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]

Are PR Embargoes Dead?

The embargo is one of my favorite PR tactics, but it looks like it will soon be another casualty of the Internet, if it isn’t already. In the ooollllddd days, you could hand out embargoed news and assuming you had a good relationship with the media, the news would sit in the can until the agreed-upon time. But...

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Know-Nothing Journalists Give Bad PR Advice (Again)

I almost didn’t even react to this latest example of journalists giving businesspeople bad advice about PR, but I couldn’t help it. I figured it was better to blog about it than to leave a comment on someone else’s blog. Here’s the story: a Boston web trade group held an event on Tuesday called,...

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The difference between the mainstream media and online media keeps getting smaller

Everyone knows that the mainstream media and the online media are two very different beasts, at least in their roots and points of view. But as we get further into the Internet revolution and the weakening of the business models of the mainstream media, the lines are really starting to blur. I ran across an example...

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In the end, it’s all corporate communications

One of the reasons I became disillusioned and left the mainstream media was that while it purports to be “independent” and “objective,” it’s really just corporate communications. That is, the media of today is largely owned by massive corporations who want to make money, and they do so...

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Hooray for frickin’ Carol Bartz of Yahoo!

I’ve decided I’m a big Carol Bartz fan. Note to my contacts at Yahoo: I want to meet her and be her media trainer! The latest Bartz bomb came yesterday in response, again, to one of those “how can Yahoo survive” questions. The Yahoo CEO turned the question around and challenged the media to...

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PR Rule #1: It’s About the Message, Not About the Methods

Generally speaking, it’s a bad sign when your PR strategy becomes the story, rather than the messages you are trying to send. And so it was today, when the New York Times ran five nearly identical pictures on its front page of Obama giving health care reform interviews on five Sunday talk shows, accompanying...

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Journalist pokes his head out into the real world, sees his shadow, and goes back

I just can’t get enough of journalists trying to make sense of their relationship to PR. Today’s example comes from Monday’s New York Times, where David Carr relates the story of his friend and neighbor, Thomas Moran, who left his thrilling but insecure newspaper job covering New Jersey politics for...

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Great insights into New York Times blogging

MyRagan.com has a great article by Paul Boutin, a Times freelancer and VentureBeat.com writer, about the nuts and bolts of blogging for the New York Times. It’s free today but may go behind Ragan’s paid sub firewall soon so check it out while you can. Inside peek: How The New York Times handles its blogs Excerpt: In...

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3 No-No’s When You Pitch the Media By Email

Almost all journalists say they want to be pitched by email. So guess what — they are deluged with email pitches! And to make matters worse, most of them are bloated, non-news pitches that get deleted faster than you can say, “did you get my email?” How to avoid the trash bin? That’s easy —...

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What the heck is U-verse? AT&T doesn’t make it easy to find out.

I’ve been planning an upgrade of the TV set-up in my house, and have started to research the options. It is almost a full-time job. On the hardware side, the options are pretty straight forward — HD or not, 720 or 1080, LCD (cheaper) or LED (much more expensive). But on the content side — that’s...

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