Author: Angelo Fernando

The end of anachronism? SEC could change Internet disclosure law

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It’s been more than a year since Sun Microsystem’s Jonathan Schwartz complained about the Securities and Exchange Commission being slow to recognize that the Internet exists. He and others lobbied for changes to Regulation FD, a 1934 law about guidance and disclosure to investors.

Why wouldn’t blogs serve the role of a press release, he asked? He put it much better than that:

“we have to hold an anachronistic telephonic conference call, or issue an equivalently anachronistic press release, so that the (not so anachronistic) Wall Street Journal can disseminate the news.”

This week, there was a breakthrough. The SEC’s Special Counsel recommended that the SEC give some leeway with an ‘interpretive release’ so that companies could use web sites and electronic channels to release public information.

Too bad the announcement came via this long, convoluted press release from the SEC. I guess they don’t have someone like Cabinet secretary Mike Leavitt to bring some clarity to this via digital means.

Schwartz hasn’t commented on it yet.


New journalism: less story, more bloggy

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Jeff Jarvis has started a discussion on the new definitions and direction of journalism. In a well organized post, (“The building block of journalism are no longer the article“) talks of the ‘countless grains of information’ being more important than the story or the page.

“Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized”

That’s right, the ‘story’ is being usurped by the elements of a blog, a wiki and linkaggregation.

He spells it out more clearly.

McCain caught between rock-star and hard place

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

The news about John McCain’s campaign isn’t looking good. Or positive. The folks directing marketing communications have to juggle between keeping too many metaphors alive: Maverick, fighter, experienced politician etc. They forget McCain has another metaphor: celebrity — for the right reasons.

The trouble with going after Obama with the latest round of attack ads is that it earns him the metaphor that sticks too fast: desperate.

It doesn’t help when the media, that used to be supercharged with maverick-ism, is not so enamored with the tactic. The dirty little secret, however, is that the media loves it. It gives the campaign coverage a lot of juicy bits to savor. So why the McCain campaign serves up these silly hors deurs (like the Brittany/Hilton analogy) beats me. The public already know that Obama is a rock-star, politics aside.

In the end, since I am more interested in positioning not politics, McCain’s brand that the media loves is more durable, and he needs not try so hard to reposition the rock star. If his campaign lets McCain be McCain, he would pick a different kind of fight, the kind of fight he’s best known for –on policy. No glitzy Euro photo ops required.

No dumb YouTube videos, too.

Blogging the Olympics, new for media

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The media have dispatched a new breed of journalists for this Olympics.

The LA Times has sent a team of ten. who also report on the lack of access to certain web sites and blogs from Beijing. “It is hard to imagine why I can get every U.S. newspaper site — but not these blogs,” observes Philip Herch who has been there for just a few days.

The BBC has secured five British Olympians -and promise more to come –to blog at Olympic Diaries.

Sports Illustrated and CNN (FanNation) has one.

NBC has sent four –even Diane Sawyer is listed as a blogger.

And there’s Lenovo, as I mentioned here before, which dispatched blogging-athletes in a unique sponsorship deal. What do we call these professional athletes who are amateurs reporters? Pro-Ams or Am-Pros?

In other news, however, access to an internet connection appears to be restricted and expensive in the Village.

Mommy bloggers carve spot in media mix

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So Proctor and Gamble is doing a McDonald’s? They are inviting 15 so-called “mommy bloggers” to their corporate office.

One of them is MIndy Roberts, a mother of three. She calls her blog, Wonderbelly, a chronicle of “life and children in the sleepless hours in an effort to capture her young family’s world in real time.” Roberts is also the author of Mommy Confidential.

P&G seem to have done their homework in making their pick. “Metropolotal Mama” Stephanie Sheaffer, is another in the group of invitees. She says she works in the PR industry by day and blogs by night.

The Golden Arches did something like this around this time last year. Creating an advisory panel was a good way to counter the kind of flak they were getting from some quarters —and bloggers. Today Blogger Relations is becoming standard PR practice with lots of advice from the pros.

What does this tell us? It signals that bloggers are quickly becoming part of the media mix, rather than a group that only exists on the edges.

Cabinet secretary: “I am not a professional blogger”

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

A cabinet secretary may not come across as your typical blogger, or PR person. But Mike Leavitt’s blog at the Department of Health and Human Services turns that stereotype on its head.

This morning, he was on a Kaiser Family webcast about why he blogs, how he finds time to do it (answer: sometimes on a stair-master in the gym.) Also how his organization looks at new media exercises like this. Some quotes:

  • “I speak my mind. I am just not reckless about it.”
  • “I am not a professional blogger … I have been taken under the wing of more seasoned bloggers.”
  • “information goes where people are, and public policy makers should do the same.”
  • “A secretary is the spokesperson. Too many HHS spokespersons could be a problem.”
  • “My blog is not a literary masterpiece –that is not my goal.”
  • “I choose the topic – not a reporter.”
  • “I choose the words – not a reporter.”

Leavitt was quizzed about moderated comments and the media reading his blog, and it was evident that he is much more interested in the unfiltered voice and format of the blog than being reduced to a sound bite, and being subject to the media filters. It reminded me of Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwarz’s comment some years back that he decided to maintain his own blog because he was tired of being strained through the media filters.

Leavitt was a bit shaky on the audience question about whether he would promote his staffers to blog. (See quote above.) Which was odd for someone who embraces the democratized medium like this, and wants to hold on to the megaphone. That sounds like what a PR department would say.

I took it as a comment that suggests he is still thinking about this. Some blogger would/should take him under his/her wing on that one.

Pandemic flu hits blogosphere

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I’ve been tracking how the pandemic flu is being covered over the past few months, and notice a spike in interest across many cities, scary media stories, a military-styled exercise. The blogosphere has suddenly become engaged in this.

Blogging a pandemic I. SDHD PanFlu BlogEx, a blog by the Southeastern District Health Department in Pocatello, Idaho is nothing to sneeze at. It is using a blog format to ‘report’ an outbreak within a two-week period using news-like headlines, fact-filled blog posts, videos and and links to external agencies. I like the fact that comments are open to the public. Every carries this disclaimer in red: “This is an exercise. It is not real.”

Unlike most What-If exercises (considered table-top exercises by the Dept. of Homeland Security) a global event like this cannot be contained by governments and medical professionals. There is a huge public component, not to mention a media component. Information will spread fast through whatever channels are available and it is not a stretch to assume that the blogosphere will upstage the traditional media in the same way it did during recent crises, such as the London bombings and the Asian tsunami. People will upload videos from their phones. Paramedics will provide advice via home made videos published on Youtube. Citizen journalists will break stories from far flung places before Newsweek or Catie Couric even get there –if flights to affected areas will even be possible. This format with potential for greater collaboration and dissemination is truly worth exploring.

Blogging a pandemic II: One Michael Coston, a paramedic, maintains a blog called Avian-Flu diary. He’s onto something, being a sort of a paramedic-meets CitJo.

On similar lines, the Kaiser Network is hosting a web conference called “The Health Blogosphere: What It Means for Policy Debates and Journalism” today at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

ASU fired the first shot? I like to think we had a head start on some of these. Our ‘hybrid’ Pandemic Flu exercise at ASU’s Decision Theater in April this year took the table-top model in a new direction, using the collaboration tools of the Theater with rich media inputs, and scenarios.

“Get clicking, pointing, editing and mixing”

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At the risk of creating promoting a stereotype, I have to say this. A monarch is not someone we associate with being an advocate and user of social media. Queen Rania of Jordan, the wife of King Abdullah, loves smashing that stereotype, among others. (It runs in the family. Her husband has appeared on Star Trek).

Her web site begins with the line “A journey of a thousand miles can begin with a single click” and contains phrases like “join the conversation” so you you know where she stands on new media.

It therefore comes as no surprise that Queen Rania has her YouTube channel, where she tackles issues such as … breaking stereotypes. In this video, she not only speaks out about stereotypes (I like the way she takes on the stupid Michele Malkin comment about the scarf, in passing) but urges people to “get clicking, pointing, editing and mixing” to join her in this mission.

Just for the record, Queen Elizabeth does have a YouTube channnel, but doesn’t use it the same way.

Farewell, Randy Pausch

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Randy Pausch never met a brick wall he didn’t like. The Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science who inspired his audience -and in this digital age, millions of those who listened to him and watched him and followed his blog — died yesterday.

Pausch came to be known as a fearless fighter against pancreatic cancer. His ‘Last Lecture‘ delivered 10 months ago is now in the public domain. It became a best seller, and is being translated into Chinese. He once said the lecture was never meant for the public.

Pausch however went ‘public’ with his blog about his fight with what he knew was a terminal illness, and was constantly upbeat (“I’ve still got gas in the tank”) about his condition:

“I’m recovering much faster this time from the congestive heart failure (practice makes perfect, I guess). I’m still hideously fatigued, but today I was out of bed most of the day.”

He used it to communicate his ongoing story with his wider audience, commenting on things like a great design of a prescription medicine bottle, the death of Dith Pran (who also succomed to pancreatic cancer) and the media frenzy around his book.

Diane Sawyer is running a special tomorrow (Wednesday) night at 10pm on ABC. People who know what I’m really like will doubtless be throwing tomatoes at the screen ; -)

Yesterday, when the sad news came, Google did something it probably has not done for anyone before. It ran a small line under its usually clean search page with In Memoriam: Randy Pausch [1960 -2008], linking to the YouTube video of Last Lecture that’s been viewed over 3.9 million times.

The brick wall reference is from a metaphor he often used about the importance of facing an unsurmountable problem, and what it teaches us.

Quotes for the week ending 26 July, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

“Randy died this morning of complications from pancreatic cancer.”

Posting on Randy Pausch’s web site, on Friday 25 July announcing the sad news of the American professor of computer science known for his “The Last Lecture,” that became a New York Times best seller.

“I get that many consumers of online-transmitted information don’t like print much anymore…What I don’t get is why those Republic readers who haven’t sworn off computers altogether would simply ignore the logical digital complement to their dirt of print-based information.”

Paul Maryniak, General Manager of The Mesa Republic, inviting print readers to make better use of the Arizona Republic web site.

“To the average flier, this isn’t a case of the boy who cried wolf; It’s a case of the wolf who cried wolf.”

Editorial in Advertising Age about the disingenuous attack by the CEOs of 12 airlines asking their passengers to support them in their fight against oil companies to restrict oil speculation.

After 9/11, Mr. Bush had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on breaking our addiction to oil. Instead, he told us to go shopping. After gasoline prices hit $4.11 last week, he had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on clean energy. Instead, he told us to go drilling.

Thomas Friedman on on the significance of 9/11 and 4/11

“The gnashing of teeth from the left took on the odd cast of intellectuals congratulating each other for recognizing the satire of the image …”

Ann Marie Kerwin, on the New Yorker cover that sparked an uproar by the Obama campaign last week.

“The Web is not stealing audience away from TV, but rather helping them to build it.”

Mitch Joel, commenting on the fact that 45% of the CBS TV audience, watches their shows online.

“A throng of adoring fans awaits Senator Obama in Paris …And that’s just the American press.”

John McCain commenting on Obama’s visit to Europe and being neglected by the local media.