Media Thrives Covering Death of Media

The rapid demise of traditional media is fueling a new media stream, most notably on Twitter, chronicling day-by-day media death blows. The merciless axe fell today on Conde Nast’s slick business mag Portfolio, launched two years ago during boom times with lots of fanfare and a big budget. Peter Kafka, wsj.com ‘All Things Digital’ MediaMemo blogger got a jump on the competition with his as-it-happens tweets (http://twitter.com/pkafka) about the end of the print & web-versions of Portfolio.

• May issue, out now (Tim Geithner cover), is Conde Nast Portfolio’s last. Web site to close “in the second quarter” http://bit.ly/1517il about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
•  Conde Nast publisher David Carey : “The company is deeply grateful to Portfolio’s readers ” http://bit.ly/1517il about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck 
•   Conde Nast declines to comment re: Portfolio shutdown. http://mediamemo.allthingsd… about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck
•    Source tells me Conde Nast is shuttering Portfolio and is informing staff right now. Posting ASAP about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

Also see http://twitter.com/themediaisdying

Matthew Bishop of the Economist says: “After tweeting for a week, I am already convinced that Twitter is the “killer app” for journalists, and will hasten the end for newspapers.” Follow him @mattbish

According to the latest semi-annual report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Wall Street Journal is alone among the top 25 U.S. newspapers in reporting higher weekday circulation for the six months ending March 31, 2009, than for the same period a year earlier. Its circulation of 2,082,189 constituted a 0.6 percent increase. The New York Times (-3.6 percent), the Washington Post (-1.2 percent), the Los Angeles Times (-6.6 percent), the Chicago Tribune) (-7.5 percent), Newsday (-3 percent), New York Daily News (- 14.3 percent),  New York Post (-20.6 percent).

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.

PR/Media Week in Review 12-14-2008

It was the week of the swindler, the thief, the profane, double-dealing Governor, the blood sport of Illinois politics and the sociopathic Wall Street money manager. Marc S. Dreier, “one of New York’s most accomplished lawyers, brazenly swindled some of the city’s savviest investors,” (NYTimes), while Bernard Madoff was perpetrating the largest fraud ever (Wall Street Journal), $50 billion, making Dreier’s $100 million damage seem like chicken feed, while Blago Blagojevich was peddling Senate seats on the open market like bogus flat screen TVs (Washington Post). 

It was a week to celebrate unrepentant greed and corruption as the tightening vise of a deep recession forces dark dealings to the light of public scrutiny. As U.S. auto makers and the unions will attest - this is a great climate for crisis communications.

PR JOB: Seeking “spirited” PR pro who has handled media relations and strategic PR for premium wine and spirit account. Work with creative team of agency vets on high visibility brands. Seeking home-based, flexible, highly motivated, digitally proficient individual who can embrace the ‘new PR’ built for the digital age. Background & Links to: spiritjob@prblognews.com

PR WANNABES NEED NOT APPLY to the Spring Associates database assiduously compiled and analyzed for the The Official PR Salary & Bonus Report©. Spring queries nearly 20,000 credentialed PR corporate and agency professionals nationwide for proprietary insight into salary ranges, billing rates, geographic breakdowns, etc. 2009 Edition, the 13th annual, is available January, 2009.

The Drama of Public Relations continues through the week with performances of WHITE NOISE to December 22 at H-B Playwrights Theatre in New York City. Performances for the “Waiting Room” series of 10-minute plays are free. Comment by Karasma: PR and cruising on the traitorous sea meet in a therapist’s office…PERFECT!

Maintaining good relationships with donors or their descendants is not only good public relations but also could help avert legal messes down the road. … See San Antonio Express-News story

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Up or Down, PR Drives The Dow

A great feat in public relations is to create a deeply penetrating brand that is accepted broadly and perpetuates unquestioned credibility for its creator.  Is there a better PR brand than the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

We are all obsessed with “The Dow” right now although few of us know what it is or why it is so important. DJIA - The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an index of 30 “Blue Chip” stocks that are supposed to be an indicator of the broader stock market (thousands of stocks). “The Dow” is broadcast across the world, transcending geography, language barriers and market highs and lows. Even rival media companies, such as The New York Times (above, left)  post “The Dow” on its home page. PR doesn’t get better than that.

May 26, 1896 Dow Jones published its first “Industrial” average, DJIA, consisting of 12 stocks closing at 40.94. DJIA is occasionally re-jiggered to reflect our changing economic landscape. Manufacturing companies in DJIA such as U.S. Steel have been replaced by tech companies such as Microsoft. Standard & Poors, Wilshire, and Russell all have stock indexes that are broader, more specific, and, many investment professionals would argue, more accurate indicators of trends in the stock market. But none are more recognized or accepted as DJIA, which has become synonymous with “the market.” That’s a big reason why Rupert Murdoch was obsessed with acquiring Dow Jones and its media properties Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch.

See What is the Dow Jones Industrial Average? from How Stuff Works - includes video on stocks currently in the DJIA.

PR/Media Week in Review 9-21-2008

What a week it was, starting with Lehman’s bankruptcy, through AIG’s bailout, wild gyrations in the market, capped with a supposed $700 billion plan for the government to enter the toxic mortgage business. What will next week bring? According to Joe Nocera of the NYTimes, the big government bailout is a Hail Mary pass that can be intercepted in the end zone. Several others agree. Stay tuned for the second half.

The worse the financial markets become, the more financial issues are pushed to the fore, especially in the heat of a Presidential race, the more more we rely on financial media to report and analyse critical issues. This week the Wall Street Journal online rolled out a radically new look with several intriguing social media tools - just in time for our greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Nobody has ever accused Rupert Murdoch of not being canny, propitious or just plain lucky.

The Wall Street Journal Community is Murdoch’s attempt to offer the Journal audience a taste of MySpace, with message boards and interest-related groups, profiles, etc. This might work for business people who don’t find value in Facebook-like social communities and professional-level job hunters who want to participate in social media media without tarnishing their cred - or it might be one ‘online community’ too many.  Also, see All Things D. - meaning All Things Digital, from the Journal,playing to the natural geek tendencies of Wall Streeters and the high demographic Journal audience.

Murdoch moved rapidly to remake the moribund Journal print edition and online offering. Both desperately needed it. I suspect that the following weeks will be just as dramatic as the last - hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars are at stake, the final days of the Presidential campaign are approaching, the stock market will likely react with wild swings, and we’ll rely on the financial media to explain it all. Rupert to the rescue!

I am now following NYTimes, L.A. Times Travel section and CBS Early Show on Twitter.  Mainstream media is beginning to catch on - and I may be seeing some value in Twitter beyond knowing that blah blah had a double macchiato in Seattle at 10:32 this morn. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/markrose

Is Financial Media Aiding Wall Street Collapse?

MarketWatch columnist Jon Friedman (left) has a provocative column today on the role of financial media in the continuing Wall Street crisis (the Dow is down over 330 points in early trading despite the government’s $85 bailout of AIG). Where is the skepticism and outrage at Wall Street titans that journalists direct to other news makers, asks Friedman. It is not about being disrespectful, it is about being tough and expressing the same frustration and hurt that “ordinary” citizens feel (especially when they are being extricated from the jobs by the thousands and billions in retirement income is being wiped out). See Media’s Wimpy Wall Street Coverage.

MarketWatch also extensively reports that a money market fund “breaks the buck” - a frightening development that indicates a wider, deeper impact of the credit crisis on “safe” investments favored by conservative retail investors. 

MarketWatch is an excellent source of financial news that goes deeper than mass outlets such as The New York Times or even Wall Street Journal (MarketWatch is a Dow Jones property). As the name implies, MarketWatch is focused entirely on market moving news and is sort of the people’s Bloomberg, geared to retail investors and traders. Jon Friedman consistently writes incisive columns that de-mystify financial news. He has strong opinions and backs them up with the flair of a tabloid reporter.

Floyd Norris at NYTimes gets a little wild on his blog today with Socialism, 21st Century Style, arguing that the government takeover of AIG is akin to nationalization of the largest insurer in the U.S. (Didn’t Harry Truman fail when he tried to do this with the steel industry?). The business news these days is scary but this is what financial reporters live for.

Financial Online Media Blooms As Wall Street Collapses

Floyd Norris (left), the chief financial correspondent for The New York Times, has been the solid, authoritative dean of financial columnists for over 20 years. Floyd can be dense to read but he has gravitas - you have a vision of him pecking away on a manual Olivetti in a corner office heaped with 10-Ks and Deal memorandum.

But dig it - Floyd is now live blogging, filming videos, loosening up like a kid in a digital playpen. How do I know Floyd is live blogging? The NYTimes comm dept Twittered me an alert. Why is the Times business newsadvancing so rapidly into multimedia news (besides the obvous)? Because Rupert Murdoch is making good on his promise to challenge the Times with the remade Wall Street Journal web offering, rolling out just in time for the “day in which the U.S. financial system was shaken to its core,” as the Journal proclaimed on its home page today.

The Journal on the web has changed dramatically in the past couple of months, thankfully. Under Murdoch, at the Journal, like Fox, the 24 hour news cycle predominates, meaning constantly updated blogs, “raw” reporting (typos to be corrected in later iterations), and plenty of video. Murdoch is stitching together the high drama of financial intrigue with politics and style for a national audience - and he’s doing it in a surprisingly politically inclusive fashion.

The WSJ Labs offers some intriguing options for customizing the Journalexperience with RSS feeds, headlines delivered to your desktop as a screen saver and other techno/info goodies. Wall Streeters are tech geeks who spend their formative years glued into Bloomberg terminals. Murdoch has been at the forefront of integrating critical and frivolous information with new forms of digital delivery.

Ron Lieber, the recently installed “Your Money” reporter for NYTimes, video reported the same mantra you hear during every Wall Street crisis - don’t time the market, continue investing in equities, the stock market has always come back in the past, and will likely do so again - over time. It all depends how much time you have. It may take a while for this drama to play out.

PR/Media Week-in-Review, 07/27/08

Jew on Jew Violence

My first day in grade school at P.S. 244 (correction: it’s P.S. 277) in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, a tall Irish thug named Patrick Selkirk introduced himself by sharing his favorite joke: “What’s the fastest means of transportation?” asked Patrick. I shrugged. “Throw a penny and hop on a Jews back,” he said and Patrick and his gang of thugs cracked up and boasted of making raids into ‘Jewland’ (neighboring Marine Park) to beat up on kids like me. Patrick and his boys made good on those boasts.  Enticing and evading the Irish gangs was a favorite activity back then until we developed our own brand of thuggery, albeit much more subtle.

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