Letterman started the week on a guilt-trip with his wife about all the creepy things he has been doing, including ‘the women’ – not just ‘woman’ - he has been sleeping with. His on air confession/campfire funny story was widely seen as a PR masterpiece but it was his subsequent stumbling and bumbling and fear – will I lose my job? Lose my marriage? – that played like a real life serial drama, fueled by media speculation, that boosted ratings and kept advertisers in place. Remember Johnny Carson also had brief – very brief – moments of on air intimacy, a breaching of the late night show game face, that played well. It doesn’t help Letterman that the protagonist in this story, the would-be extortionist, has a pit-bull media hungry attorney who is avery aggressive about spinning ‘the rest of the story.’ Meanwhile, Letterman is virtually muzzled by his position and, presumably, his wife. How many times can you say you’re sorry? It’s been reported that Rubenstein is representing Letterman, of course. It’s now in the stage of PR for a highly-public legal case. Maureen Dowd nailed it in her op-ed column Men Behaving Madly.
So much of baseball is PR. On field quick interviews. Long, post-game press conferences. Crisis communication – the latest steroid story, moving a team to another city. New York is the media capital of the world and the Yankees are the #1 sports franchise in history and they have been supplying drama, making news, all season long and now big-time in the post season. Manager Joe Girardi calls Yankee Stadium, and by extension any ballpark the Yankees play in, ”the big stage.” We’ve been waiting for A-Rod take take his star turn on the big stage and this could be the year.
This year A-Rod has learned that despite the $25 million a year he gets to work, his pimary obligation is to HAVE FUN. He learned that from Mark Texeira, who is an aw-shucks, hard running, uncomplicated, un-pretty home run banger who is also a dazzling fielder – a guy who full-throttle loves playing baseball. And Texeira does all this for a measly $180 million over eight years, $2.5 million a year less than A-Rod. As long as the Yankees play like this, nobody will quibble over those salaries.
The real story is that you can now Twitter the Yankee game right from the MLB site. Always be Twittering, pitch to pitch, that great swell of Yankee tweets if you can’t pay $1,000 a ticket to be there in person.
This week we launched Who is Worth Following, a continuing PRBlogNews series based on random scans of intelligence, original thinking and personality in the PR blogosphere: #1 tomforemski - batting cleanup | #2 occamsrazr – the Leonard Cohen of PR bloggers | #3 #4 and #5 coming next week.
P.S. – There in no truth to the rumor that Barack Obama is up for the Cy Young Award, based on the pitch he threw out opening day.
When you have a $250 million property, you go to great lengths to protect it.
New York is the great stage and the Yankees are the most dramatic sports team on that stage. On that stage there is always one, and only one, player who is the big star, the media magnet, the conflicted soul who demands attention and is tortured by the public scrutiny and vilification that inevitably comes with it.
press. 
In his anti-climactic press conference yesterday at Yankee spring training camp in Tampa, Florida, Alex Rodriguez released some new information and hedged and maneuvered to put this all behind him. He chose to bunt instead of swinging for the fences – another lost opportunity for a high profile athlete to come clean and set a real example for contrition and re-birth.
According to Tyler Kepner, The New York Times: “Ben Porritt, a former spokesman for 
The pumped up Alex Rodriguez show kicks into high gear at 1:30 PM today at the Yankees spring training camp in Tampa, Florida. A-Rod will face the media en masse after his one-on-one with ESPN’s Peter Gammons last week left a lot of questions. In that interview A-Rod falsely accused Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts of stalking him and breaking into his home. A-Rod subsequently apologized to Roberts.