Month: December 2003

Once upon a time, in the early days of Google, you used to be able to type in “Spawn of Satan” (or some phrase like that; I forget what it was now) [see comment below – he's right! – Akin], hit Google's I'm Feeling Lucky button and up would pop the home page for that Redmond, Wash. behemoth.
Now a couple of new Google spoofs, both of which ask the user to type in a phrase and then hit the I'm Feeling Lucky button. For Canadians — type in the phrase: “What is the worst blog in the world”. For Canadians and everyone else, try typing in: “miserable failure” and see where you end up. How does all this work? Richard Dalton at Newsday explains.
A note to the non-Canadians here: First: We're sorry you're not Canadian but, hey, there's still plenty of room here. Second: Jean Chretien, our prime minister, retires at the end of the week and his replacement is Paul Martin.

One of the PR folks I communicate with regularly asks, in response to this post, how those who send releases via e-mail will know that anti-spam filters haven't killed their release? Many publicists, for example, send blind carbon copies to dozens of journalists and the receipt of a message with an address in the BCC field might trigger a filter. It's a good question and here's a modified version of my reply to that individual:
I know I've fought with varying degrees of success to have all filters taken off my corporate addresses. There are no filters on dakin@[nospam]globeandmail.ca but there are filters normally on any globeandmail.ca address. There are also filters on all ctv.ca addresses, including mine. I believe there are no filters on david@davidakin.com as well, although my hosting provider claims to have some anti-spam filter.
But I would never know, of course, if some legit mail didn't make it through. That's one of the biggest problems with server-based mail filters. The intended recipient not only has no idea what mail s/he missed but can't tell his or her correspondents what rules trigger the filter. I hope most spam filters are most sophisticated than filtering out anything with an address in the BCC field.
One more reason, though, to make press releases available via an RSS feed!

Just had a phone call from a public relations person in Boston — (Boston,
Massachusetts, this individual emphasized, lest I be confused) – who
wondered what format I would like my press releases in. I replied that
plain-text e-mail is always best. This individual sounded surprised when I
said that and noted that their original thinking was the press releases
should be formatted differently for Canadian newspapers. Hmmm. I don't think
so, but I'm happy to be enlightened.
But, more seriously, I'm often asked by those who want to communicate
something to the press what's best. So here's a couple of guidelines that
will impress me:

1. Never pitch by phone. Always pitch by e-mail.
2. E-mail should always be plain-text. No one ever decided to this story or
   that story because the press release had better bold text or italicized text
   or better coloured stationery background than another one. We don't care how
   it looks, we just want the information.

3. Never send unsolicited attachments. There's nothing worse than dialing
   up a slow network connection on the road only to have to wait to get through
   a 5 megabyte PowerPoint presentation that you're going to delete anyhow.

4. So to review: No phone calls. Plain text e-mail. No attachments.
5. There's never any need to follow an e-mail with a phone call unless the
   e-mail bounces back to you. If that happens, check to see if the e-mail
   address is correct. Those e-mail addresses are always at www.davidakin.com

I'm going to put a page with more suggestions and hints but in the
meantime, what San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan
Gillmor has to say on this would parallel my thinking on the issue very
closely.

As I'd mentioned here and elsewhere, the Supreme Court of Canada heard a landmark
Internet law case last week involving a petition by Canada's music
performance rights holders to force Internet service providers to pay a
blanket annual royalty.
Lawyer and University of Ottawa law school teacher Jason Young was at the
court (I wasn't unfortunately) and has made some notes about the day at his blog.
Young has also posted the judicial
review by the Federal Court of Appeals there and he's included a link to the PDF
file of the original Canadian Copyright Board decision that started this
whole thing.

I was at my alma mater, the University of
Guelph, earlier this week and checked out the Wi-Fi network in McLaughlin
Library, the campus' main library. Shelves of books on that library's first
floor have given way to lots of comfy chairs and a coffee shop. Library
users now access indexes, abstracts, and journal articles from their
wi-fi-enabled laptop. Don't have a laptop? No problem, the library will loan
you one at no charge.
If you're at Guelph, by the way, here's a tip: The network leaks well beyond
the library's walls, even as far as the Brass Traps in the University Centre
and up to Johnston Hall.
The University of British Columbia is the
other big Wi-Fi campus that I know of in Canada. In fact, UBC is the largest
geographic 802.11 hotspot in the world, I'm told.
Now comes news today that Brock
University in St. Catharines, Ont. is about to light up its campus-wide
wi-fi network.
“The network currently covers 60 per cent of the main campus, with plans to
reach 100 per cent coverage late next year. Current coverage includes many
of the large classrooms, small seminar/teaching rooms not previously hard
wired, corridors and large student gathering areas,” Brock says in a press
release. “The $100,000 investment in computing and telecommunications
infrastructure includes $30,000 in donations from graduates and parents of
students through the University's TeleGrad fundraising program. The balance
of the cost was covered by the University.”
There are 50 hotspots on Brock's campus right now. Brock is running 802.11b
at this point.
Mail me or fill out the comment below if your campus has some hotspot activity. Love to hear about it.

Jay Rosen offers up a tremendously interesting and thought-provoking essay
about meaningless PR stunts and whether or not we should cover them. You
might say, “Well, of course, we shouldn't cover meaningless PR stunts”. But
what if that stunt was the President of the United States visiting U.S. Troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving? Aaah. Now you've got an ethical quandary on
your hands. This stunt exists only for the press and costs several million
taxpayer dollars. But this is such a stunt — I mean, it's a doozy — that
you can't resist. And yet, if, as some commentators have said, our job is
tell the truth, what are we doing if we agree to not say anything about this
stunt until after the stunt is over?
From Rosen's blog:

Ask any of the reporters who accompanied Bush to Baghdad what they were doing there and, after allowing for the unusual circumstances (extreme
secrecy) they would say they were there to “cover the president's surprise
trip to Baghdad.” Which sounds reasonable enough until you realize that the
president's trip did not exist as a workable idea outside the anticipated
news coverage of it. This realization takes under three seconds.
The whole notion of the trip as an independently existing thing that could
be “covered” is transparently false, as the White House warning to
journalists demonstrates. If word leaked out, the trip was to be
cancelled–it would no longer exist–and the airplane would turn around and
head back to Washington. That does not mean the trip was illegitimate to
undertake or to treat as news; but it does mean that its potential
legitimacy as news event lies outside the logic of “things happen and we
cover them” or “the president took decisive action and the press reported
it.

The American Journalism Review reports that in several surveys, newspapers prosper when they pay attention to some pretty basic stuff:

• Providing excellent customer service
• Improving editorial and advertising content
• Building recognition and loyalty through stronger brand promotion
• Reforming management and culture.

Now those may sound pretty basic but implementing those kind of improvements can be trick and that's because of newspaper culture itself. Good newspaper reporters, I've found in 15 years in the biz at papers or all sizes (and egos), are lone wolves. They are contrarion by nature. They don't like authority. Rules have to make good sense to be followed. Reporters don't like to follow rules just because someone says so. Good reporters are independent types who think outside the box. Now, all of the things that makes for good reporters often makes for a poor company man (or woman). And yet, in this case at least, it would be in a reporter's own best interest to be a bit more broad in his or her worldview when it comes to the idea that
the newspaper is a business.
Most reporters, I think, will immediately recognize that their primary task is improving editorial content. But most will also think that it's someone else's job in the organization to worry about everything else. It isn't.
It's their job. Reporters, too, are in the customer service business. We meet our subscribers and our advertisers every day. And while we often meet them in the role of newsgathering, there's nothing to say we can be polite and helpful to those who have questions or comments about our business.
Similarly, we are in the brand building and recognition game. We've all seen the print reporter show up at a press conference who looks like a slob and acts like a boor. What does that do for the paper's brand? Now, I'm not somme pollyanna who believes we have to toe some corporate line, wear plastic smiles and a club tie, and perfect a firm handshake, but a recognition by newsroom employees that we're all in the business of finding and keeping readers and that we do that in a number of ways would go a long towards stemming readership declines and even reverse them.
[The AJR link is via Tom Mangan's blog]

The good folks who develop Blogware, the publishing system used for this blog, have added a couple of nifty new tools, one for me and one for you, dear reader. For me, I can post via e-mail and that's going to be much easier and should generate more posts. For you, there is a now a search function so you can find stuff on this blog. You can see it right over there to the left, underneath the Ultra Top Important Links and above the Topics category.

A modified version of a rant/opinion bit of mine below from a post I made recently to the listserv of the Canadian Association of Journalists in response to a commentary by American journalist Bill Moyers. In that commentary, Moyers said:

I keep coming back to the subject of media conglomeration because it can take the oxygen out of democracy. The founders of this country believed a free and rambunctious press was essential to the protection of our freedoms. They couldn't envision the rise of giant megamedia conglomerates whose interests converge with state power to produce a conspiracy against the people. I think they would be aghast at how this union of media and government has produced the very kind of imperial power against which they rebelled.

I wish some academics or independent researchers would challenge the fuzzy logic of the silly assumptions behinds Moyers' remark. (Incidentally, I would have liked to send these remarks to Moyers himself and engage in a democratic dialogue. But while Moyers' show NOW provides links to “Buy something” at its Web site, it provides no link where readers and viewers can engage Moyers in a debate about this issue. That, to me, is an anti-democratic Big Media flaw. Bill, if you're there, engage in the debate on this site or e-mail me.”)
It is absolute historical hooey to suggest as Moyers and many in Canada do that today's media environment is “taking the oxygen out of democracy” and conspiring against the people. There are so many more voices and choices in today's media environment than there have ever been in any historical era and this is all good for democracy. Does Moyers think it a coincidence that the Berlin Wall fell as new independent and alternative news sources started flourishing in the West?
The Internet, blogs, cheap on-demand publishing systems have put the power of the press in everyone's hands. Internet-based broadcasters are taking radio and television news wherever there's network connections. Cellphones, moblogs, text-messaging are now being harnessed to reach and excite those consumers of news who would avoid privately funded news organizations.
Compare today's media environment to that of 10 years ago (in Canada, for example, just one national newspaper, now there are two!!), 20 years ago, 50 years ago, etc. and it's obvious that democracy is infinitely better served now than it was then if only because there are no longer just a dozen 'boys on the bus' that need to bought off with a bottle of bourbon to control a story. Today, for example, labour unions are arguing for free speech and the right of a reporter to refuse a byline at House of Commons hearings. That's good for democracy! Were unions fighting for those boys on the bus and their right to tell a story 50, 100 years ago? (Actually, I don't know the answer to that question – they may well have been doing just that 50 years ago)
Think of what Matt Drudge could have done to Franklin Delano Roosevelt! JFK! etc., etc.
No sirree, today's ultra-competitive Big Media, indie media, alternative media, and issues-based outlets are impossible to cajole, control and spin. And even if they are asleep at the switch, there are dozens of watchdog groups to tell us about the biggest underreported stories of the year or campaign for Fairness in Reporting. Good for them! Keep it up. It's all good for democracy.
Big Media types have also been worried that younger media consumers are turning away from the 'corporate' mass media and are apparently able to find other sources. They note that young consumers don't read newspapers or watch network news. And yet — lo and behold — young people demonstrate time and again that they are engaged by world events and reacting to them. The very fact that these other sources exist for those consumers keen to seek them out puts the lie to the claim that today's media environment is “choking” democracy.
(What's choking democracy is the refusal of young consumers to vote. You really want to do something for democracy? Forget about the media: Take a 25-year-old to the nearest polling booth. But I digress . . .)
Survey after survey confirms that the the Big Media that critics like Moyer complain about are becoming increasingly less important. Big Media, survey after survey say, has increasingly less influence.
Not only that but news consumers are historically more aware than any earlier group of news consumers about how news is made. Media criticism is now high pop art with every Tom, Dick, and Harry purporting to be be able to deconstruct the subtext of what Big Media is trying to shove at us. More university students in the U.S. got their 2002 election news from Jon Stewart than Tom Brokaw! Slate's “Today's News” is one of it's most popular newsletters. People — news consumers — can't get enough of what's going behind the curtain. And again, I'm all for it — it's terrific for democracy! Can we really say that of any other generation of news consumers?
Welll, That's my knee-jerk view/rant — but again, please: Will some academic / researcher put this claim of Big Media conspiring against the people into historical context? I'm convinced the answer will be that democracy here and in the U.S. has never been better served by the noisy, rabble rousers that populate today's mediascape.

A little humour this evening – source unknown:

Stopping the Weapons of Math Instruction

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.
“Al-gebra is a fearsome cult,”, Ashcroft said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in
search of absolute value. They use secret code names like “x” and “y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns”, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. “As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle,” Ashcroft declared.
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes. “I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence,” the President said, adding: “Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line.”
President Bush warned, “These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before see unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.”
Attorney General Ashcroft said, “As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertainty of: though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks.”