Bad news for reporters is bad news for PR

The Week of the Long Knives

Jon Friedman of Marketwatch.com wrote a column yesterday that cut right to the chase.

Friedman's first sentence: "This is a scary time to be a newspaper journalist."

The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News, The San Jose Mercury News, and the San Francisco Chronicle have all announced layoffs or cutbacks and buyouts. This means fewer reporters to pitch to, and reporters who will be less willing to take a chance on a story that is not obviously box office. Here’s hoping for better times for all.

Katrina Help Wiki

Why we name hurricanes

National Hurricane Center

Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive given names in written as well as spoken communications is quicker and less subject to error than the older more cumbersome latitude-longitude identification methods. These advantages are especially important in exchanging detailed storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases, and ships at sea.

Hurricane season is not over.

Well done Richard Parsons

Adam Shostack reports that Time Warner has refused to collaborate with the Chinese secret police:

Time Warner thought about ``what we would look like here in the U.S. if we agreed to a governmentally imposed regime where words like democracy had to be blocked,'' Parsons said. ``We made a judgment that it wasn't a market that we wanted to enter in this way at this time.''

What the general public should know about the relationship between PR and journalists

I think Ann McDaniel put it very well:

Both have jobs to do. Public relations professionals are trying to put out their message in the most positive way possible. Journalists are trying to create an accurate report. Often the two roles are complimentary; occasionally there is tension over their varying views. Neither is doing anything wrong.

How Deutsche Welle discovered blogs

From my interview with Holger Hank, DW-World Editorial Director:

ALICE MARSHALL: How did Deutsche Welle become aware of blogs?

HOLGER HANK: We took notice of blogs in 2002 when referrals from blogs suddenly popped up in our logfiles.

I suspect that is how much of the news media discovered blogs.

The nation’s capitol

Rüdiger Lentz, Washington Bureau Chief for Deutshe Welle, has some kind words about the federal city:

ALICE MARSHALL: What are your impressions of Washington, DC as a city? What do you think Americans should know about their capitol city? What should Europeans know about Washington as a city?

RÜDIGER LENTZ: Washington as a city: It has much improved over the last 20 years during which time I have either visited regularly or lived here for longish intermittent periods. It is a very colorful, diverse and interesting city which has – compared to other cities and world centers – a great quality of being able to live comfortably.

Microsoft and the ECM market

Larry Borasato suggests that anyone with a web server and Microsoft SharePoint can do content management, or at least they think they can.

The truth is, most companies have found out that they can do ECM on a shoestring. Of course they won't realize the mistake they've made until they actually need to get the information back. Then it will suddenly become clear that they spent too much time on the capture, manage, store, and preserve part, and not near enough on the find and retrieve part.

Tony Byrne takes a similar view.

Together with forthcoming Office 12 enhancements and continued wide adoption of SharePoint, Microsoft could finally become a fairly robust ECM player. Except that...

1. It can take years for new Microsoft technologies to be adopted and refined by the company's all-important reseller channel;
2. Microsoft sometimes misjudges the marketplace and their customers (c.f. lackluster Web CMS product);
3. The company does not have a great record with 1.0 releases.

Why the humble press release will continue to be our primary tool

Shel Holtz

When done well, press releases do exactly what they’re designed to do. Fraser Seitel, writing in the standard PR text, “The Practice of Public Relations,” writes, “There is no better, clearer, more persuasive way to announce news about an organization, its products, and their applications than by issuing a news release. A news release may be written as the document of record to state an organization’s official position—for example, in a court case or in announcing a price or rate increase. More frequently, however, releases have one overriding purpose: to influence a publication to write favorably about the material discussed.”

Commentary from the New PR Wiki

Pitching technology stories

Schwartz Communications has some good tips.

What is ECM?

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Definitions

Registry Web Site As Model Of Cooperation

Bob Evans, Information Week

In less than 60 days and for less than $1 million, the U.S. Department of Justice has built a Web site giving access to sex-offender information from 28 states. It's a model of collaboration and cooperation, Bob Evans says, that gives access to information that, while deeply disturbing, is also extremely important.

Just one example of the power of information sharing.

New resource for analyst relations

Analyst Profiles

Tekrati, the source for today's news on high tech market research, is pleased to introduce Analyst Profiles, the world's leading collection of industry analyst biographies, complete with contact information and detailed research focus.

In a matter of minutes, you'll gather the contacts you need. Locate new experts and firms. Download and print biographies in a consistent format. Participate in a professional community forum.

A very handy service.

Online newsrooms

Dee Rambeau and Chris Bechtel have written a terrific summary of what you need for an online newsroom. Read it, print it out and keep it for a handy reference tool. It is that good.

They don’t tell you to put your press releases in HTML instead of PDF. I guess they just assume no one is that clueless. Wrong, there are plenty of firms still doing that.

Rita and Philippe

Tropical Storm Rita, 2005.09.19 at 1145Z. Centerpoint Latitude: 22:29:07N Longitude: 74:34:29W.

Tracking Map

Hurricane Philippe regional imagery, 2005.09.19 at 1145Z. Centerpoint Latitude: 17:00:48N Longitude: 56:15:57W

Tracking Map

Building networks with blogs

Elizabeth Albrycht has opened Global PR Blog Week 2.0 with a terrific piece on blogs as a tool for network building:

By focusing on network building, we move away from the hyperbole of BLOG and begin to think about how to use blogs pragmatically, as powerful communications tools. A prime reason blogs are such good tools for network building is that they are link-heavy, and the link is the core technology for making networks visible. I believe the visibility of a network contributes to its effectiveness because that very visibility reinforces its presence and influence to its members. ...

In the past, it was much more difficult to see your network, as connections had little sharable physical manifestation. A business card sitting in a rolodex on your desk is a far more difficult to assign value to vs. a visible link on a website or blog. One of the implications of this visibility is that it makes the results of our work more easily measurable, making our work more justifiable (always nice at budget time).

So much of marketing has to do with what is known as networking, building a series of interlocking business relationships that produce referrals. Blogs allow us to build those relations far more quickly and effectively.

Remember the basics

Think Like Your Customer

This is the basic tenet of all marketing. If you do this, you will usually make the right decision. About your products, your services, your image, your position, your marketing, your advertising, your website.

Take the time to identify the person that is your primary target market. Describe that person. Write down a full description. Then think about the person you described every time you make a decision about your product or your advertising.

In PR you also have to think about your clients’ customers.

Public Safety Tech Blog

Police Blogger at Presynct

Berkeley Recovers Stolen Laptop

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Campus police at the University of California, Berkeley have recovered a stolen laptop that contained personal information on more than 98,000 of the school's graduate students. The laptop's hard drive had been wiped clean of information and then sold on an Internet auction site, making it impossible to determine whether the sensitive information it had contained was ever accessed, the University said in a statement.

Encrypt your data.

Remodeling

The Presto Vivace, Inc. website has been completely redone. Hope you like the changes.