Technology

Starbucks’ Free WiFi is a Big Deal – Here’s Why

June 16, 2010 · Leave a Comment

News flash: I just moved to an office in downtown San Francisco — woohoo! I love The City, and now I have a chance to be here everyday again. I last worked in SF in 1997. One thing that has changed since 1997 — there are a LOT more Starbucks in downtown SF. No duh. There are Starbucks EVERYWHERE in the U.S. — 6,700 total locations [probably excluding franchisees, such as those in museums and Barnes & Noble]. Now there is going to be reliable, free WiFi hotspots all over urban/suburban America in Starbucks starting July 1. As soon as I heard this news, I immediately started... [Read the full story]

Fox "News"

Good Riddance, Lou Dobbs

November 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Buh-bye Lou: The bombastic and misguided Lou Dobbs has finally given up his perch on CNN and quit the network, more than a year before the end of his contract. For now, he will spew his anti-immigration, white-privileged perspective on his national radio show. I haven’t looked up the odds, but if I were a betting man, I’d say 5:1 he goes to Fox “News” after a respectful interregnum. I’m not a big believer in the so-called objectivity of the mainstream media, but for years Dobbs has even crossed that line and used his show, ostensibly about business and finance news,... [Read the full story]

Email Pitching

Two New Ways to Use Texting in Media Relations

July 16, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Here are two tidbit’s from yesterday’s Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference on email/online pitching (which I moderated): Dave Satterfield of Sitrick & Co. said that he has texted reporters to answer questions and make clarifications during major announcement events, while they were all in the room together The Vatican has been send text messages to followers and the media since 2003. Kevin Dugan of the Bad Pitch Blog said one of the reasons was to reduce the possibility of Vatican-related hoaxes being picked up by the media as legit. Read More →

Spin

Tiger Should Go With His “New Hugh” Persona

December 20, 2009 · 2 Comments

Now that the stories about Tiger Woods have descended from “marital woes” to “all out sex/party maniac,” I think Tiger needs a new strategy: Tiger should go full-steam ahead and plant his flag as “the new Hugh Hefner,” or in my shorthand (trademark pending), “The New Hugh.” I’m serious here. Hugh Hefner has made a bloody fortune screwing beautiful women and leading the party life. But he’s ooollllddd. I can’t believe he’s still going strong, supposedly. Hugh ain’t gonna last forever. We need a new role model, a new Adonis... [Read the full story]

Media Training

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom Acts Like a Complete Jerk in a Media Interview

November 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’m always on the lookout for good on-camera examples of spokespeople doing a terrible job. It’s a great teaching tool — seriously. So if you’ve got any examples, by all means forward them to me. Playboy SF Mayor Gavin Newsom has made a dandy contribution to the archive with his interview on CBS 5 here in the Bay Area. Newsom dropped out of the California governors race a few weeks ago, and the conventional wisdom is that he has been pouting and avoiding the press, who he foolishly blames for his early demise. (Note to Gavin: look in the mirror for the true culprit). He... [Read the full story]

Top Tech Products of the Decade Were All About Communications

HuffPost has a “top 11″ list of tech products of the decade, and I was stunned at how many of them were communications tools that radically reshaped the way we think, interact, and entertain ourselves. Among HuffPo’s top 11: iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before...

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The Ugly Truth About Tiger Woods and All His Enablers

So it turns out that Tiger Woods has been a carousing, hard partying guy, both as a bachelor and as a married man. In essence, this doesn’t surprise me one bit — in fact, it makes a lot more sense than the partial stories that were coming out the first week about his “transgressions.” I believe...

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Death of E&P is a milestone worth noting

Neilsen announced yesterday that it was shuttering Editor & Publisher, the iconic newspaper industry trade magazine that has chronicled the newspaper business for 108 years. I’d been wondering about the relevance of E&P in past months, so after getting over the initial shock, this decision comes as no...

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Company Gets $500,000 in VC Funding to Bridge the Gap Between PR and Media

I am one who believes there will always be a chasm between the media and PR, unless and until the media dies and all media is PR. Which I hope does not happen. I’ve been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people figure out if they had a story...

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Tiger Woods and the Concept of Super-Replicators

One of the more interesting things that has been said about Tiger Woods is that now he is “human like the rest of us.” This is undoubtedly true, though quite painful for him and us to live through this week. We all have our human failings — can you imagine coming to terms with yours under the spotlight...

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Tiger Woods Caught With His Pants Down, But He Keeps His Guard Up

Uh-oh. It turns out that where there was Thanksgiving Day smoke, there was definitely fire. Tiger Woods has been caught red-handed being a philandering adulterer. Goodbye pristine reputation, maybe goodbye marriage. But is it goodbye golf game and goodbye endorsements? No and probably not. Woods issued another statement...

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“Who Will Pay the Messenger” Is Indeed the Question

I am not a believer that print media is all but dead. But I am a believer that the highest profile print media, namely big city newspapers, are, in fact, all but dead (with one notable exception, the New York Times). This is not, as many assume, simply because the Internet came along and took away a lot of the advertising...

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Tiger Woods Takes the Right Media Relations Tack

As the Tiger Woods car accident story was becoming known and starting to be covered in the media, my other half passed along an article talking about “what Tiger should do,” and suggesting that I weigh in. In the moment, I have to say that I had a hard time forming a strategy, partly due to Thanksgiving...

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Turkey Day Oddities

Two random Turkey Day observations: Is Facebook over its capacity today? I’m getting lots of error messages today — could it be that everyone who is off today has jumped on FB and pushed their traffic beyond capacity? That’s what it looks like to me. If so, it’s a problem we’d all like...

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