Sunday Afternoon Thoughts 20

No business in today’s post.

While working on my William Ard site, I scoured eBay looking for his books which are very hard to find. During that process I became re-addicted to eBay which I write about in my perfect song blog. I also rediscovered John D. MacDonald, one of the finest suspense writers of the 20^th century. I was a JDM fan many years ago and read a lot of his books. He wrote about 80 novels. I mention him because MacDonald, writing from the 1950s through the 80s, was a prophet, examining terrorists, terrorism, and the inevitability of a terrorist attack in the U.S. (The Green Ripper). He was also an environmentalist, predicting just about everything that has happened. He was also a nonconformist who hated big business, developers, the corporate world, and dirty politics.

Here’s a passage from The Green Ripper, 1979:

“We run a strange kind of country in the modern world. Customs and Immigration are in a sense token services. Any plausible-looking person can find many ways to come and go unimpeded. Anything that can be flown or floated can be brought in or taken out. We are but a wide place in the road in the middle of the world, and they wander through, back and forth, marveling at the lack of restraints. It is a paradox. The openness which endangers our system is the product of the policy which says that to close our borders and enforce all our rules and back them up with guns would change the system just as completely as any alien force.

Terrorism is going to pay us one fat bloody visit. But it will only be a visit. They underestimate our national resilience. Aroused by that kind of savagery, we will become a very tough kind of people.”

MacDonald was a visionary. Add him to your summer reading. He will reward you for your time.

Then, I took my cue from blogging colleagues and shut down my computer. I worked in the garden, did some grilling and on a beautiful Sunday afternoon went to the cemetery to pay respects and send my love to my grandparents, my father, and my younger brother who died two months ago.

Later I’ll try to tune into a two-hour radio show I produced several years ago as a tribute to our World War II veterans. It airs every Memorial Day as a gift to them and to all our troops.

Sometimes you have to put things in perspective and realize many things are important.

And some things are more important.

Newspapers as Agenda Setters. Who Follows in Their Wake?

For this guest blog I asked Dick Jones of Dick Jones Communications for his thoughts on newspapers as the agenda setters and who sets the agenda as they continue to lose circulation. Here’s Dick’s response:

While most people no longer get their news directly from newspapers, the papers retain an important role as the agenda setters of the news.  That’s why it’s still essential for college and university publicists to get their stories into the newspapers.

At the local level, your TV assignment editors are taking many of their cues for the day’s news coverage from the stories in the morning newspaper—at least the stories that they think have some “visual” potential.  The stories that do not have video appeal turn up in text on the station’s website.  Zoning ordinance changes make bad television.

Too few local radio stations retain independent news operations anymore.   Where local radio news still exists they are reading wire stories (many of which were re-written from newspapers) and cribbing shamelessly from the local newspaper for others.  Sometimes this is done with attribution.  Not always.

Bloggers commenting on the foibles of the school board may have attended last night’s board meeting.  More likely, however, they read about it in the morning newspaper.  Or if they are commenting on a national issue, such as the relief efforts in the China earthquake, they got their info from a Google search which turned up a host of stories from newspapers and wire services.

It’s not much different at the national level.  The producers of the network television and cable news programs are scanning their agenda-setting newspapers for story ideas.  These include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA TODAY.

More often than I can count in my career, a big broadcast score has resulted after the story was covered by a national agenda-setting newspaper or a major wire service.   One of the more recent examples is a professor who wrote an op/ed for The Chicago Tribune about Presidents Day in February.  After it appeared he was interviewed on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

So newspapers still matter even though fewer and fewer people read them.  That’s one reason why the collapsing economics of the newspaper business is  a concern.  If the newspapers go belly up who will be the agenda setters?

Something will fill the vacuum, of course.  Something will serve as the agenda setter for the news.  Something always has; always will.

As media relations professionals we will have to find whatever it is and successfully pitch them.

Sunday Afternoon Thoughts 18

This year at commencement I practiced what I’ve been preaching. I went armed with Zoom H2 audio recorder, my Flip camcorder and my still camera. My photographer attended and my news director had his camera so I felt free just to roam and play.

The results? It was so windy that my audio was not usable. I shot some video of the band which turned out surprisingly well. I found a spot behind the stage where I could get still shots of our president congratulating and hugging the graduates with the sea of seated graduates and proud relatives in the background.

That’s it, from here on in, I’m traveling with my multimedia recording arsenal.

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Kyle James Stumbled my douchbags report. Kyle, it worked. I actually had a couple referrals from it.

I was expecting a barrage of visits from douchbag aficionados but really didn’t have any. D.W. did you attract perverts?

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Harvard and Yale’s struggle to attract low income students tells me two things:

-Their brand as elite Ivy League schools is so imbued that they’ll always have a struggle.

-Competition in the admissions area is getting tougher which means we in marketing have to work smarter.

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A new program which some of you may know about and are using. This from the press release:

Magnify has introduced a new service that promises to make it easy for Movable Type and WordPress publishers to incorporate media from a variety of sites.

Magnify Publisher is a native blog application that lets you search for video, text, and images, using key words and tags, and embed the content directly into a post, without ever leaving the WordPress or Movable Type dashboard. Magnify Publisher also offers Seesmic-like tools that let you shoot and publish videoblog posts using a WebCam.

If anyone has tried it, let me know how it works.

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A University of Leicester space scientist says text messaging is more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space telescope—about 4.4 times more expensive.

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While I continue vacillating by “The Great Twivide,” I do want to share a couple interesting posts, one by Max Kalehoff, VP for marketing of Clickable on Why Twitter Matters and his five strategies for choosing who to follow.

In the comments, Ellen Leanse of Ellen Leanse consulting has a link to her blog in which she offers 10 really good Twitter tips.

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I found them, by the way, on TargetX’s Email Minute.

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While Stumbling last night I found a cool blog post on Cogent Metal on Firefox Smart Keywords.

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And this post by fortysomething on CSS organization for better efficiency.

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New Dick Jones guest blog coming this week. Dick is more knowledgeable about the print media than anyone I know. His thoughts and insights are invaluable and they continue to be read long after they’re posted. So, thanks Dick.

Research, Write, Conclude –Douchee!

The Old College Try post on Super Villians Week: The New Media Douchebags sent me on a tour to find out more about the history of the term as a form of put-down.

My first stop was Wikipedia. Here’s part of the definition:

The word can refer to the rinsing of any body cavity but usually applies to vaginal irrigation, rinsing of the vagina. A douche bag is a piece of equipment for douching: a bag for holding the water or fluid used in douching (the term douche bag can also be used as an insult; see below for slang uses). To avoid transferring intestinal bacteria into the vagina, the same bag must not be used for a vaginal douche and an enema. . . . The slang usage of the term dates back to the 1960s.^[6] The metaphor of identifying a person as a douche is intended to associate a variety of negative qualities, specifically arrogance and malice.

I continued my search and found Saturday Night Live skits although this one doesn’t show the characters’ arrogance and malice as much as just being self-confident jerks.

I found videos on the subject that were so funny and well done I realized again that production quality isn’t as important as content which is why commercial TV is doing its awkward descent into fragmented irrelevance.

So this has been a real education for me. Douchebag is as entrenched in pop culture language as F— and M—F—- and it’s socially acceptable.

While the term seems to me to be really sexist, many women seem to have embraced it and use it along with their male counterparts.

So The Old College Try led me into sociology, the history of advertising, language (douche is French meaning “shower”), women’s history, birth control, “science” , hygiene and pop culture.

I’ll never be able to use it in my blog because it just doesn’t seem to be a good fit with higher ed (although every campus has its share of them ) but it was a great learning experience for me. The icing was the Lysol ads from 1928 and 1948 on feminine hygiene.

That’s right. Lysol and vaginal irrigation. Not a match made in Heaven but I finally have the answer to Why She Spends Evenings Alone.

Sunday Afternoon Thoughts 17

Deborah Saline, chief operating officer at PR Works in Harrisburg, PA, taught a PR class at Bloomsburg University this semester and shares her observations of college students in Nexters Enter the Work Force Oh

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Ad Age blogger George Parker is catching up with the new wave of un-conferences, concluding that marketing conferences are becoming irrelevant.

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An interesting article in Advertising Age about adults spending more than half their media hours with TV. According to the survey, Internet advertising still is not faring very well. At the same time Wall Street marketers are ditching radio,TV and print for the Internet. What the survey doesn’t cover is the market that we’re interested in – the teens. And it does not address social networks. While it’s good information for what it’s trying to do, it does show that Advertising Age and traditional media are still catching up with what’s happening in communication today.

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Well, almost out of touch. They skim the market with this article, Is Your Consumer Using Social Media? They’re talking about a different marketing than what we’re looking at, but it’s worth the read.

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Interesting to see how Simmons Research breaks consumer categories into the “socially isolated,” “approval seekers,” etc. Don’t laugh. You’re probably in one of those categories yourself.

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The survey also showed that TV advertising overwhelmingly remains the most influential with 81.4% of the 25-54 adult segment, compared with advertising on internet (6.5%), newspapers (5.8%), radio (3.9%) and magazines (2.3%).

Those surveyed also overwhelmingly reported TV has the most persuasive advertising (69.9%). Only 9.5% of respondents said newspaper has the most persuasive advertising, followed by 8.1% magazines and 7.5% radio. Wow. Don’t tell the Wizard of Ads that.

To be honest, I don’t think the survey is even relevant. I’ve read too many articles that say the TV audience is bailing. The remaining are fragmented. What does it matter who’s the most persuasive in markets that are shrinking.

It overlooks a large and growing culture of people seeking information on products they’re interested in, comparing products and making their own decisions. How does nearly everyone find what they’re looking for? They Google. Google search. Google ads. Google world.

Traditional media and the corporate world are having a hard time making the transition from incessant message shouting to seeking consumer input and sharing information. (Am I too harsh here?)

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Two blog series I did – Drug Bust and Raging DJ – continue to be viewed, making me think that crisis PR is an in-demand subject. Over the years (oh, God, decades), I’ve dealt with a variety of crisis PR situations. I’ll do more posts on the subject in the future. In the meantime, if you don’t have your own blog and want to share your crisis PR stories, send them to me and I’ll publish you as a guest blogger.

Really! Give it some thought. Do it.

Email me at theperfectsong@gmail.com with “crisis PR story” in the subject box.

Sunday Afternoon Thoughts Part 16

In my last post, guest Dick Jones wrote about the demise of newspapers, happening in part because they refuse to let go of their double digit profits. Ad Age has begun a series entitled Newspaper Death Watch. The first installment mentions many of the same problems Dick did. I’ll be following this series and provide a link to each installment. Intriguing stuff.

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Related to the death of newspapers and the huge transition we’re experiencing in news gathering- dissemination (and PR and marketing) is Chris Brogan’s post on Some Differences Between Pitching Mainstream Press and Bloggers. There are some marked differences and, of course, a lot of similarities.

Most revealing are the responses when Chris Twittered his friends for their opinions. Read this in full and think about it. There’s a lot about passion, opinions, homework, freebies . . .oh, yes, and pimping.

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Martin Weller is a Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. I’ve subscribed to his blog, The Ed Techie for quite awhile but, like everyone else, I don’t get to all my feeds as often as I’d like.

In the virtual world this April 7 post, Whither the Blogosphere, might be considered old, but it’s relevant, well-written and thoughtful. It’s about the possible trend of bloggers moving away from the blogosphere and into different forms of communication on the Web. Martin writes in part:

What I think is happening is another example of technology succession. The blog was the primary colonizer for the barren landscape of online identity. The presence of this colonizer changed the environment, which made it more amenable to secondary colonizers. . .

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I found this interesting entry on The Ed Techie’s recent post, Making Connections 2.0

Blogger Tony Hirst was criticized harshly at a conference for having his laptop to do some live blogging. Both his account and the comments give some great insights into the schism between traditionalists and 2.0 practitioners.

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John C. Dvorak, VP at the former Podshow, explains the name change to Mevio. His post is short and to the point. The 68 responses range from agreement, to anger to thoughts on the term “podcasting,” branding, search engines, etc. Again, interesting insights into our fast-changing times.

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Finally, I need your insights and ideas.

Three weeks ago I did the three-part post on the drug bust. A week later I followed it up with a report on another one. As I posted them, each one attracted a larger-than-usual number of views. They continued to get a steady but lower number of views, which is the norm. Then, Friday night, views of these posts suddenly jumped way, way up. The views continued growing throughout Saturday, giving me one of my top five days ever. Has this ever happened to anyone else?

Any ideas as to why this seemingly untimely explosion of interest?

Is Corporate Greed Killing Newspapers?

Here’s a continuation of thoughts Dick Jones wrote in his February guest blog on the role of newspapers.

Continuing the discussion on the future of newspapers, I read in the April/May 2008 issue of American Journalism Review a column by newspaper industry consultant John Morton who says that newspapers need to lower their profit-margin expectations.

Oddly, despite all of the bad things that have happened to them, the average profit margin of publicly owned newspapers is 17 percent, he says.  That is very high compared to most businesses.  Certainly way higher than my business.

And papers are used to that profit margin.  So in this economic downturn with classified advertising down by 16 percent and retail newspaper ad sales down five percent—and Internet revenue still amounting to only seven percent of the pie—they want to maintain that margin.  This  they accomplish by cutting costs.  (I recently visited the newsroom of The Chicago Tribune the day after it had been announced that 100 reporters were being let go).

Morton says that short-term high profit margins are being maintained at the expense of the long-term viability of the newsgathering organization, “…with inevitable damage to newspapers’ standing in their markets.”

He adds, “If newspapers hope to survive the Internet transformation, in which their brand name and reputation will be paramount to success, they must stop the ax wielding and accept that the era of exceptional profitability is over.  Or should be.”

If Morton is right, then newspapers could survive—and salvage a role as the “watch dog” of our society—simply by deciding to make money, but less money than before.  That might work if we can repeal the laws of human nature.  And maybe a few newspapers will go that route.  But with even The New York Times—which is shrinking its education coverage from seven reporters to three—succumbing to the trend, what hope is there for small town papers owned by national chains whose managers are judged by the financial performance of the last three months?

Maybe I was too optimistic in my predictions about newspapers before.

And if newspapers don’t survive as news gathering organizations, where will the news come from?  From bloggers?