone else's work as my own.

It's a fair question and what I believe the Globe is doing right now. Do they have the potential for more? Of course. The problem is that the site, as it stands, spread the information out into a number of different areas. But the main page is only part of the problem.

The Newton site includes a local wiki in which the editors are asking people to submit information, any information and then self-police it. This is a fanciful notion to make a Wikipedia type play, but that's only likely to work if they can also get a number of local overzealous editors.

During the launch meeting one person asked a simple question: what's to stop the Globe from eventually taking that information, restricting access and selling it back to us? The editors assured us this would never happen. Though, that assumes the current editors are always in charge. What happens if and when Boston.com gets sold. Wouldn't another owner look at any repository of information as a potential revenue source?

The editors also noted that any information submitted by an individual remains the property of that individual. OK, that's fair. But what happens when my writeup of Taste Coffee House in Newtonville gets edited by a Globe editor, and then added to by another customer? Who owns the content then? How do you track that ownership?

Jeff Jarvis portrays the Gatehouse folks as ignorant stooges who don't seem to understand how the Internet works. However, as one of the few people writing on this issue who actually LIVES in Newton and also operates a hyper-local site, I have a little better idea of the personalities involved.

It happens that the Newton TAB folks understand new media very well. They are on Twitter, blog regularly and use Facebook all in an attempt to get closer to their readers. They went from being a weekly to having an active local news site with a regular blog long before the Globe even bothered letting readers comment on its own local blog.

This is a group that understands the implications of what it's doing. But it also knows the economic realities of the situation. If a local business is looking to spend money advertising, are they going to advertise with the TAB (and on its online site) or with Boston.com? If Newtonians are flocking to Boston.com/Newton, a site that is made up mostly of content reported by Gatehouse, then the money is going to flow there, plain and simple.

In fact, the entire Boston.com hyper-local operation feels more like an adveristing play than anything else. They created a site, hired a single (very young) editor, then simply reorganized much of its existing content so it focused heavily on one city.

One final very telling note in all this. When Boston.com started rolling out its site it invited a number of local thought-leaders to the Newton War Memorial Auditorium to show it off. This group included a number of bloggers, advertisers, people who have local TV shows and a few others who are well known. The mockup they showed included articles from the TAB in addition to other bloggers, some of who were in attendence, and they even pointed out that they were going to aggregate information from every site, including the TAB.

They never invited the TAB to the meeting. The editors first heard about it when I posted about it on TheGardenCity.net

Restart: Branded Journalism

I am returning to this long-abandoned blog to play with a few concepts that have been floating around my head. Specifically, what is the future of journalism?

You don't have to go far around the web to find people lamenting the fall of newspapers, even as they take full advantage of all the publishing freedom the web offers. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that life is over because newspapers face certain death.

The way I see it, people will always want information. In fact, they'll pay when the information will benefit them in some way. However, we've created a situation in which people believe the basic information in life is free. So what we have is a demand and when there is a demand there will always be a supply.

The question isn't whether journalism will survive, but how it gets funded and who does the funding. I believe that funding will come from brands. Yes, those brands can be news brands like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but they can also be from companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Over the next few weeks I'll expand on this.

But in doing research I spent some time playing with the New York Times company numbers and present the following two charts. This first compares revenue from circulation and advertising. If you notice, circulation revenue remains relatively steady while advertising revenue is on a relative decline.



The second chart compares circulation by source. The numbers seem relatively steady year over year, with the exception of single copy (newsstand) sales, which show a precipitous decline.



I have more research to do to see whether this is just the Times or industry wide, but the advertising decline seems to be almost independent of readers, and the increase in online readership seems to relate only to newsstand sales. This doesn't make sense from a business perspective, but I believe that it is not that newspapers are dying, but that they were never built on a solid advertising base to start.

Job Opening

Apparently they are also looking "fo" copy editors.

The Much Maligned Press Release

Everyone loves to beat on the press release, from comedians to corporate executives, yet we all use them. The debate over the Social Media News Release is just one more step in this ever-evolving debate.

My thoughts on this are over on the Schwartz Crossroads blog. Take a look.

Beating PR People and Getting PR Value

Beating on PR people seems to have become a sport. Chris Anderson's rant is only the latest in a long list of bloggers complaining about the emails they get from the clueless PR people who send out scads of useless pitches .

Most of the complaining I hear comes from bloggers who, until they put out a blog, had never seen this side of the industry. Though, quite a bit comes from reporters who routinely echo the same refrain: why don't PR people read what I write before sending me a pitch?

I also get a lot of lousy pitches, some from people who show up on Chris' short list, but so what? Every once in a while I hear about something interesting. Though, I must admit, NO ONE has tried to engage me in any meaningful conversation.

Why are PR people such easy targets? I believe this is because PR does, in many ways, operate in the shadows. Whenever I try to tell someone what I do they give me a funny look, not because they don't understand it, but because I don't appear to do anything at all. I don't write the articles that appear, I don't produce the products I pitch, but I just tell reporters the stories and get THEM to write something. The key question they never get around to asking is "don't the reporters FIND the stories?" It's a tough for a general news consumer to understand that reporters find stories, but some stories are sent to them. It means admitting that not everything they read was collected as expected.

On the other side, you never read an article that says "I got a call from a PR person telling me about this story." The source is usually left unknown. Frankly, if I do my job well, you never should know that I exist, you should just hear about my client and all the great things they do.

So, if people know we exist but don't fully understand what we do, and we continue to operate in the shadows, then we're easy targets. I mean, who really loses other than the PR people? The members of the press look good, as if they would much rather be out doing REAL reporting than dealing with our annoying email, the general audience feels as if they've gained some insight, and PR people are still going to pitch Chris Anderson because, well, he's got a pretty good audience.

The irony of this Anderson flap is that he's done some amazing PR for a client of my agency (though, not one of my own). He loves Cloudmark Desktop so much, that not only does he talk about it on his blog, but he started this whole thing by trying to emulate the collaborative nature of the product. Going beyond that, he's talking about the product in almost every interview he's done, even Portfolio.com.

Can you imagine trying to pitch an email Spam tool to Portfolio.com? Of course not, no PR person would ever do it, unless they had a great story to go along with it. Yet, there it is, messaging in tact, from the Editor-in-Chief of WIRED.

The lesson? It's not just about pitching bloggers, it's about impressing them in such a way that they want to write.

Podcamp Boston

I'm not a podcaster, though I am an old radio guy. So that gave me an interesting perspective on some of the things I heard at Podcamp Boston this weekend.

Regardless, John Federico gave a good talk toward the end of day 1 on podcast measurement in which he basically calls for some standardization to help the industry earn some credibility. Essentially what he's asking for is a way to anonymously track listenership, including playback data. That is, how much of a given podcast did someone hear?

He's asking for something that the broadcast industry has been dying to have for as long as there has been measurement. Though, he rightfully pointed out that new media, such as podcasts, have a tougher hill to climb, since they are unproven. TV, for example, can exist with woefully inadequate measurement because it's always been done that way and the advertising industry has learned to accept it.

Isabel Hilborn over at MarketHum did a pair of very good sessions, probably the best that I attended. The first focused on defining social media and contained an excellent case study on how her company created a group blog for one of their clients. Without going into to much detail, MarketHum essentially took the custom publishing model and applied it to blogging, resulting in some great SEO value as well as marketing value. They did this by taking bloggers who were already writing on a given topic and then hiring them to write on a topic blog, while also giving them complete editorial freedom.

Isabel's second session looked at marketing mistakes and how Web 2.0 tools enhance those mistakes. For example, how companies with lousy customer service are often called on that by bloggers who point it out. But what made the discussion interesting was the fact that the crowed became very interested in picking some of these apart and discussing where these were true mistakes or just perceived mistakes because the voices of the offended were so loud.

In any case, a good event and one worth attending. I got to meet some interesting people and hear some interesting thoughts.

Framingham Fight on Free Speech

There's an interesting fight brewing in Framingham that has implications well beyond the town borders. The Southern Middlesex Opportunity Council has filed suit in federal court against several individuals, saying that there is a coordinated effort to keep certain social services out of the town.

Regardless of whether this is true, one part of the lawsuit is rather disturbing. Among the names of the defendants are a couple of private citizens who spoke out on privately-run electronic forums. Being someone who runs such a forum, this has me a little concerned.

I haven't read the emails and posts, so I can't say whether the speech was hateful or otherwise, but if the SMOC is accusing the town of this kind of coordinated effort, does it have the right to rope in citizens who speak out on the subject?

The editorial board of the Metro West Daily News doesn't think so:

The inclusion of private citizens in this suit is even more regrettable. Yes, some of the comments posted on Web sites and included in e-mails are inflammatory, hateful, or inaccurate. But we don't need the First Amendment to protect speech that gets no one mad; if speech that offends a powerful organization isn't protected, no one's speech is really free.

You may want to read the articles covering the topic. The first one is here, and the one focused on the electronic message board is here. You may also want to check out the Framingham Neighbors discussion board.

Certainly something worth watching.