PR/Media Week in Review 04-04-2009

This week The New York Times reported that the The New York Times Company was considering ‘closing’ the Boston Globe. There’s an interesting twist to the story as reported:  “The Times Company chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Catherine J. Mathis, chief spokeswoman for the company, each declined to comment …”

So, the Times reporter, RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA, is boxed out by the Times‘ head flack and the guy who owns the company (the Times is a publicly traded corporation in name only, it operates more like a family business managing ‘the paper of record’ for the good of us commoners.)  What can the reporter do?  He’s not about to launch an investigative piece on the guy who signs his paycheck.

Still, PÉREZ-PEÑA digs and gives the appearance, at least, of reporting on his employer at arms length by citing an unnamed source:  “The New York Times Company has threatened to close The Boston Globe unless labor unions agree to concessions like pay cuts and the cessation of pension contributions, according to a person briefed on the talks.”

These are extraordinarily precarious times for journalists.  Reporters covering media are like spectators at their own wake. The Sun-Times Media Group, including the Chicago Sun-Times, filed for bankruptcy last week, joining the Chicago Tribune in bankruptcy court.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased printing a few weeks ago and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News folded in February. MediaNews Group Inc., publisher of the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News,  and St. Paul Pioneer, agreed this week to a restructured debt repayment plan that will keep the newspapers printing, for now.

Media consolidation in the digital age is not surprising - this has been in the works for some time. But the pace has accelerated in recent months as the economy sinks deeper. These days, when I am pitching stories to the media I am also fielding inquiries about possible employment for out-of-work or soon-to-be-laid-off journalists.

See hilarious Colbert Report video below that illustrates, in typical Colbert fashion, why the newspaper business is dead.

This week a conversation kicked up on the LinkedIn Public Relations Professionals group on the usefulness of the press release. I thought this was an issue put to rest a few years ago but apparently not. I am decidedly in the anti-press release camp. Here is my two cents: 

The death of the press release has been chronicled extensively on the web. Traditional press releases are necessary for public companies. Otherwise if you are not crafting news to be optimized on the web and to build digital assets that can be managed, then a ‘press release’ is a waste of time and it frustrates and angers journalists. If you have news to share with journalists it can be done informally, unless there are compliance issues and you need a ‘formal’ release. Writing and following up on press releases is probably the single most time consuming, useless activity that PR people indulge in. Yes, Tom, a summary is great. Look at CNN. Their news stories start with summaries. Write for the web. You can distribute through your own news channels and impact search results - how most people find their news.

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PR/Media Week in Review 03-22-2009

It was a shock to see the Seattle Post-Intelligencer fold this week after 146 years of printing a newspaper.  Worse than the demise of the newspaper is the web replacement seattlepi.com - atrocious, a mess, no chance of success, an insult to the journalists who toiled at the newspaper for generations and the Pacific Northwest readers who deserve much better.

 For several yeas I reviewed web sites for the the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, the group that produces the annual Webby awards (the Webby award ceremony this year is June 1-8, closing out Internet Week NYC). I critiqued sites based on Content, Structure and Navigation, Visual Design, Functionality, Interactivity and Overall Experience

Donning my site reviewers hat I would give seattlepi.com a failing grade. The lead story is Joel Connelly’s lame piece on Seattle restaurants (they deserve better than his perfunctory attention). The home page goes on forever - a mishmosh of soft features you can find on dozens of other sites. I can go on but it’s not worth it. What a shame. What was Hearst thinking?

“We look at this as a great experiment to launch a fully digital local-media company in Seattle, taking advantage of the great brand and the great talent that we have,” Steven Swartz, president of Hearst newspapers, said in an interview. Shira Ovide chronicles the collapse of the paper and the grand, misguided Hearst experiment in her story in the Wall Street Journal.

Can PR Save GM?  Automotive giant General Motors Corp. is nurturing a whole new image in cyberspace, defined by tweets, blogs and one-on-one conversations. See General Motors public relations exec Tom Wickham uses online tools to spread good news about automaker from MLive.com.

“We’re so deep into social media, we have our own team specializing in this,” Wickham said. He’s a newcomer to one of the hottest sites, twitter.com. Just this month, Wickham enrolled as TweetingTom. “I’m out there tweeting, sharing information,” he said. “That’s how PR is evolving, connecting with people one on one on one.”

 China military trains first public relations team. An initial class of 51 officers graduated this week in an effort to “raise the opinion-forming ability of the force’s foreign propaganda team and advance the innovation and development of the military propaganda work,” the official People’s Liberation Army Daily reported Friday.  Frightening! See Associated Press story.

Penn. Gov. Ed Rendell is paying an old political hand $100,000 to spearhead a publicity campaignfor programs financed with billions of federal economic-stimulus dollars. Rendell’s hiring of Ken Snyder as a subcontractor comes at a time the governor is calling for spending cuts and tax increases to avoid a state budget shortfall of more than $2 billion. See Rendell Hires Publicist to Tout Stimulus Money.

Bye Bye P.I.

I first went to Seattle in 1971. Fresh out of high school, looking for adventure, escaping New York City, everything about the Pacific Northwest was new, including the local newspaper we all read - the Post-Intelligencer. You come to rely on a newspaper to inform, entertain, capture the personality of the region and to give you the tactile pleasure of ink on newsprint, an essential morning ritual. You read the P-I on the ferry to Bainbridge or the Halfway House in Brinnon. It was (and may still be, on the web only) an essentially Northwest newspaper.

Tomorrow is the last print run of the P-I. A victim of the brutal economy, especially for print media, the P-I will become the largest daily newspaper to shift to a web-only product. That’s sad and unfortunate but maybe there’s opportunity for seattlepi.com to lead the way for a leaner, nimbler, web-savvy established news organization - based on the pioneer spirit that lead to its  founding 146 years ago. Can these old white guys blaze new digital trails and shed generations of print-based baggage? It’s going to be an interesting experiment. I am rooting for them. I just changed my homepage to seattlepi.com - they need the traffic.

Why we need the P.I. … really need it … Recently, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer spearheaded a national expose on the Boy Scouts of America titled Chain Saw Scouting (See Profit trumps preservation for Boy Scout councils nationwide). Reporters from Hearst newspapers around the country worked on that story for a couple of years, they shared resources, connected the dots, followed the leads and a disturbing national pattern emerged. We need that kind of deep investigative reporting that requires professional time and resources. We need the P-I to keep watchdog over the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America. 

The P-I wrote the first stories on the Pulali Point landowners banding together (SavePulali.org) to force Chief Seattle Council to respect the property rights of its neighbors and the sanctity of the land bequeathed to them.  The P.I. deserves an award for the Chain Saw Scouting series. And they deserve our allegiance.

How the P.I. can survive and thrive:  Go totally innovative and ‘web-ize’ reporters so they can transmit to the web instantly from the scene. The Chain Saw Scouting series has interactive features, video, maps, slide shows - and hundreds of virulent, off the charts comments by rabid right wingers who are giddy with glee that the P.I. print has failed.  That’s the kind of fighting media property we need in the Northwest. 

The P.I. now needs to reinvent a major city newsroom. That can be thrilling … or impossible. Maybe the out-of-work P.I. reporters can start their own publication without the baggage of a print-based parent. Ah, the beauty and terror of the web.

Dying in the Digital Age

My father-in-law died last week. He was 92 and lived near Brinnon in Washington State. He mostly lived on the same land with his wife Marilyn for more than 50 years, secluded, surrounded by pristine forests, an abundance of wildlife and the magical waters of Hood Canal, part of Puget Sound. 

John Pedersen did not have a computer, he could not comprehend email or the Internet. In his final days he tended his garden, read Tolstoy and The New Yorker and visited with his wife, who also enjoyed nature and shared his mistrust and suspicion of technology.

Now that John has passed, technology keeps his memory alive to those who could not make the trip to his memorial, and far flung family members who lost touch. The days of the simple obituary are gone. John Pedersen’s obituary online in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) includes a Guest Book, and links to send a gift, share a photo, or leave an audio message.

The obituary service at the P-I is through Legacy.com , specializing in Memorial Websites ”Where life stories live on.” This is a valuable service and a brilliant business. Obituaries are the ‘most read’ section of a newspaper. We are naturally drawn to people’s stories. Self-described as “the Web’s dominant obituary resource and the leader in online memorialization,” the Legacy.com people are also obviously adept at ‘digital public relations.’  Their site includes bios and photos of luminaries who recently died and they create permanent memorial sites for notables such as Bettie Page .