The absurdity of embargoes

November 1, 2009

This Halloween I was visited by a demon that has haunted me for decades. It was brought to mind by this Tweet from Tom Foremski, an old pro from the Financial Times: “Are there new rules for embargoes? I’m not sure if there are…”
If there’s one subject that will always elicit a frothing response from [...]

On salaries, don’t pass the buck

October 29, 2009

Even in the days when prosperous newspaper companies seemed to print money along with the news–an increasingly distant memory–some recent revelations about top editorial salaries would have arched more than a few green-shaded brows.
First there were reports that former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger was pulling down a cool $570,000 at ProPublica [...]

The dumbing down of media

October 23, 2009

Countless articles are written every day decrying the demise of journalism and all of democracy along with it, but many of them are little more than personal rants from recently unemployed journalists or romanticized writings that pine for a “Front Page” era that never really existed in our lifetime.
One observation made in various venues lately [...]

How to safely inject humor into PR

October 14, 2009

When I worked at a PR agency, it was serious business. By this I mean humor rarely seeped into the client’s work. This was not because the client couldn’t appreciate it. It just wasn’t done. You want to be funny, go work for an ad agency.
This was unfortunate because I saw so many client campaigns [...]

Hybrid media species discovered

September 30, 2009

Only a scant few months since publishing the first “Field Guide to Common Journalists,” Newsvetter’s media anthropologists have turned up an exciting new species.
This hitherto undiscovered genus is something of a hybrid, neither fish (journalist) nor fowl (PR rep) by classic definition. Instead, it appears to represent a nascent breed [...]

Friday funny: Seth Godin Is Not Evil, he’s EEEEVIIIILLLL

September 25, 2009

I’ve been following the uproar over Brands in Public these past few days on Twitter and the blogs. There are a lot of disappointed people out there (I’ve tried to capture the prevailing sentiment in the toon featured on the right).
I don’t know Seth Godin all that well. I never finished his book Tribes. I’ve [...]

Learn to love your links

September 23, 2009

If you’re old enough to remember when the web was called the Information Highway, you may recall a site called Suck.com. It was an irreverent daily zine (remember those?) launched in the summer of 1995 with the irresistible inscription, “a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun.”
Yet what I recall appreciating most about Suck was [...]

Boeing breaks the news barrier

September 15, 2009

As much as we’re tempted to rant yet again about the inanity of press releases, we at Newsvetter have promised ourselves to stay focused on the positive ever since our last blood-pressure checkup.
To that end, we herewith officially laud Boeing for adopting a new way to provide information that forgoes the dreaded e-mail blast that [...]

The PR-ad-marketing quibble

September 8, 2009

Try as I might to keep from getting hooked on “Mad Men,” I’ve finally succumbed. There’s something irresistible about an era when cigarettes and alcoholic “refreshments” were acceptable at office meetings any time of day.
But at one such gathering, something other than the Camels and Gibsons caught my attention. It was a pitch to [...]

We need a swine flu newsroom

September 1, 2009

My kids are starting kindergarten in a few days, but the lump in my throat isn’t a bittersweet reaction to seeing my boys leave the nest. Rather, it’s from a fear that they’ll come back infected with the swine flu.
According to local news reports, Oregon state health officials are warning that “40 [...]

Could humor have saved Brody PR?

August 21, 2009

Just to be clear. Brody PR screwed up and deserved to be outed. But I believe humor could have saved them.
As blunders go it was a doozy, but did anyone get offended or hurt? No. Other than irritating a few influential social media folks during their busy day, it was harmless. In other words, here’s [...]

PR’s love affair with press releases

August 12, 2009

If there’s anybody who has developed a successful model for charging for news content, it’s the PR industry.
In 2007, press releases represented a $2.2 billion market, according to Fortune. This figure only covers distribution through companies such as PR Newswire and PR Web. It does not include the cost to write and pitch them to [...]

Monsanto needs a reality check

August 4, 2009

Like many kids who visited Disneyland in the ’60s and ’70s, I always remembered Monsanto’s “Adventure Thru Inner Space,” an exhibit that pretended to shrink its visitors to microscopic size and examine them with a giant eyeball as they exited. (We became particularly familiar with it after my frugal father learned that it was [...]

What PR can learn from squirrels

July 30, 2009

Cutbacks are to be expected in any economic downturn, but the Great Recession has forced many companies to rethink fundamental operations in the name of survival. This includes even departments once considered sacrosanct, such as legal services.
Gone are the days of fat monthly retainers and unlimited billable hours. An increasingly common strategy among many companies [...]

Forget about the New York Times

July 21, 2009

You may not know it, but there are some close parallels between PR and the real estate business these days. A blog on PowerSites, an online real estate listing company, offers an observation to this point that is admittedly self-serving but no less true:
“Over the last few years I have spoken to many Realtors who [...]

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