01/31

The whole of digital storytelling has been broken into five categories with sub-categories and examples to show how each is applied.  The categories are media, action, relationship, context, and communication.   What I like about the site is its seeming simplicity as one enters and travels through it.  Everything is clearly labeled and connected.  There are no doubts left about what the authors are doing, and there are plenty of references in each category to academic literature, also neatly presented.

The site is a wonderful example of pedagogy that is needed in online training and education.  Hats off to Nora Paul and Christina Fiebich who created it.
 

It wasn't long ago that the company seemed like a good idea and everyone was hailing Steve Case and Jerry Levin as geniuses for completing a $106 billion merger in which AOL took over Time Warner.  Now, it is the incredible shrinking company, a fraction of its size of little more than a year ago.  Richard Parsons, the CEO, has a titanic job of turning the place around and the betting is that he will dump AOL in a year or so. 

People are jumping ship as well.  Ted Turner stepped down as vice chairman of the company, a much poorer man than when he joined.  The word was that he is going to focus on his philanthropy.  He has less to give away these days. 

Somewhere, someone is going to frame those old, glowing press releases of yesteryear as a reminder of how quickly things change.
 

01/29

For a complete list of awards, go here:
 http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1804835

What I like about these sites is that they are content-oriented and well-designed.  The Los Angeles Times won for a multi-part story that originally ran in the newspaper but was redesigned beautifully for Web consumption.  It is called Enrique's Journey and is about the hellish conditions that migrants experience when coming up to the U.S. from Central America. 

The Scripps site on the Lewis and Clark Expedition is wonderfully presented history.  The Albany Times-Union shows how to gather political news about a governor's race into one compact and informative place. 

PR practitioners should study these sites.  They provide good examples of what organizations can do with their own news.  You will note, by the way, that there is little "eye candy" in any of these sites.  Instead, they are rock-solid information venues for Web readers.

Good work.
 

01/28

Let's let the reporter, Julia Scheeres, set the scene:

If there's one thing more loathsome than getting spammed, it's getting spammed about spam.  One might call it spam spam.

So when a Northern California company broadcasted an unsolicited mass mailing to the press on Tuesday with the subject line "ANTI-SPAM LEADER SURFCONTROL CITES TOP 10 MOST ANNOYING SPAM IN 2002," it was, well, a tad annoying. 

Not only are Internet scribbles typed in all caps the equivalent of offline shouting, the ploy is also a time-honored technique used by spam-meisters, along with misspellings and exclamation points.... 

Nevertheless, the company's spam spam was delivered, in part because it was distributed by a trusted source, PR Newswire <http://www.prnewswire.com>, which forwards press releases to media outlets.

The sender was a company called SurfControl <http://www.surfcontrol.com>.  This is how the company describes itself on its website: "SurfControl plc (London:SRF, Nasdaq Europe:SRFC), the world's Number One Web and e-mail filtering company, is the only company in the security market offering a total content security solution that combines Web and e-mail filtering technology with the industry's largest, most accurate and relevant content database and adaptive reasoning tools to automate content recognition."  Jargon-free translation: We make e-mail spam filters.

 

There is no excuse for failing to target press releases.  There is less excuse for failing to abide by e-mail etiquette.  Finally, to use PR Newswire to spam such a release to everyone everywhere was, well, bush league.  Let's hope the company does better the next time -- if there is a next time.
 

01/27

Hype is portraying something that it isn't.  Hype is misrepresentation whether exaggeration or falsehood.  Hype can be intended and less often, unintended.  For every Jeff Bezos and Steve Case who believe they are starting new industries, there are as many individuals out to make money off the credulity of others. 

The Internet Bubble was a period of hype and, if you believe states' attorneys general and Lou Gerstner, now retired from IBM, Wall Street was at the root of much of it.  Investment bankers shoved concepts into investors' pockets rather than equities and skimmed hundreds of millions.

PR practitioners should avoid hype because hype is supposed to be what we do.  Journalists call us "spinmeisters" for a reason.  Reporters have caught too many of us exaggerating or bending facts. 

However, our credibility rests on respecting facts and trying to show whatever is positive in them.  Why?  Because by staying within the facts we surprise reporters who expect us to hype, and we gain credibility with them.  Speaking for myself, it is a warm feeling to have a skeptical reporter in a major national publication take my word because the reporter knows I am accurate. 

So what should PR do if it doesn't hype?  It should present story angles constantly to reporters who might otherwise overlook them.  No reporter can cover every angle of an industry much less some angles of multiple industries.  There is simply too much going on.  PR connects the dots for them in the interests of PR's clients.  By connecting dots, PR spotlights the importance of what a client does.  It is for a reporter to decide whether to write the story or not. 

Ours is a business of persuasion built on solid and well-supported facts.  Anything else is hype.