Archive for the ‘journalists’ Category

"Excited" "new" "Canadians"

It seems like just a year or so ago that Netflix found itself in the New York Times apologizing for hiring actors to pretend to be excited about the company entering the Canadian market. And didn’t the US Federal Emergency Management agency have to apologize for pretending that its own employees were journalists, when it faked a news conference? Oh yeah, they did!

But hey, those guys are amateurs. They are certainly not “Canada’s home for hard news and straight talk”, a network that is “unwavering in their commitment to uncover the real stories impacting the lives of everyday working people and their families“.

So when Sun News wants to cover a citizenship ceremony, what ends up happening? The minister’s office sends down the orders to put together a ceremony at the Sun studios (not where Elvis and Jerry Lee hung out, sadly), and when they have trouble putting together enough warm bodies to make the ceremony look legit… the ceremony gets faked, with public servants posing as new Canadians. Here’s the video, in all its cringeworthy glory. Keep in mind as you watch it, that six of these people are not “new Canadians.” They are federal employees.

I’m guessing the two small people on the end aren’t the public servants. They appear to be children, although in this topsy-turvy world who can tell? Here’s the story as reported in the Globe and Mail, obtained through Access to Information requests by the Canadian Press.

The story’s money quote:

When a bureaucrat sent Sun News a list of possible citizenship ceremonies to cover in Ontario, a network employee suggested another scenario. “Let’s do it. We can fake the Oath,” reads an email from a sunmedia.ca email address, the name blacked out of the document.

I suppose I should draw the lessons, although I can’t imagine I have to:

• Journalists shouldn’t create pseudo events or cover them as real events.
• Public servants should have more integrity.
• Hard news and straight talk don’t mix well with “Fake the Oath.”

Let’s all be a bit better than this.

UPDATE:

The political appointee Candice Malcom appeared on Sun News today to apologize for the event. Sun News host Pat Bolland claimed that they knew nothing of the fakery. For what it’s worth, I never would have suggested the strategy followed in the wake of this muffup. Here’s the video:

UPDATE 2: Sun News Network’s David Akin weighs in with his take on the event.

Rob Ford tells the media their questions. Then answers them. (Image from CBC)

Rob Ford is the mayor of Canada’s largest city. The dedicated Flacklife reader may note that I’ve covered Mayor Ford a couple of times here. The most notable post was the one in which I included audio of his interview (to use the term loosely) with CBC Radio’s national show “As It Happens” — an pre-booked interview which was 210 seconds of intense awkwardness.

That was October. This is August. And Rob Ford has worked hard on his media relations skills.

Today, he met with the Premier of Ontario, and afterward, met the Toronto media for a scrum. But this was a scrum with a difference. Listen and learn:

[audio:http://www.translucid.ca/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/robford1.mp3|titles=robford]

This is taking the Donald Rumsfeld school of media relations to an entirely new plateau. News conferences are far more pleasant when in two minutes you can tell the gathered reporeters what they would be asking, answer those questions, and leave.

I don’t know whether to rejoice at the innovation or… jump off a bridge.

Audio from the National Post’s Youtube channel.

I grew up in Cape Breton, where there’s been a long — and far from uniformly successful — history of government agencies trying to support and grow the island’s economy. Back in the late 1980s, when I had gone from an aborted decision to go to graduate school to being a freelance journalist, there were full page ads being taken out in the New York Times offering “Free Money in Cape Breton.” Those ads were successful in bringing in many entrepreneurs, some of whom built legitimate businesses, and others who were less scrupulous.

Currently, economic development is led by a Crown corporation called Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, which works with another entity called the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. ECBC’s CEO is a man named John Lynn, who formerly worked with grocery retailing giant Sobeys. And he appeared on CBC Cape Breton’s Information Morning program as part of their annual “year-in-review” series of interviews. Former co-toiler in the trenches of freelancing Parker Donham pointed to the 15-minute conversation on his blog Contrarian. Here it is :

[audio:http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/cbnsinfomorn_20101220_42870.mp3]

I don’t know the details of the issues Lynn and Sutherland discuss. And I don’t know John Lynn at all. But I have to agree with Parker on his general assessment of Lynn’s media performance. Don’t criticize the media as he did while you’re on the air; you come off as peevish, irritable, and defensive.

Let’s compare and contrast with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, who did NOT want to answer questions from the Today Show’s Matt Lauer about a rumoured takeover of his company by Google (I saw this via Brad Phillips, a/k/a Mr. Media Training):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So you can be cranky, irascible, and somewhat confrontational, or you can be quirky and a little bit off the wall.Which interview came off better?

As if we didn’t need proof that media training is an ongoing need from Rob Ford’s interview with As it Happens.

Check out how Stephen Duckett, Alberta’s top health-care bureaucrat deals with media:

That’s 134 seconds of pain that could have been avoided by a little less flippancy and a little more diplomacy.

Mitigating this: a full and clear apology and acknowledgement that he muffed it. Good on him for that.

UPDATED: Monday, November 22: The leader of Alberta’s Opposition Liberal party is calling for Duckett’s resignation. Meanwhile, a government backbencher has been expelled from caucus over a rather intemperate e-mail he sent quite broadly last week. Seems like a high-pressure time in Alberta’s health sector.

Greater minds than mine — Jeff Jarvis, for one — have taken their run at newspapers and new business models recently.

This latest spasm of analysis began when New York magazine’s “Daily Intel” site reported that the New York Times would begin charging for access to its content. The model, according to that post, would be like the Financial Times, where you get very limited access to articles (1 per month when I tried it) and are then asked to register (10 articles free each month) and then subscribe (two levels of access to content, costing either 17.50 or 25 pounds).

The Times ran the TimesSelect paywall-based system from 2005-2007. TimesSelect was criticized by some of its biggest names, and was judged a failure. But some people, for example, Nicholas Carr, feel it was a reasonable business model to try. He points to an economic analysis by Matthew Gentzcow that suggests that online news is a substitute for newsprint, not a complement. If you buy Gentzcow’s argument, a fee for online access is reasonable.

All of this to say — where is the business model for newspapers?

We’re all hearing and reading seemingly contradictory information. Here in Canada, Canwest’s newspaper assets are in bankruptcy protection. But according to the publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, that paper remains a profitable entry (with no paywall in place).

Newspapers in the US have been doing all kinds of things — shutting down, going online, going from for-profit entities to not-for-profit foundations. And Rupert Murdoch is calling sites such as Google or Digg “content kleptomaniacs” and threatening to block Google from indexing his publications (something that Google points out he could have done at any time by inserting a couple of lines of code)

People are pointing to the latest Pew Institute study of newsgathering in Baltimore, which suggests that the vast majority of reporting work still is getting done by traditional media. And to Jaron Lanier’s (left) new book “You are not a gadget”, which suggests a system of micropayments are necessary for media to continue to survive, if not thrive.

So it would appear that we have the following alternatives:

• Papers are still profitable (Ottawa Citizen)
• Papers are going bankrupt (CanWest chain)
• Papers need paywalls (Wall Street Journal)
• Papers need to meter access (Financial Times, New York Times)
• Papers need to get access to a global micropayment system (Lanier)
• Metered access won’t work (Jarvis)
• Micropayments won’t work (Clay Shirky)

Is it any wonder that I’m confused?

I don’t know the magic solution — I’m sure that if I did I could command a handsome price. It seems to me that there’s gotta be some room for paying media for online content. But what is that going to look like? What is one article on a newspaper web site worth? If a paper costs $1.00 and there are 200 articles in it, does that mean each article costs a half-penny? Who gets that money? What if they’re using wire copy ? Do I get to pay one rate if I just read it, and another if I link to it? Or should I get credit for a link? How much?

If I pay for the online side of things, does that mean I should pay at a library for using their online databases or their hard-copy newspaper indices? Or does their coverage give me full access?

I almost feel as if we’re in the media version of the Cretaceous period — a period characterized by intense diversity in approaches to surviving, thriving, and passing on the ol’ DNA. But instead of dinosaurs and wee scampering protomammals, we have these seemingly uncountable new ways of trying to make a business model for sharing information. The hard part for business, as in nature, is that the vast majority of adaptations will fail. Those best adapted to the circumstances will survive.

So many questions, and so few answers. What do you think?

(Lanier photo used with CC permission from Flickr user dfarber)

Just saw this list of journalists using Twitter. which was written about in today’s MediaBistro PRNewser.

Pretty sad that there are only two Canadians listed. I know that motorsports writer Jeff Pappone is on Twitter (@jpappone). Surely there are others. Please share your ideas with the class. Anyone. Anyone at all. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

UPDATE: I now have writer access to the wiki in question, so if you have people to add, let me know.

Ciao,
Bob.

New survey out by Brodeur (part of Omnicom) about blogs and journalists. The short version:

• Blogs are a regular source for journalists. Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
• Nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.
• Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.
• The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

The survey was released as part of a panel at CES.

More detail on this later. Jeez, I wish you didn’t have to ask for the full survey findings.

Hat-tip: MarketingVOX.

Ciao,
Bob.

I’m likely not adding a lot to the discussion here, but my column today on CBC Radio’s The Business Network dealt with the Microsoft laptop giveaway. You can listen to it online, or read the script here.

“Big targets are easy to hit. And in the crosshairs of the blogosphere and the mainstream media right now are Microsoft and its PR firm, industry giant Edelman.

What turned the holidays sour for these two company? Ironically enough, trying to give stuff away.

Microsoft and Edelman used a Microsoft site called The Hive to contact nearly 100 bloggers at the top of the influence list. The bloggers were offered a hot new notebook preloaded with Windows Vista and other software to review over the holidays. The bloggers were told that once they’d tried the stuff out, it could be sent back, donated to charity, or kept.

Now there are two streams of invective flowing like lava from high ethical peaks. One is from angry bloggers, critical of the companies for not being more forthcoming, and for trying to buy good PR.

The other is coming from the mainstream media, which has pointed out that readers should put their trust in… well, the mainstream media, and not those ethically-challenged bloggers. Insert harrumph here.

There’s no doubt that this is a gray zone. Some bloggers either were silent or lied about where this new computer came from. Others hastily backpedaled and changed their mind about what to do with it after the review period.

And it’s true that mainstream media have far more transparent guidelines for accepting products or services than do blogs. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that little sentence at the end of a sports car road test that reads “This article was prepared based on travel to the Luxo Hotel and Spa provided by the manufacturer” is enough to clear a writer’s conscience.

But I think this story’s getting more attention than it deserves, for two reasons. First reason: you’re dealing with Microsoft, which has a dedicated group of detractors in the tech world, and Edelman, which is a whipping boy for bad blog-related PR strategies right now.

Lots of small and large companies give products and services away for review – cell phone companies, software, car companies. But nobody gets watched like Microsoft.

And second, it’s an opportunity for journalists to land punches on the blogosphere and on Microsoft at the same time.

While this might not have been the perfect strategy, all this outrage is a bit over the top.
For the Business Network, I’m Bob LeDrew in Ottawa. Happy New Year!”

One additional point: I take the MSM to task a little in the script for preaching from the ethical mountaintop, but I could have said more. Look at the junkets that journalists are offered for movie or video game marketing. This Chicago Reader book excerpt describes that phenomenon, as does Eric Snider’s “I was a junket whore.” (Of course, Snider was banned by Paramount from further junketeering for writing about it…)

My point in talking about this is that journalists are far from pristine on the whole giveaway field, and I think it’s chuckle-worthy that they’re piling on MS, Edelman, and bloggers for the whole Ferrari giveaway scheme.

Ciao,
Bob.