Author: Angelo Fernando

Workshop: Writers, blogs and social media

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I am conducting an workshop on blogging for the IABC Phoenix Writer’s Support Group this week. The topic’s called Brave new, annoying new media. (Or why aren’t you blogging yet?)

This is not to say that every writer should have a blog, but I am a firm believer that every writer could make his/her content more blog-like. If you’re a “content creator,” (considering how newsletters, annual reports, presentations, press releases, white papers and books have analog AND digital lives) you’re probably feeling the pull of this whole web 2.0 world. It’s never too late, and there is no such thing as a dumb question*.

New tools, new formats and some cool new hacks are making it much easier now. If the technology has scared you off, I plan to keep this session 100% free of geek-speak.

This IABC Phoenix workshop is free.

Topic: Brave New, Annoying Social Media (Or Why Aren’t You Blogging Yet?)
Venue: Cisco Learning Institute. 1661 E. Camelback Road, Phoenix
When: Thursday Feb 28th
Time: 6.00 – 7.00 pm

You can register Here

* Fellow ValleyPRBlogger Dan Wool talks on just this topic this Wed, at a PRSA meeting.

Quotes for the week ending 23 Feb, 2008

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“This story seems to me not to pass the smell test. It makes the innuendo of impropriety, even corruption, without backing it up.”

David Mccumber, editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, on why he did nor carry the McCain story about a relationship with a lobbyist.

“Fouad Mourtada, like thousands of people who create fake profiles of well-known personalities or celebrities on Facebook, has in no way acted in a willingness to cause nuisance to Your Highness.”

A plea for clemency from the family of Mr. Mourtada, a computer engineer in Morocco jailed for impersonating a member of the royal family on Facebook.

“Get out your palette. It’s time to do some 21st Century cave painting.”

Chris Young, Video Insider.

“The views expressed on my blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, were mine and mine alone. I represented no one but myself, and I didn’t make a dime doing it.”

Chez Pazienza, a producer at CNN who was fired for blogging, and was told “We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees.”

“It was an agonising decision for me.”

Toshiba president, Atsutoshi Nishida, on stopping the production of HD DVD, and ending its battle with Blu-ray , a DVD standard adopted by major manufacturers who are part of the Blu-ray Disc Association.

“The beauty of digital PR is that its “rules” have not been written yet. You can write them.”

Mark Stevens, author, at PRNewsOnline.

“Congress is broken. Lawrence Lessig can debug it”

Words on the U.S. Flag image used on a Facebook group to support Lessig, the Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, who announced that he may run for Congress from the state of California’s 12th district.

“It’s a handoff … They’re friends and allies.  They share a view of politics and often riff off of each other.”

David Axelrod, a political guru, quoted on Jake Tapper’s blog, about Barack Obama’s use of rhetoric that’s similar to his friend Deval Patrick. The Clinton campaign accused Obama of plagiarizing parts of his speeches; Obama dismissed it as silly.


Journalism’s bad press – The Times they’re a changin’

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Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist who was jailed for refusing to divulge her sources, has an interesting take on the the new tourniquet being applied to the profession. Miller’s article about another contempt of court case, appeared today in The Wall Street Journal.

Coincidentally, the pressure is being applied elsewhere this week. Senator John McCain’s campaign is questioning the veracity of the story that appeared in the Times, about his alleged relationship with a lobbyist. The McCain “hit piece” as it is now being called, seems to have taken a turn; it is now a story about the New York Times itself. (The paper reported that more than 2000 comments had come in, critical of the article.) One McCain aide referred to the Times, which oddly endorsed McCain, as the “national inquirer,” suggesting that the much more had been expected in the post-Judith Miller world.

The Arizona Republic quotes an ASU professor, Michael Rubinoff, who thinks this might be more more than a “small radar bleep,” considering the momentum McCain has right now.

Interestingly, the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, James Mccumber wrote that he didn’t carry the McCain story in his paper because it was flawed, and was “pretty thin beer.”

Should Obama brush off plagiarism, or “turn the page?”

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Maybe Barack Obama did “borrow” words from Massachusetts governor. It brings up two interesting questions:

  1. How much of what we use in communication should we attribute?
  2. How fast should we come back and apologize?

He called it “too big of a deal,” but as recent history has shown us, plagiarism has been quite a deal. From Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code) to Kaavya Viswanathan (How Opal Mehtha got kissed…) to journalists who inadvertently use material without attribution.

“Certainly plagiarism can have degrees,” notes Steve Buttry. And in case you’re looking for attribution,it’s a quote from the American Press Institutes‘s web site, in an article “When does sloppy attribution become plagiarism.” He goes on to say, “For the most part, sloppy attribution is to plagiarism as manslaughter is to murder.

As Plagiarism.org suggests, it’s good to attribute:

  • whenever you use quotes
  • whenever you paraphrase
  • whenever you use an idea that someone else has already expressed
  • whenever you make specific reference to the work of another
  • whenever someone else’s work has been critical in developing your own ideas.

That the accusation comes from the Clinton campaign, makes sense. She is running out of brand differentiation, and will turn to the department of dirty tricks –even though she has lifted lines from Obama such as “Yes we will!” that echoes his “Yes we can!“The ‘academic’ rebuttal -explaining the circumstances of the borrowed words– is never good enough. Considering how anything you say in an election campaign can and will be mashed up, Youtubed and turned into a Swiftboat attack, this could be grave stuff.

Just apologize, and let’s “turn the page,” no matter who strung those three words first!

Quotes for the week ending 16 Feb, 2008

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“I frankly don’t care who just wrote what on someone else’s Wall or who just joined the Carbon Foot Print Group.”

George Simpson, at OnlineMediaDaily, about Bill Gates turning off his FaceBook page, and the need to ‘Unplug. Delist. Erase. Take down,’ and get a life off-line.

“It’s 1980 in my office — I can’t get on the internet, but I hear it’s just great.”

Brian Williams, talking about the computers being down at NBC, and having to fly blind in prep for the evening news.

“Sure, Wikipedia can and should be “used for research”, in the same way a classroom might use a cadaver for research. The class shouldn’t take the cadaver home to meet Mother, nor should it use the cadaver to co-sign for a loan.”

Comment by reader at The Chronicle of Higher Education, responding to the news that a professor at the University of Texas encourages his students to read Wikipedia –the discussion and history pages, specifically.

“A case study (is) really a story about a hero, a dragon and a damsel in distress. The dragon is the business problem-for example, a project badly behind schedule and over budget. Your company is the hero. The client is the damsel in distress.”

Gail Z. Martin, on identifying your customer’s story, at Marketing Turnaround Blog.

“As writers and directors, we have our nose in the tent for real for the first time.”

Tony Gilroy, writer and director, on the value of the Writer’s Strike that ended this week.

“Whatever one calls it, the Council/Bulldog project has a foul odor.”

Ray Kotcher, Council chair of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists (and Ketchum CEO) on the shady alliance of the Council of PR Firms’ and the Bulldog Reporter.

What did we learn from the Writers’ Strike?

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No matter what you write, or where you publish, your content is going to migrate online.

The long and winding road of the Writers Guild of America has now come to a yield sign. They signed a contract with the studios on the basis of residuals that will be paid to them, some of which only begin after 2010. But they did have a qualified win.

Interestingly, this week, another group is negotiating how their “work” might be remunerated. Faculty members at Harvard University are voting on on a proposal that will allow the university to push their scholarship through online distribution methods online for the princely sum of … free! They could opt-out, of course.

And also this week, BurrellesLuce has called for a a copyright compliance standard for PR firms that may otherwise unwittingly violate intellectual property rights when they distributes publishers’ content. It calls for charging “a small royalty” for delivering the online and print stories it selects for clients.

If we have learned something from the Writers’ strike, it’s the value of (and price we should put on) content. We have sipped the “information wants to be free” cocktail too long and have never questioned what the real price of “free” is.

OK, so YouTube wants to be free, and the New York Times online wants to be free, but writers need to be paid and nurtured, and have a motivation to go after or craft the content that needs brainstorming, travel, teamwork and publishers who appreciate their endeavor. It depends on the definition of “small royalty,” but and it ought to be settled across a table not a picket line.
If not, everything from research to sitcoms will be diluted –to refill our freebie cocktails, maybe.

Social Media Release, a work in progress

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David Fleet started an interesting discussion, based on a problem he ran into with the Social Media Release.

The problem, as he explains in the structure of his post, is one of bullet points, embedded links and sections, rather than the conventional narrative structure.  Meaning, the press release doesn’t pretend to be a pre-fabricated story for lazy editors.

With some compromises, it had a happy ending s he noted on For Immediate Release (Show # 319,) but it re-opens the topic of whether the SMR is ready for prime time.

There were big objective: to increase access, provide context, make it seo friendly, and the big one, to leave out the spin.  The last is a big one, since most editors don’t want a PR department to write their stories, but give them the hook. Big difference. Then there’s the convenience factor of the embedded links, one-click image downloads and the delicious and technorati tags.

Getting all these in one place, for many organizations is a work in progress. We love our ‘shared folders’ and our media pages, but they’re not exactly accessible and journo-friendly.

Stanford blog, features competitors

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There’s something about being ‘open’ and ‘unofficial’ that grabs me. The unofficial Stanford University blog by a student (Ed Finn) and and editor (Dan Cole,) called Open Culture is a treasure trove of information.

This week, there’s a free audiobook download of James Joyce‘s Ulysses. Before that, a link to Thomas (World is Flat) Friedman‘s video podcast.

Best of all, it does not feature just Stanford material. You could also find the top-10 free university courses (a link via iTunes) that includes competitive schools such as UC Berkeley, Oxford, Harvard and UC Davis. That’s what being Open is all about –being big enough to embrace your “frienemies.”

Old Media vs New: right debate, wrong question

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“Speech over the radio is as likely as a man jumping over the moon.” – Thomas Edison

I am always reminded of ‘predictions’ like this when someone tells me questions such as “Will anyone read books on cell phones?” or “Will laptops ever become obsolete?” The problem with questions like this is that they frame the debate wrong, or to put it a better way, we frame the question with words that relate to industries that are being redefined even as we speak. Books are not always paper-based, when you consider audio books, eBooks and now books on readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.

In the famous debate (which won’t go away) over film vs digital, Roger Clark, a photographer, tells us the question really is a debate over “film versus electronic sensors.”

In the debate over whether blogs amount to journalism, we get distracted by trying to apply what we know about them -are they both ‘filters,’ or ‘gatekeepers?’ — because both blogs and journalism are changing, and the question becomes irrelevant. You can compare Kevin Sites, with say Brian Williams if the debate was simply one about “Should journalists blog?” but that’s the wrong question. Rather it should be “How best should journalists tell their story?” Sites, if you recall worked for the usual suspects NBC, CNN and ABC, but was last working for Yahoo! (Which re-frames the question, the Yahoo Vs Microsoft issue notwithstanding, “Is Yahoo a news organization?”)

Which brings me back to the “speech over radio” issue. Mobile devices have allowed us to accomplish the moon-jump that Edison though impossible, and it is taking us into new territory. We could debate forever old questions such as “will cell phones replace land lines,” but the real question is whether mobile devices (that may or may not happen to be phones) change conversations. Already micro-blogging, mobile search, and photography are seeing new models emerge thanks to these devices.

At this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, actor-director-indie film guru Robert Redford will speak at an event called Mobile Backstage. His topic is about the “Fourth screen” as a medium for filmmakers. In case you’re wondering what this term means, consider this. Until recently there was a lot of talk about mobile devices being the “Third screen” –after television and the computer. Everyone got very excited about the 3-screen possibilities. Today we are talking of a different set of screens for the entertainment industry: the cinema screen, television and the gaming console were the first three. Mobile devices are the fourth.

From a communications perspective then, put them all together and you’ve got 5 screens, and you could configure them any way to suit your campaign or outreach program. Content will always be fluid, media will always be non-linear, so let’s not get locked in by asking the wrong question. The Mobile World Congress’ theme is “ideas in motion” –not platforms in motion!