Media

“Rumor” about Jobs, a symptom of things to come

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Steve Jobs brushed it off with a slide. He used the Mark Twain line to note that the rumor of his death had been greatly exaggerated.

The rumor, was not a rumor but a publishing mistake –going live with a story that should have been behind a firewall. Bloomberg is not the first to make this new-media error.

The copy had the usual safeguards: “HOLD FOR RELEASE – DO NOT USE – HOLD FOR RELEASE – DO NOT USE.” There were placeholders such as “IF STOCK DROPS” leading into a sentence “…The decline is no surprise to investors…” All good intentioned.

But in the rush to do things to meet unforgiving deadlines, to hit the newsstands, and sate the digital newsfeeds, publishing must take these risks. Are we moving too fast, where we might accidentally push the button that could affect the stock price of a company?

Rumors –especially the online kind– are nothing new. United Airlines’ stock was a victim of a rumor just this week, while Yahoo! (temporarily) benefitted from the Microsoft takeover rumor that turned out to be more than a rumor.

Rumor is being slipped into the PR toolbox because it goes well with viral. Recently, there was one about the –ready for this?- Apple Nano iPhone. If you replace “rumor” with “forecast” a lot of this might make sense. The Nano iPhone story was based on a “forecast” using “unnamed sources in the supply channel.”

As we accelerate our marketing, our PR and how we generate news about organizations we represent, news, forecasting and speculating could begin to blur.

Dan Lyons, who once created the now-retired Fake Steve blog, didn’t mince his words describing Gawker, which republished the Bloomberg gaffe as “filthy hacks,” ending also with “Great work, Bloomberg. You dopes.”

Quotes for the week ending 6 September, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“Most people know the staff at the local Starbucks better than McCain knows Palin”

David Mark and Fred Barbash, of Politico, about John McCain’s Vice Presidential pick.

“It won’t work. This is a nation that elected men with such middle names as Gamaliel, Milhous and Rudolph. This also is the home of Elvis, Madonna, Oprah and Rush. We love unusual names.”

David Walters, at the Washington Post, commenting on Ann Coulter’s attempt to make Barack Obama look dangerous by calling him B. Husein Obama.

“Apparently tweeting, friending and linking have not infiltrated popular culture as much as one might think.”

Tanya Irwin, of Online Media Daily, commenting on a global study by Synovate that found that 58% of people aren’t familiar with social networking.

“You actually spend more time in your browser than you do in your car.”

Brian Rakowski, a Google group product manager, commenting on its new browser, Chrome.

“fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege”.

Priya Tanna, editor of Vogue India, who draped flashy fashion accessories on ordinary Indians for a photo shoot for the August issue, responding to New York Times, which criticized the effort.

“Standing on that stage, I saw past the balloons, confetti and cheers. I was left with a singular image. One of a man who will take his improbable journey and draw from it at every turn to change our country and our world for the better.”

Meghan McCain, daughter of John McCain, on her blog that chronicles the presidential campaign from the inside.


Attacking journalists, sign of times

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

In the lead up to the hurricane that never was, even as other social media came on board,  Craigslist became a place for questions and answers, even debate. A Canadian news crew was looking for a boat, but I noticed how one post from a journalist looking for accommodation received a very rude response. It seemed out of place in the flood of generosity pouring in through the site.

But it was not really out of context at this particular time, when some sectors of the media appear to paint themselves into a corner. Great example of this was in the coverage of Sarah Palin.

In an attempt to give depth, the media is perceived always sniffing around for the scandal, the conspiracy, the skeleton in the closet.

I watched a news item on CNN, where Anderson Cooper asked if it was relevant to for the media to go after the story about Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy. Cooper gave it his best concerned look, as if he was standing outside of “the media” –as if his rhetorical question was not a thinly disguised attempt to open that can of worms. They opened that can much earlier, even while using iReport.com to ask people to comment on Palin, and then by promptly doing a story on the ’emotional’ response to the out-of-wedlock baby.

So no wonder that people ridicule the genuine reporter’s attempts to go after the news. No wonder the cry against sexism, and indecency, and that direct attack by Palin last evening. She obviously had the standard ‘liberal media’ talking points, but at this moment in time, they were quite relevant.

Community uses social media to prepare for Gustav

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

As the hurricane heads toward New Orleans and mandatory evacuation orders were made, there’s plenty of emergency news and help coming through on social media channels.

Craig Newmark posed a question as to how his site, Cragslist, might help, noting now users are taking over and  ‘repurposing’ the New Orleans portion of the Craigslist site.

“Is something happening now I’m missing?” he asked?

The site looks like it is shaping up to be a bulletin board and clearing house of helpful information. One person posted this offer for accommodation for the displaced, today, even adding a phone number:

“WANT TO HELP A FAMILY or persons needing a SAFE PLACE DURING GUSTAV. WILMINGTON, NC been through hurricane andrew – Have spare bedroom / bath king size bed. Pet ok too. call my toll free # 1-877-269-2784.”

Another offered shelter in New Hampsire.

On Twitter, there’s a feed called NOLANews those in the area can subscribe to., with lots of tips and links for truckers, and others fleeing the city. CNN’s Twitter posts also carry good breaking news

What business is Google in? How about you?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Google is a search engine. No it’s an advertising company. No scratch that, it’s a monitoring service. A software company. A brand monitoring service, a publisher and library a….

Most organizations have been schooled on the practice of identifying what their core business is; (as the ‘law of focus‘ goes) of sticking to one thing and one thing alone. But Google has been successful by doing precisely the opposite. It’s the brand that violates all banding laws. Even how it has fun at the expense of its own logo!

It’s hard to pin down what the Google brand stands for, or is moving into. As CEO Eric Schmidt said in April, ” All options are open. I don’t want to rule out or rule in anything.”

Imagine if FedEX said that and decided it needs to be in the passenger transportation business too? After all it is not just a delivery company, with Kinkos, so it has expanded its core offering. I believe that companies, like communication professionals, are starting to rethink what focus means.

Olympic video edit excusable?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

We all make mistakes –editing mistakes, in the rush to tell a story.

So when the BBC made what they called a ‘chronological’ editing mistake of an event at the Olympics, they were quick to own up. Most viewers –unprovoked by the due-diligence that takes place in the blogosphere– will let it slide. But I find it ironic that criticism reigned down when the opening ceremony of the Beijing Games was found to have been digitally enhanced –an elegant euphemism for editing.

“Thankfully, it’s human beings that make TV and human beings that watch them,” said the Beeb spokesperson. He also called the humans “illogical, irrational and unfair.”

The Chinese could easily have said that.

Will crowdsourcing take off with Photosynth?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As an amateur photographer I have been watching this Microsoft ‘lab’ project, talking it up since last year in fact, as an example of where crowdsourcing and visual communication could be headed.

Glad to note that it’s now open to us, the hoi polloi. You will need two small plug-ins for the site to work, and adhere to a code of conduct that includes abiding by intellectual property and privacy laws.

I can see how global and local events could be seen and reported.

OlympicSynth: Imagine if Photsynth pulled all the tens of thousands of images from amateurs and Pro-Ams at the 2008 Beijing Games via Flickr and Picasa. We would get a whole new perspective and in-depth look at events such as the disqualification of an athlete for stepping over the line, the tie breaker at a gymnastics final, the Free Tibet protests, the opening ceremony etc.

ReuterSynth: Could news organizations such as local TV stations and newspapers, even global ones such as the AP and the BBC create their own synths and let communities contribute to stories? Not a stretch since some of them are taking contributions from citizen journalists.

Internal CommsSynth: Organizations could let employees feed their intranets through Photosynth widgets to participate in company events.

iPhoneSynth: The widget for an iPhone plugin is just begging to happen, considering how iPhone / iPod users are sharing pictures anyway. Camera phones and digital cameras are waiting to be knitted together.

SecuritySynths. The FBI and SIS could easily pull together real-time synths of cities and buildings, subway systems etc when something on the scale of the London bombings occurs. If you the detail of people and architectural features possible on Photosynth demos (it can capture anything from a logo on a T-shirt to a pack of cigarettes in a piazza) it makes the controversial Google Street View maps quite tame.

Grainy, biased, poorly edited reports from Beijing complete picture

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Controversy demands source variety. The Olympics, like war, is poorer when the variety is constrained by commercial or political decree.

Jamaican sprint wonder Usain Bolt’ display of speed and celebration spurred much commentary –even a conspiracy theory about him slowing down. All this seems to make the official NBC coverage bland.

We also faced what I hope would be the last Olympics with a news blackout –messages like “Sorry, this media is not available in your territory” — from big (old) media outfits like the BBC, that is ironically doing a great  job of unfiltered reporting through new media.

Then there are plenty of citizen journalists in the village: athletes with cameras and blogs. GroundReports.com features some real street-level reporting complete with shaky camera, grainy video and poor audio. These reports don’t compete with the big guys but they sure add pressure for the media to rethink how it covers and keeps us informed about our world.

The Lenovo blogging program, Voices Of The Olympics, has been responsible for more than 1,300 athlete posts. “It isn’t really a program about making millions of impressions in the traditional marketing sense,” says Lenovo, but about those “thousands of connections between athletes and fans.”

Over at Bleacher Reports, another CitJo outfit that’s connected to FoxSports, a reporter called Zander Freund had this to say about the controversial tie-breaker between Nastia Liukin and He Kexin.

“If I were in charge of the IOC, I’d tell Liukin and Kexin to get their butts back up on those bars.”

Not exactly the way NBC’s Bob Costas would have put it, but it’s as authentic and grainy as you can get.

Journalists, an endangered species. But do you care?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

We pay scant attention to reporters and journalists who fight two survival wars today. The first, which we cover a lot is about job security, as newsrooms shrink and the ‘business’ of news gets downgraded to meet the wave of web 2.0 content creation and consumption.

But methinks we –myself included– focus too much on this.

We celebrate people who blog-slash-report to the point of turning them into celebrities. Robert Scoble with his camera phone in Davos, streaming live ‘news’ and the power of YouTube and Google in news distribution.

But I bet many of the following names mean nothing to my readers. John Ray, J. S. Tissainayagam, Levent Ozturk, Jill Carroll, Hisham Michwit Hamdan, Alan Johnston … Google them and see if you are interested.

Johnston was captured in Gaza, and freed last year. He had a campaign going, and now a Wikipdia entry, but Tissanayagam doesn’t get that kind of attention.

If you want to see what risk means watch this video taken this week as Turkish journalist Ozturk and his crew are fired at covering the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Tissanayagam, a former Sunday Times journalist, is being held on a flimsy ‘prevention of terrorism’ charge by the Sri Lankan government. OK, he has a statutory banner, and a web site; Reporters without borders has been campaigning for his release. But to much of the western media, these journalists are invisible, and those who consume news ignore them in the same way they don’t notice the bylines.

Tissanayagam wasn’t carrying a camera into the warzone. The ‘risky business’ he engaged in? Managing a web site. That’s right, my friends, he is the sort of new media journalist that doesn’t get covered by new media journalism. He’s 161 days in detention, and counting.

And we just go on covering China, and how investigative reporting is so risky in an era of slashed budgets.

Quotes for the week ending 16 August, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“One thing I love about Benetton: it never knows when to leave well enough alone.”

AdRants, commenting on Benetton which uses another controversial ad featuring a Tibetan monk and a Chinese soldier.

“The forecast? We’re smack dab in a cat five hurricane.”

Steve Rubel on “the thrill of the chase” as PR pros pitch publishers and bloggers, and why PR could be obsolete.

“Guys like Michael Phelps can roll out of bed in the morning in cutoffs and break the world record.”

Gary Hall Jr., on the controversy over the Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit, made of materials developed by NASA, which some say allows less talented swimmers to excel.

“I have no opinion on Tibet. I am a journalist.”

John Ray, ITN’s China correspondent overheard speaking to police officers as he was arrested, roughed up and being taken away after photographing a protest in Beijing, China.

“It sort of feels like the entire world is attending a huge party and NBC threw away our invite.”

Blogger, complaining about NBC delaying the broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics to “maximise its audience.”

“People were in such a good mood all night, watching the ceremonies, smiling, drinking, laughing and taking pictures of fireworks with the enthusiasm of children.”

Mara Schiavocampo, correspondent for NBC Nightly News.

“In the meantime, the world has a new war.”

Brian Williams, commenting on his blog about the Soviet fighters in Georgia in the same week as the Olympics began in China.

“Pray for peace. Pray for the Bachman and McCutcheon families. For all of us.”

Sports columnist for the Arizona Republic, Dan Bickley, from Beijing, commenting on the senseless murder of Tod Bachman, the father of former U.S. Olympian in Beijing.

“That’s a fool’s errand — like the State Department spending untold millions trying to persuade Arabs and Muslims that they have us all wrong. As long as the U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians is what it is — right or wrong — Arabs will resent us.”

Bob Garfield, commenting on Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” that tries to solve the pesky little problem it has over people’s negative perception of the Vista operating system.