Archive for March, 2008
By Ben
The Wall Street Journal will undergo another makeover in the next few weeks. The marketplace section of the paper will be changed to include more breaking news and shorter articles.
These changes come after current owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, bought Dow Jones & Company in December. Murdoch has been making changes to the Wall Street Journal over the past few months by incorporating more general interest news like world news and sports, in order to create a larger market for the paper.
These changes come as the newspaper owners are struggling to make a profit. The New York Times reports that last year alone, ”overall newspaper revenues dropped by about 7 percent, pushed along primarily by the secular change of readers and advertisers fleeing to the Web.
March 25th, 2008
By Kyle Austin
Yesterday Owen Thomas of the Valleywag reported that Steven Levy, senior editor and chief technology editor at Newsweek would be leaving Newsweek for Wired according to rumors floating through Silicon Valley and New York tech circles. The rumors insisted that Wired had made a strong offer to Levy and the offer included a book deal.
Levy has been contributing to Wired for more then a decade and he usually writes features for the magazine on the side from his day job at Newsweek. Last night on Facebook Levy confirmed the rumor by stating in his status:
“Confirms: I will be moving to Wired later this spring.”
Levy took his position at Newsweek all the way back in 1996 and is often regarded as one of the pioneers of technology journalism. He is the author of five books including Hackers and Crypto.
His articles for Newsweek have won numerous awards including the column of the year award in 1996.
I had the chance to work with Steve at the end of last year as he was compiling a piece on One Laptop per Child for the “Giving Globally” issue of Newsweek. He actually was the first reporter to do a hands on review of the XO in a video he did for Newsweek.com. I was certainly impressed by how quickly Steve took to understanding the ideology of “One Laptop per Child” and the purpose of the XO. This is a huge win for Wired and a huge loss for the major news weekly. Levy was always able to elevate technology stories for mainstream audiences and understood which technology stories had the potential for serious social impact. He won’t be easy to replace.
March 21st, 2008
By Ben
The USA Today reported this morning that JuicyCampus.com, a site where students can post anonymously about other students, is being investigated by prosecutors to see whether it violates New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. JuicyCampus.com is in violation of the act if the site says that it doesn’t allow offensive material, but provides no enforcement or way for users to report or dispute the material
In what can’t be much of a surprise, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram said, “There’s an unbelievable amount of offensive material posted and absolutely no enforcement”. Prosecutors began investigating the site after a student reported to authorities that she had been targeted in very offensive posts, which included her home address.
JuicyCampus.com takes on a whole new meaning to Facebook’s honesty box, an application allows users to post a question that people can answer anonymously.
JuicyCampus.com has been met with a lot of negativity, as its primary function has turned into an outlet where students can write negative, accusatory statements about each other without any ring of truth.
March 20th, 2008
By Kyle Austin
After 41 years the Associated Press and the Dow Jones have ended their news sharing partnership. The Dow Jones will no longer carry news coverage from the AP and has signed an agreement to distribute news from the Agence France-Presse.
According to an AP report by Seth Sutel:
AP’s chief revenue officer Tom Brettingen said in a statement that AP didn’t believe it was being adequately compensated for the use of its news on Dow Jones Newswires.“We weren’t able to resolve that with Dow Jones, so we’re going our separate ways,” Brettingen said. “We’ve been expanding our domestic financial coverage significantly, and we’re in the process of doing the same internationally.”
Louis Hau with Forbes.com covered the story in detail this morning and added his insight on the matter:
For decades, the partnership gave the AP coverage of business and financial news, while Dow Jones got access to dispatches on politics and global affairs, as well as a relatively low-cost means to expand its overseas presence by locating many of its correspondents in AP bureaus.But today, AP and Dow Jones don’t really need each other as much as they once did. The easy accessibility of breaking news over the Internet has made it less urgent for Dow Jones to supplement its news content with comprehensive non-business coverage from the AP. And now that it is part of the global News Corp. empire, Dow Jones has access, at least in theory, to office space and other facilities that it didn’t have before.Meanwhile, the AP has greatly expanded its own coverage of corporate news and the financial markets–partly with the help of editors and reporters it poached from Dow Jones.
Hau goes on to make a key point in stating that the biggest shift in this split will be felt overseas where the AP and Dow Jones currently share 30 offices. The AP had been fairly dependent in getting overseas business insight as part of its relationship with Dow Jones. Without the help of Dow Jones the AP could be hurt in its foreign business coverage as it struggles for traction in the market with incumbents including Reuters, Bloomberg and the aforementioned Agence France-Presse (AFP).
AFP, the least talked about of the bunch, could turn out to be the biggest winner. They will now have their content distributed by Dow Jones and Google. The AFP joined the AP, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press in a deal with Google last August to allow Google to host and distribute its news content.
March 19th, 2008
By Ben
As the Red Sox board the plane today for their two game series in Japan, the Boston Globe reports that EMC has unveiled its new advertising campaign for this huge market.
The ad translates to “The moment when confidence becomes conviction. IT strategy based on EMC’s technology is the winning approach.”
EMC’s logo will also be on the Red Sox jerseys, which marks the first corporate logo on a MLB team uniform.
The last time an advertiser made it this far on the field was in 2004, when “Spider-Man 2” had arranged for the movie’s design to be placed on the bases. This arrangement was overruled due to overwhelming complaints from fans.
March 19th, 2008
By Kyle Austin
Would someone tell the media about this guy called Darwin? Vasanth Sridharan of the Silicon Alley Insider had the latest reason yesterday as to why we are often marking the incumbents of the media space with tombstones rather then praise.
Citing the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s release of the “State of the News Media 2008,” a voluminous look at every aspect of journalism, Sridharan uncovered these troubling numbers:
81% of national broadcast journalists, 80% of local broadcast journalists, 63% of local print journalists, and 53% of national print journalists still say that their traditional medium – not the Web – is the priority at their companies.
We may need a bigger cemetery plot.
March 18th, 2008
By Ben
Since the state of Israel was established in 1948, the country’s borders have been constantly changing with every war and peace agreement. The West Bank and Gaza strip have been particularly sensitive areas, with a lot of fighting and uncertainty.
However, in Facebook’s attempt to assign a network to the people living in the West Bank, it automatically assigned them to the Palestine network – a pretty bold move.
As one could imagine, pinpointing an entire region as Palestine did not sit very well. Every person in Israel defines themselves differently depending on their background, family, and religion. To label an entire region of people with such different backgrounds and identities seems to go way beyond Facebook’s goal of being a “social utility that connects you with the people around you.”
David Shamah, a reporter for the Jerusalem Post writes, “I think it’s very unfair of Facebook to take sides in an ongoing dispute by making official (the creation of a state called Palestine), something that the United Nations has not even decided on yet.”
After receiving a lot of complaints and being accused of having a political agenda, Facebook has now started to allow people living in these areas to chose whether they’re listed as being a resident of Israel or Palestine.
March 18th, 2008
By Kyle Austin
Steve Hamm took a slight jab at me last week when I told him our new global practice is called World 2.0. He’s tired of attaching 2.0 to all the subjects of this new digital universe. So I’m sure he’d be equally rigid over me attaching 2.0 to this headline. However, given the context of some recent high profile stories it seems to be fitting.
Tim O’Reiley who originally coined Web 2.0 described it as:
“The business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
It seems many of us are still trying to understand the truth and fiction that have become part of this platform and the media and business revolution. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine took a look at the subject of internet-spread innuendo in a story entitled “Rumor’s Reasons.” The story looked at the much talked about internet spread Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor. Andy Martin, a popular Web columnist and wannabe Republican candidate for state office started the rumor by issuing a “press release” announcing that Obama had concealed his Muslim beliefs. The unsubstantiated claim may have been completely disregarded by the mainstream media but it has lived on through the blogosphere and email messages.
Although some would argue that the digital rumor / “smear” campaign hasn’t had an affect, I’d say it has. I was made a believer of the rumor’s traction in a 60 Minutes’ piece that ran on March 2nd. In which, an Ohio voter as part of a poignant interview with 60 minutes’ Steve Kroft, disclosed that he wanted to vote for Obama but was slightly turned off by his religious beliefs:
“I’m leaning towards Obama, but there are a couple issues with him I’m not too clear on. I’m hearing he doesn’t know the national anthem and wouldn’t use the holy bible. He’s got his own beliefs with the Muslim beliefs - A couple issues that bother me at heart.”
When corrected by Kroft that the rumors weren’t true the voter was a bit mystified and stated that he was just addressing what he had been told. Farhad Manjoo, the author of the piece in the NYT’s Magazine, and staff writer for Salon.com, delves further into the psychology that goes into determining truth versus fiction and why the Internet presents a greater opportunity to blur the lines between the two - The hypothesis being that when a claim on the internet is refuted, it may actually lead to people further believing the rumor.
Consider, for starters, this paradox of social psychology, a problem for myth busters everywhere: repeating a claim, even if only to refute it, increases its apparent truthfulness. In 2003, the psychologist Ian Skurnik and several of his colleagues asked senior citizens to sit through a computer presentation of a series of health warnings that were randomly identified as either true or false — for example, “Aspirin destroys tooth enamel” (true) or “Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips” (false). A few days later, they quizzed the seniors on what they had learned. The psychologists expected that seniors would mistakenly remember some false statements as true. What was remarkable, though, was which claims they most often got wrong — the ones they had been exposed to multiple times. In other words, the more that researchers had stressed that a given warning was false, the more likely seniors were to eventually come to believe it was true. (College students in the study did not make the same mistakes.)
The Muslim rumor proved to be an illustration of this. Even as Barack and his team of advisors openly rebutted the claims and illustrated the inaccuracies of the rumor, it has continued to live on. This leads me to believe that we could be looking at an even greater problem in internet inaccuracies. At least the Barack rumor was initiated by a known figure, who had a known Republican motive to disparage Obama - Someone that could be singled out and rebutted directly. If his story was absorbed and believed (In an NBC / Wall Street Journal poll taken in December, 8 percent of respondents believed Obama was Muslim) what then of a rumor made up by an anonymous poster? One could imagine that an anonymous poster could create a very similar rumor with a lasting outcome. All without being able to be directly rebutted or singled out for starting the rumor.
Forbes took a frightening look at anonymity and the Internet in an October issue last year. It illustrated how singular anonymous posters and even mobs of anonymous posters were reigning free on the Internet and spreading rumors and gossip of innocent people, even the deceased. In many cases the rumors and innuendo lived as truth, even as loved ones tried to curb the claims. Although not a laughing matter, College Humor has successfully parodied the idea of an anonymous mob attack in this video (imbedded above).
Manjoo concludes the piece in the New York Times Magazine with a blanket statement that nicely sums up the Obama rumor, and the state of the Internet as a whole.
“There’s an arms race between truth and Fiction, and at the moment, the truth doesn’t appear to be winning.”
Scary indeed.
March 17th, 2008
By George
There is some interesting work happening over at Optaros, a next-generation consulting firm. Optaros helps companies build web sites and back end systems using Web 2.0 principals. The company recently converted its own web site to showcase what it means by Web 2.0.
Full disclosure: Racepoint was Optaros’ PR agency of record for more than a year, but we are no longer are engaged with them.
Optaros’ new web site has a fresh look and feel (although some of the dynamic content looks a bit clunky, especially on the home page). Optaros lists its “8 Principals for B2B Marketing 2.0” in the new age of the web. Most of its principals have been said before, but they present it well. However, number 6 really took us by surprise:
“Stop issuing press releases “over the wire.” The first press release was “put on the wire” on March 8, 1954 by PRNewswire to 12 news outlets in New York City. The pricing model is still based on the number of words with the average press release costing between $500 and $1,000 to put “over the wire”. Instead, email them to reporters/ bloggers to build a personal connection and increase the probability of coverage.”
This is why companies shouldn’t take communications advice from marketers. They simply don’t understand public relations. This principal flies in the face of what is happening on the web (and also contradicts Optaros’ 7th principal, which is to syndicate and actively share content).
In the age of interconnectivity and search engine optimization why would a company choose to limit the distribution of its own news? When a press release goes over the wire – it is automatically picked up by dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of online outlets. These “links” immediately push the press release to the top of Google and Yahoo searches.
When Racepoint launched Ringleader, a next-generation mobile advertising network, several weeks ago, its press release held three of the top spots in the first 10 results in a Google search for the company for more than 10 days. That meant anyone conducting a search for “Ringleader” had a 30 percent chance of clicking on a link to the press release.
That’s a powerful mode of communication. If a company was wise enough to include links to additional content in the press release then it now has an opportunity to engage more directly with potential customers.
Press releases are more important than ever. The mistake in Optaros’ thinking is believing that press releases are written for the press. That’s old-fashioned thinking for company touting to be Web 2.0. Press releases are now for everyone: customers, prospects, partners, investors, employees, bloggers, social networks, reporters, editors, and analysts.
Companies should be writing more of them – and distributing them widely through the wires, through RSS, through aggregators and social bookmarking services, and, yes, even directly to reporters when a reporter has asked for a copy of one (and generally before its been widely distributed).
(And on another note: Optaros clearly doesn’t understand how to develop relationships with the press either. One sure-fire way to get off on the wrong foot with a reporter is to clutter up her inbox with press releases she didn’t ask for.)
There’s little doubt that the industry needs to rethink the way they write press releases. We agree with Optaros that companies should kill the corporate voice and engage with everyone in a more straight forward, plain-spoken manner.
Here are some additional details about our philosophy on press releases.
It’s refreshing to see companies like Optaros opening up and communicating better. They are setting an excellent example for other companies to follow.
But they should leave the public relations advice to the experts.
March 17th, 2008
By Ben
Almost a year ago, a new application called the ‘honesty box’ was developed for Facebook. This application allows users to post a question that people can answer anonymously – something that The New York Times says “has become another weapon in the cyberbully’s arsenal.
Some students Palo Alto High School in California have been using the honesty box for this exact purpose, and one student even received a message saying “You should kill yourself. No one likes you.”
Although one of the application’s creators, Dan Peguine, says he developed the honestly box because he was curious to see what people thought of him, it’s not shocking that the application has been abused. Still, Peguine says that the word used most in the honesty box is ‘love’.
In other news, the Chinese government blocked YouTube after protest videos about Tibet were posted on the site.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9Y9jA68Mo8]
March 17th, 2008
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