Interesting Peek At What Real "New Media" Might Look Like

You can call things like Facebook and Twitter “social media” all you want, and they are certainly an interesting new societal development, but they aren’t professional media. There will always be professional intermediaries, storytellers if you will, who will seek to get paid to tell you what’s going on in our world.
Will the media continue [...]

UC San Diego PR Nightmare!

It’s that time of year again, as parents and high school seniors anxiously await the ‘fat’ or ‘thin’ envelopes from the colleges of their choice. Only this year and for some time, colleges have also sent out emails announcing the news.
That’s what UC San Diego did this week — except they sent the “you’re accepted” [...]

The Online-Only SeattlePI.com Will Be a Media Relations Challenge

Take a moment and note that this is a landmark day in American journalism, and by extension, American public relations. A major American metropolitan newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has completely dropped its print edition and gone online only.
It’s hard to imagine this not being the first of a trend, and perhaps even the beginning of [...]

If your corporate web site looks credible, media sites will link to it

Time and again, the biggest complaint from journalists trying to do company research on the web is corporate web sites are hard to navigate and hard to use. “If they’re not usable, we’ll just go to Google,” says Dan Gaines, managing editor of LATimes.com.
But a good credible corporate site? Gaines says that more and more, [...]

The Great Thing About Twitter: You Can Lurk Before You Leap

One thing to understand about Twitter: you can follow someone without their permission, unless they have set their profile so that they have to approve you [which is rarely the case].
This means that you can get someone’s Twitter handle, find them on Twitter and click “follow” and if it doesn’t give you the privacy notice, [...]

This Week on Catching Flack

I’ve decided that it’s dumb to just let 21st Century Media Relations wither while I write a blog over on BNET.com. On the other hand, my deal with them is that I’ll mostly blog over there instead of here. So what to do? How about a weekly digest of what I’m talking about over on [...]

Newspapers Are Still A $60 Billion-a-Year Industry

Great piece this morning on CNN.com/Fortune about the current state of the newspaper industry. Despite all the bad headlines, reports Richard Siklos, newspapers are still generating $60 billion in sales and still generating “decent profits.” Yes, public stock investors are unhappy with the performance of newspaper stock prices, but that’s another issue. And for sure, [...]

Get Real: PR Isn't Going Anywhere

Raging debate over at and around Silicon Valley Watcher, a blog run by former Financial Times writer Tom Foremski. Tom contends that PR is a dying industry, headed down the same rat hole as the dead-tree media business.
A sampling from Tom:
I’ve long warned the PR industry that it is on borrowed time. The media industry [...]

Online Ethics Panel Coming Up

The PRSA Silicon Valley panel on online ethics for journalists and PR professionals, rescheduled from September, is coming up: it’s scheduled for October 30, 8-9:30 am at the offices of Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto.
If you can make it, I hope you will join us. Here’s the reg form and here’s the description and [...]

The News Cycle is Dead

The news cycle is dead. Long live “The Opinion Cycle.”
So says Lee Ann Schreiber, ombudsman for ESPN. In a terrific piece on ESPN.com, Schreiber dissects various sports “controversies” and concludes that a) very little actual reporting was done but b) tons of opinions were spewed. She wrote:
“If you look at the proportion of airtime [...]

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