http://www.unjournalism.com A media junkie and PR guy sharing his thoughts on, well...media and PR and stuff. Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:00:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en When I saw this headline from Jason Falls -- "There Is No Perfect Pitch, Only Perfect Pitches" -- I immediately thought, "Wow. That makes perfect sense." As I read the article, I found that, although I agree with what he wrote, Jason didn't go in the direction I thought he would. ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/07/10/the-perfect-pitch-needs-good-setup-first/ Color me disappointed. When I started reading this story in the New York Times, I thought I was going to read an analysis of how the hell so many prominent new outlets -- "including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times" ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/06/30/ny-times-on-the-science-of-news-release-writing/ The Web is full of perfectly justfied rants about the sub-par quality of much of the writing done by PR people, particularly in news releases. A popular target -- for good reason -- are those executive quotes that were probably never uttered by an executive in the first place. Example: "We're excited ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/06/03/bad-writing-isnt-just-for-pr-people/ Chris Brogan asks this morning, "What are your social media tasks?" He asks six specific questions, and rather than leave a monster of a comment on his blog, I'm intentionally fragmenting the conversation (sorry!) and responding in this post. 1) What’s first in your day? What do you do before any ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/04/17/my-social-media-tasks/ Shannon Whitley pointed me to this post from John Furrier about social media news releases. I started following links within and ended up reading this post from Matthew Ingram, which John was summing up. Matt's post was prompted by this one from Mark Glaser, which provides a pretty good history and ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/04/12/social-media-news-release-one-year-later/ (A note about the headline to old people who might read this: "FTW" means "for the win." Think golf: "The Shankman sinks the big putt - for the win!") PRNewser provides a brief write-up about Peter Shankman's "Help a Reporter" Web site, a good-karma-earning project in which the Shankman (doesn't the ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/03/25/facebook-failing-as-favorite-web-hub/ I want people to leave SocialTNT alone, and here, I'll tell you why. It all started on Saturday when Chris Lynn, a.k.a. SocialTNT, made a comment about how he found coolness in a gay couple and their adopted child and the skin colors of each. It seemed an honest, innocent statement ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/03/04/leave-socialtnt-alone-the-backstory/ The New York Times wrote about it. The Social Times got me thinking about it again. I must weigh in here on Target's non-participation policy toward blogs and a couple of related issues. To be clear, I am in no way interested in weighing in on the advertisement in question, ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/01/29/can-you-handle-one-more-post-about-targets-blog-policy/ Yesterday I saw an item in which the writer, Clarence Westberg, referred to Pownce, the "similar to but not the same as Twitter" microblogging tool, as a "social network." (Actually, he called Pownce a "worthless social network," but that's a separate issue.) This simple statement got me thinking: What makes a ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2008/01/09/what-makes-a-social-network/ Bill Sledzik, associate professor at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Kent State University, writes a guest post at PR Conversations about social media measurement and ROI. He doesn't pretend to have all of the answers, but he does a good job of raising and putting into perspective the ... http://www.unjournalism.com/2007/11/15/social-media-measurement-lets-start-somewhere/