Pitching Business Media Is Getting Tougher and Tougher
One of the untold stories of PR over the last quarter century has been the great rise in business journalism, from a media backwater to a front-and-center element of the media. It just so happens that I had a front-row seat for this transformation, as I entered business journalism in 1981 as part of the [...]
Yahoo's CEO Shows the Big Boys How It's Done
Nice to see some refreshing candor from Yahoo’s newish CEO, Carol Bartz.
At the hipper-than-thou D Conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, Bartz stage-whispered the f-bomb at media high priestess Kara Swisher, not a direct shot but definitely a signal that she was to be taken seriously.
Then, at the same conference, she interrupted an interview [...]
Bancrofts Going Out With a Whimper
Poor Bancroft family (that would be poor in the pitiful sense, not in the monetary sense). Seems they couldn’t agree on who to nominate to the News Corp. board as part of their sale of Dow Jones (they were too tired to make a good decision, apparently), so they let their contractual right expire and [...]
How NOT to say "No Comment"
Great story in yesterday’s WSJ about the subprime mess — in classic Journal fashion, they looked at the intertwined relationships of players in the mortgage business, tracing the story from the misfortunes of a single homeowner up to giant multinational financial institutions that invested in mortgage-backed securities, including securities whose returns were dependent on the [...]
Coming Next Week: Fox Business Network
Even as Rupert Murdoch moves forward to close the deal to by Dow Jones, Fox is close to launching its much-anticipated Fox Business Network to compete for business news viewers with CNBC.
The Talking Biz News blog is doing a good job tracking this new entrant in business news. If you’re interested in pitching FBN, you [...]
Great New Article on Wall Street Journal
There’s been a lot of crappy speculation on the fate of the Wall Street Journal once Rupert Murdoch takes over. Here’s one article, though, that does an excellent job: A new jewel for Rupert Murdoch’s crown: Will he fix what isn’t broken at The Wall Street Journal? It’s in the latest edition of PRSA Tactics. [...]
Burson-Marsteller Outed as Microsoft's Sock Puppet
The Wall Street Journal and the U.K.’s Observer both outed Burson-Marsteller today as the “sock puppet” of Microsoft’s effort to create an Internet industry group to oppose Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick.
Seems B-M has sent emails to players in the Internet space urging them to join a new industry group, Initiative for Competitive Online Marketplaces [...]
WSJ.com Wants to be Free
The only subscription-only daily newspaper site in the U.S., WSJ.com, is on the road to becoming at least a partially free site, according to a story on today’s subscription-only WSJ.com site.
From the story:
Mr. Murdoch has been dropping hints that he is contemplating doing just that when he takes over, raising the idea in interviews before he [...]
PR Pros on WSJ Sale: Yawn…
PR Week made a few calls last week and concluded that the sale of the Wall Street Journal was “no biggie” to the PR industry.
The author, Hamilton Nolan, wrote a story for the print version of PR Week and then blogged about it on PR Week’s site, providing quite a bit more detail in the [...]