Unjournalism

I’ve always wondered why every — yep, I’m pretty sure I really do mean every — credit card offer (”You’re pre-approved!” “0% interest!” “We’ll have sex with you if you sign up!”) I’ve ever received has come from Wilmington, Delaware. Don’t believe me? Start looking at the return address on the envelopes as they come in.Wikipedia, as usual, shines light on the subject, informing us that it’s a simple matter of a liberalization of banking laws that attracted these banks to the area.

Still, I wonder what the success rate of these offers is. I get nearly a dozen a week, and I’ve never accepted one. In fact, if I were looking to open a new credit card, I’d probably make sure to not use one of these mailed offers, just to discourage these bastards from dumping this stuff on people in future. Not that it’d have any real effect, unless…

Does anyone own www.StopSendingUsShit.com? Let the revolution begin!

clipped from en.wikipedia.org The city in the 1980s experienced tremendous job growth[citation needed] and office construction when many national banks and financial institutions relocated to the area after the Financial Center Development Act of 1981 substantially liberalized the laws governing banks operating within the state. In 1986, the state adopted legislation targeted at attracting international finance and insurance companies. Today many national and international banks, such as Bank of America, Chase, Barclays among others have operations in the city; typically their credit card operations.

Tags: credit cards, marketing by Mike Keliher
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In an effort to clear up some of the many things I’ve intended to write about during the past couple of weeks, I’m going to fire off a quick run-down of links and my quick thoughts.

Hiccups girl
This poor girl can’t get rid of the hiccups (old news story, I know). She pops about 50 times a minute and has been doing so for the past month. Long story short: She was going to appear on the Today show, and the folks at Good Morning America just couldn’t stand to be beat on this hard news story (he said with loads of sarcasm). So they called the girl’s house 57 times, slipped notes notes under her NYC hotel-room door and otherwise tormented her and her family. My point: Isn’t this what journalists hate about PR folks?

72 percent of PR people: stupid or lazy?
“Preliminary results from a Kent State University/BurellesLuce survey shows that 72 percent of PR professionals do not have a formal system for monitoring the blogosphere. Only 19 percent say they do monitor blogs…” The survey was of “938 clients and prospects of BurrellesLuce, the media monitoring and analysis company.” Do these people know that Topix.net, Technorati and Google Blog Search are free? And that drunken monkeys could use them?

FakeYourSpace: If you want it, kill yourself
I’m not making this up. “FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall. FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend.”

“… Our basic plan starts at only $.99 This will give you 2 messages per week for 4 weeks. So for only $.99 you will receive 8 messages that will be there forever, not to mention our Models picture which will show up on your friends list. A pretty small price to pay for online popularity don’t you think?” This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. If this honestly appeals to you, you have two option: 1) please turn 14 years old — your birthday’s coming up, right? Or 2) shoot yourself in the mouth.

Greatest parody ever: Truth in Ad Sales
For anyone in advertising, marketing, PR — or anyone anywhere with any sense of humor — this is a must-see. It’s priceless. My favorite part: The exec who wakes up in the middle of the pitch meeting and tries to sound involved by stammering buzzwords: “Uh…mobile!…online!”

Newspaper scared of facts
The Raleigh News & Observer recently ran a description of rape suspect that included all sorts of details but omitted any mention of race. Isn’t that a little more significant than whether or not he was wearing a do-rag, which, mind you, is a little more removable than skin pigment? “I don’t think in this community the description of someone as black or white is as meaningful as it once was,” according to the paper’s managing editor. What other descriptive qualities are soon to become no longer “meaningful,” Mr. Editor? “The suspect is a person. In a do-rag. He or she committed a crime of an unspecified nature. If you see him or her, please let us know.”

A commentator from the Poynter Institute, a journalism think-tank-thingy, says: “All Irish-Americans don’t look alike. Why then, accept a description that says a suspect was African-American?” Well, for starters, some people will say “African-American” is a stupid phrase to use in many of the contexts in which it’s used these days; it’s lost any specific meaning. Second, if you have a problem with “African-American,” fine. Tell me the suspect’s skin is brown, tan, light brown, green, magenta, whatever. You’d tell me what color his hair and eyes are, right? What’s the difference?

Tags: FakeYourSpace, MySpace, blogging, common sense, journalism, monitoring, new media, parody, public relations by Mike Keliher
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I’ve written before (with a post that probably should have ended with a question mark, for the sake of fairness) about New Media Strategies, a company that, put simply, helps organizations improve their online image. That post was a bit critical, but today, I’m all about throwing mad props (as they kids say) at NMS.

The Boston Globe writes about blogs that cover politics and some alleged cases of astroturfing — that is, people committing acts of a fake-grass-roots nature. An interesting article, it is, but the part that caught my eye was this:

“You need to engage [bloggers] as if they are any other powerful constituency,” said Peter Greenberger of New Media Strategies, an Arlington, Va.-based consulting firm that works with candidates and corporations to improve their image on the Internet.

Greenberger said his firm was not working for any 2008 candidates, but had turned away requests by some candidates to woo activists through online “astroturf” campaigns. Astroturf, in political parlance, refers to campaigns organized by public relations firms to create a false image of grass-roots support. [emphasis mine]

Kudos to New Media Strategies for sticking to its code of ethics and not simply doing anything that brings money in the door. Who knows who these candidates were or how much fame and fortune were at stake here, but this is the kind of PR-business ethics I’m proud to read about.

Tags: ethics, new media, politics by Mike Keliher
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A good article from a great writer on the future of journalism, as envisioned by Gannett, publisher of USA Today and a hundred billion other newspapers. The article from BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine talks about Gannett’s strategy for a new journalism — “pro-am,” they call it. The professionals do the heavy lifting, and the amateurs fill in the details. This will be the new approach at Gannett’s newspapers and eventually it’s TV outlets, as well.

More from Jonny Fine:

Perhaps the best early example of this fused approach took place at the Fort Myers News-Press. Home buyers were getting whacked with massive bills—as much as $30,000—for simple water- and sewer-line connections. The News-Press kicked off its probe with a short item, in the paper and on its Web site, announcing it was looking into these fees, and, by the way, did anyone have anything to share? After that: the deluge. Certain documents surfaced, suggesting potentially illegal activity involving bids; local engineers scrutinized blueprints posted online. These were posted and feverishly discussed in forums, which in turn generated leads and drove follow-up coverage in print and on the Web. It’s “a whole different way of building a story,” says Executive Editor Kate Marymont. The “microsite” that hosted that chatter became The News-Press’ most-trafficked, a position it maintains today.

How incredible is that? Ass-kickin’ journalism in an era in which no one wants to pay for it (neither the publishers [in terms of staff] nor the consumers [in seemingly any terms])! Beautiful. I’m genuinely excited to see what more examples of this new journalism — don’t any of you dare start talking about “journalism 2.0″; that’s such a lame and lazy buzzword-ification — we’ll soon see. This makes we want to get into the journalism business. Wait, does this count as being “in the business”?

Tags: future, journalism by Mike Keliher
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A recent Wall Street Journal article attempts to explain to old people how sites like Digg, Reddit and Newsvine work. It’s really a very good article — a great effort by a big, old, traditional media outlet to cover some of this wild stuff you crazy kids are up to on the Interwebs.

The Journal’s tireless reporters explain their process for identifying the top influencers at these sites:

To find the key influencers, The Wall Street Journal analyzed more than 25,000 submissions across six major sites. With the help of Dapper, a company that designs software to track information published on the Web, this analysis sifted through snapshots of the sites’ home pages every 30 minutes over three weeks. The data included which users posted the submissions and the number of votes each received from fellow users. We then contacted scores of individual users to find which ones are tracked by the wider community.

OK. So you worked your ass off. Good for you. But maybe you could have pulled your heads out of your stuffy Manhattan orifices…sorry, offices… for a second and recognized that you didn’t really need to do all that work. Digg used to post its top users — no research necessary! — on its site, but even after it took the list down, ten seconds of Google delivers the “key influencers.” Reddit? Same deal, but it still has its own stuff on its own site.

Way easier than sorting through 25,000 pieces of captured data. Noble effort, Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen, but if you tried getting in touch with what you’re writing about first, you would have found the info you wanted — fast and free — on the Interwebs.

Tags: Digg, Reddit, Wall Street Journal, journalism, social news by Mike Keliher
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In the newest installment of my ongoing series, I’m picking on the Los Angeles Times.

In a story about “the case of Douglas R. Dowie, the former public relations executive convicted of fraud against the city of Los Angeles and sentenced last week to 3 1/2 years in federal prison,” the subheadline reads:

“About to be imprisoned, ex-PR chief Dowie has a screenplay optioned. It’s a City Hall tale, natch.”

Damn it! I hate that “word.” Now, I know “natch” is in the dictionary, but that doesn’t make it a word (see “ain’t“). More importantly, even if one grants “natch” its undue wordness, actually using it in a written work is the linguistic equivalent of putting orange juice in Crown Royal whisky — which I actually saw a bartender do recently. (What bartender doesn’t know that “I’ll have a Crown and an orange juice” means that I’m ordering two drinks?) That is to say, DON’T DO IT.

Now, I’m well aware that the article’s writer is not even the person who actually wrote “natch” in the subhead. Chances are, that was an editor at the paper. Still, I hope people will start to think twice before pissing off some lonely guy in his basement who has a blog on which he writes about inane things like the use of the “word” natch. Ooh, zing!

Remember, kids: Friends don’t let friends pronounce measure as “may-zher,” nor do those same friends let their amigos use the “word” natch. If your friend insists on saying “natch,” you should just cave in and let them drive home drunk, too.

Note to my readers (both of you): I have modified this post after speaking with the specific person at the Times who I was picking on in the original version of the post. Although I stated I had no qualm with the story’s writer personally — she wasn’t even the person who wrote the word; other people write headlines — the Google search results for her name looked bad. She was bothered by some of the things I wrote, and realizing there was no reason to put up a fight or to truly piss anyone off, I backed off and changed the post.

Two points, though: I’m sure the original version of this post will leave on for eternity, so revising it is probably futile. At least I tried. Second, I won’t back off my quest against the “word” natch. I might be persuaded to feel bad for a person (especially a reporter — I am a PR guy, after all), but I have no mercy for “natch”!

Tags: LA Times, Natch Watch, writing by Mike Keliher
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A good article from the New York Times attempts to explain this absurd process of presidential candidates-in-the-making first pre-announcing, then officially announcing and then otherwise making news about their declared candidacies.

The obvious answer: The politicians do it because the media eat it up. Great opportunities at free publicity for lesser-known candidates and even more of the same for people like John McCain and Barack Obama.

Here’s the part that bothers me, though: This article’s reporter spoke to Elizabeth Wilner, the political director for NBC, presumably overseeing all of the network’s (and MSNBC’s, too, maybe) news coverage of anything related to these candidates.

From the article:

“Candidates stretch out the announcements because they can,” [Wilner] said.

Twenty-four-hour cable and Internet saturation, Ms. Wilner said, “means there will always be someone waiting to report on every infinitesimal word change relating to their candidate status.”

Just because it’s easy to get a story out of each and every little hiccup about an “exploratory committee” and each time Senator Clinton says a word that rhymes with “candidacy,” that doesn’t mean these news outlets should be reporting on it. And let’s stamp out one of the arguments in their defense right now: Raise your hand if you give a shit about Sam Brownback’s exploratory committee. Anyone? Bueller?

When a candidate hold a press conference or some other event to say, in front of an audience of people who care, then let the cable news anchors ask their “political analysts” about the significance of this announcement. When Evan Bayh forms an exploratory committee, leave that for page A12 of the newspapers — it sure as hell doesn’t warrant the amount of coverage things like this have been getting lately. (The Times article reminds us that Bayh formed an exploratory committee in December, “only to announce a few weeks later that he was not running.”)

News folk: Just because you can get a few minutes or a few hundred words out of something, doesn’t mean you should. For those of you who went to journalism school — or just plain know how to do your job well — you should understand that a big part of your job is news judgement. Figure out what’s important, and tell the people what happened and why it’s worthy of their time to listen to or read about.

On a similar note, I’m sick to death of hearing about Anna Nicole Smith. Some brilliant son of a bitch on MSNBC today — I wish I could remember who — put it best: An MSNBC anchor (who was all too willing to head into “Casual Land” and jump right over the wall separating journalism’s church from its state) asked this guy if the news media are paying too much attention to the Anna Nicole Smith story. After all, she said, the media are supposed to serve the public interest and so on, but really, “we’re a business, too.”

This guy — god bless him — says (and I quote from memory, so excuse slight inaccuracies), “I’m not just saying this because I work for MSNBC but because I believe it’s true. It’s easy to report all day about Anna Nicole Smith and try to justify it by pointing to our competitors, saying ‘they’re doing it, too!’ But we’re better than that. We should be doing what’s right, not what’s easy.”

I want to find out who this guy was and…mail him a Best Buy gift card or something. Seriously. Well done, hombre.

Tags: MSNBC, NBC, TV news, journalism, politics by Mike Keliher
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This article from the Star Tribune (originally in the Los Angeles Times) is enfuriating. The article, running Super Bowl Sunday, talks about a little-known law — yes, law – that prohibits NFL games, including the Super Bowl, from being shown in public venues on big screens.

“Sports bars are specifically exempted,” the article says, but no other public venue can air NFL games on a screen larger than 55 inches. If you want your crowd to huddle around a 54-inch TV, that’s kosher. This law has resulted in several churches canceling Super Bowl parties in fear of pissing of the NFLs law Nazis, and it also gave the NFL grounds for rejecting a request to have the Super Bowl played on the big screen at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Come on, you heartless bastards!

The truly angering part is the reason for the law:

“The intent of the law, which dates to the 1960s, is to protect the NFL’s television ratings by preventing large crowds from gathering to watch games in public places — where their viewing habits can’t be measured by the Nielsen ratings. (The ratings only measure viewership at home.) Sports bars and other businesses that rely on televised sports to draw patrons are exempt.”

To recap: The damn NFL thinks — and the law gives it reason to think — it is entitled to high ratings. I understand why it wants the highest ratings numbers it can get, but the idea that the league is actually entitled to them is absurd, especially when the games are broadcast on public airwaves, as was the Super Bowl and most other NFL games.

What’s next? Will the NFL demand I sit and watch the commercials during the game — “No game at all if you don’t watch the whole broadcast!”? Will I be required to drive my car a certain number of miles each month to make sure I buy enough gas and need enough maintenance services?

Where’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation when we need it? Maybe a little out of the EFF’s realm, but someone must stop this madness.

Tags: NFL, Super Bowl, common sense by Mike Keliher
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Web 2.0 in less than five minutes.

This is badass. Well done, Professor Wesch. Well done indeed.

Thanks to Howard Greenstein at the Social Media Club for pointing this out.

Tags: Web 2.0, new media by Mike Keliher
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