I often write on the changing interface (and our relationship with) mobile phones, so this one caught my attention.

Have you heard about a phone company called e28? No? That’s because it’s based in Shanghai. The product, the e2800 on the left, may look like a phone, but it is more about data than voice. The secret? It’s the first Linux phone! The PDA/camera/Internet access combination makes it a hand held PC that happens to look like a phone.

Speaking of the changing use of the cell phone, also on the market, from Sprint, is a service called MobiTV, a way to watch news from NBC and ABC, FOX Sports, cartoons, weather etc.

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I often write on the changing interface (and our relationship with) mobile phones, so this one caught my attention.

Have you heard about a phone company called e28? No? That’s because it’s based in Shanghai. The product, the e2800 on the left, may look like a phone, but it is more about data than voice. The secret? It’s the first Linux phone! The PDA/camera/Internet access combination makes it a hand held PC that happens to look like a phone.

Speaking of the changing use of the cell phone, also on the market, from Sprint, is a service called MobiTV, a way to watch news from NBC and ABC, FOX Sports, cartoons, weather etc.

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“New job figures and other recent economic data..” is a fine line. It’s the sort of line that economists use because “other recent economic data” give the impression that there are stacks of reports too numerous to mention.

I bring this up because I have referred to ‘astroturfing‘ in a recent article, and Hans Kullin, one of my favoprite PR bloggers, makes a reference of such fake grassroots movements, set up by PR flacks.

The offshoot of such an astroturfing business, is that it dupes the media into publishing ‘facts’ and letters to the editor which are copied from front organizations’ web sites. This particular sentence (above) is machine generated. If you don’t believe me, copy it and google it.

Newspaper editors are aware of that and look out for ‘manchurian letters,’ but it will only increase, since PR is becoming the frontline of marketing wars, business, and politics. Someone comes up with a new trick every few months. The fake press release, was usurped by the fake web site, which gave way to the fake blog. But you can’t fool all the people all the time. Media watchdog orgs are busy pointing these out.

For readers of my upcoming article, Buzz: The New PR, here’s a useful reference for astroturfing

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Postscript to the Olympic post (below.)

Notice how Google uses an Olympic theme, without getting into copyrighted images such as the rings etc.

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Postscript to the Olympic post (below.)

Notice how Google uses an Olympic theme, without getting into copyrighted images such as the rings etc.

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Postscript to the Olympic post (below.)

Notice how Google uses an Olympic theme, without getting into copyrighted images such as the rings etc.

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CNN has limited coverage of the Olympics being barred from Olympic sports venues (NBC has exclusive rights.)

There is rumor that blogging is another form of ‘media’ that is banned in Athens. Journalist Stuart Hughes of the BBC, features some marvelous images from Greece, on his site with a Video Blog here.

Also Scott Goldblatt, a member of the U.S. Olympic swimming team is posting reports here (though he has not updated it since August 2nd!)

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Dan Gilmore’s interview by WIRED magazine last week about Gilmore’s latest book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, available online here, makes a few points that the old media will hang onto –trust, and the ‘code of ethics’ question, now that bloggers are in the news business.

But the real point Gilmore made about the anyone-can-be-a-journalist issue, was the potential for the big media to lose advertising when their readership drops. He cites, eBay, Tivo and Blogs as part of the new eco-system.

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Scott Simon, to those who are not familiar with NPR in the U.S. is a radio journalist who writes off Michael Moore as plankton in the murky pond of journalism: a ‘gonzodemogogue’ who doesn’t care for facts. (Wall Street Journal OP-ED, July 24, 2004.) (Simon covered the was in Afghanistan in 2002, and wrote a powerful ‘why we must fight’ piece here on 10/11 of that fateful year.)

Simon’s withering criticism of Fahrenheit/911 is valuable because NPR is often dismissed as the epitome of ‘left wing media.’ So why would a journalist of a lefty radio network take on the left’s spokesperson at large? How about redeeming journalism itself?

Mr. Moore has to face up to journalists because a documentary fortunately or unfortunately falls into a category of information rather than entertainment. Oliver Stone can get away with c-theories, because he is a storyteller not a documentary maker. Simon observes that

“Mr. Moore ignores or misrepresents the truth, prefers innuendo to fact, edits with poetic license rather than accuracy, and strips existing news footage of its contents to make events and real people say what he wants, even when they don’t.”

Because of this, says Simon, one has to suspect everything Moore uses as footage. (nice irony here: a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theorist!) In the ‘rigor mortis’ scene (if you haven’t seen the movie, too bad) there is no reason to trust him, he says.

“A few basic details, like where and when the video was shot, are considered traditional reporting techniques…”

Whether you agree with Michael Moore or not, the movie is very powerful, but it’s certainly not a documentary –in the same way that ‘shockvertising’ ain’t marketing. It’s as biased as heck. That’s OK with me. I don’t believe that there is any medium or genre that is bias-free. But those who make a business out of bias, have to realize that they do live in glass houses –as in this OTHER documentary tries to expose!

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TV critic Bill Goodykoonts of the Arizona Republic makes a good point about the news format in his review of Anchorman. (“Making fun of TV news is laughably all too easy,” 07/09/04)

But his real point is how bad the local TV news format is. “How do you parody something that’s practically a parody to begin with?” he asks. The movie doesn’t quite do that, he explains, pointing to post seventies ‘news’ techniques that are so ripe for parody” He cites how the common techniique of shooting a reporter in front of a darkened courthouse where a hearing took place six hour before that, the ‘breaking news’ that’s nothing more than a traffic accident that the camera crew were able to catch before airtime…

My point in bringing this up is to focus on how uninteresting and irrelevant TV news has become. Not only is it late (most stories have been covered in depth, and many times on radio before the 5 O’clock or 6 o’clock news) but the presentation style is still stuck in the old broadcast model, where one size fits nobody, where the story is no more than an expanded headline, and where the footage is pathetic.

That’s where ‘the new PR’ will be drawn to, and waste no time over outdated models. News TV news programs make the faulty assumption that people don’t have the same attention spans, and interest as before. Listen to someone who keeps people riveted. Jerry Seinfeld, quoted in the Wall Street Journal:

“There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing…People have infinite attention spans if you are entertaining them.” He’s an entertainer, so he focuses on that aspect.

The news format, of course has to modify that:

“People have infinite attention spans if you are informing them.”

As Howard Rheingold put it in a speech to a graduating class at Stanford, recently,

“The long and honorable history of American journalism is traveling through the digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry.”

He must have had the six O’ clock news in mind.

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