Spitzer | Hoipolloireport

“This is the wrong image, folks.”

Josh Bernoff, of Forrester, complaining (“People are not bees”) about the gross misuse of the bee image among advocates of social activity

“Each of Spitzer’s words was accompanied by a rush of camera clicks.”

Report on the resignation over a prostitution scandal, of New York governor, Elliot Spitzer.

“Airborne is basically an overpriced, run-of-the-mill vitamin pill that’s been cleverly, but deceptively, marketed.”

David Schardt, Center for Science in the Public Interest on Airborne’s $ 23.5 million settlement with the FTC for false advertising.

“The usual way for a newspaper writer to weasel out of such a request is to say that it is not a “local” issue.”

E. J. Montini, in The Arizona Republic, on a reader asking him to display the nine zeros in $12,000,000,000 (when referencing the amount the US spends on two wars each month) and why he complied.

“Try doing what I do for a living … It’s not that easy.”

Journalist Sarah Lacy, in an all downhill interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at South By Southwest convention in Austin, Texas. The audience started heckling her, some started dancing.

“I now see myself as The Curator of Conversations.”

Businessweek writer Bruce Nussbaum, commenting on how his approach to journalism has changed. He was commenting on the Sarah Lacy incident.

With apologies to T.S. Eliot, March is the cruelest month of the year.

One week before the other Eliot stepped down in the middle of a scandal, and Geraldine Ferraro played an “accidental” race card,” Southwest Airlines put three employees on paid leave and grounded 41 planes. With such an inspired management team, it has never needed to get to this level of damage control. At the Southwest blog, Nuts About Southwest, they have done an admirable job of addressing unflattering issues in the past. They are one of the few companies that allow employees and not just the marketing or PR types to be the voice of the organization. But on this issue, the lawyers seem to have been dragged in and scuttled the bloggers to the back of the plane.

Last week’s post “We take safety seriously” (about a voluntary disclosure by the airline of cracks in 2007) began with “Friends…” but had language that was more lawyered than the usual blog talk from pilots, ground staff and flight crew. This week the blog was a cut-and-paste outlet for its press releases.

Through all this, one thing they are doing a great job of is allowing readers/passengers to leave comments, many of them unflattering. Some readers have challenged the critics, but at least there is a conversation going on.