Morgan McLintic on PR

BusinessWeek on Blogging

The impact of blogging on businesses makes the cover story of BusinessWeek. Need more proof?

Media in the UK Election

The Guardian Unlimited reports that the UK's leading tabloid newspaper, The Sun, will come out in favor of Tony Blair, for his re-election as British Prime Minister tomorrow. While not a surprise, this is a boost for Blair's party, Labour, due to the publication's reach. The Sun backed Blair when he was first elected in 1997 and is owned by media mogul, Rupert Murdoch.

Meanwhile, the ever-entertaining John 'Two Jags' Prescott, currently Deputy Prime Minister, has been doing his bit for Labour's media campaign by telling a local Welsh reporter to 'bugger off' according to this Sky News piece (another Murdoch outlet). Prescott is frequently mocked by the media as the photo shows. Picture editors often choose open-mouthed shots if they want to send up the subject. Nice tie in with the content of the story too.

RSS like sushi

BBC quotes Dave Winer on RSS news reading, likening it to choosing food from a sushi conveyor belt: "We are still waiting for the killer app though. We are still waiting for someone to produce the software that will switch the lightbulb on for people."

It could be that news providers are in the best position to produce that "killer app" for people. They have a chance of understanding news, but technology companies do not, says Mr Winer.

In today's newsreader

CNET: The future of bloggers - Wharton legal studies professor Dan Hunter puts blogging right up there with the printing press when it comes to sharing ideas and disseminating information. "This is not a fad," says Hunter. "It's the rise of amateur content, which is replacing the centralized, controlled content done by professionals."

CNET: US blogger thwarts Canadian gag order - Canada's long-standing practice of barring news organizations from disclosing what's happening in certain court proceedings is being tested by Internet bloggers.

Blogrunner's The Annotated Times: An aggregator blog which pulls together articles from The New York Times and ranks discussion of them. Interest here, here and here following Steve Rubel's post yesterday.

Trust MEdia: How real people are finally being heard - nice white paper by Edelman and Intelliseek is proving popular. I'm impressed from my first look. Download your copy here.

Why are PR bloggers so anal? - wonders Pete Shinbach, bemoaning blogging being on the menu of PR blogs most of the time. Meanwhile Has the blogger backlash begun? - asks Mike Manuel at Media Guerrilla. Good questions.

Changing the subject... Pew released figures claiming that 6m Americans had tried podcasting. But then took it back: Pew research director Mary Madden believes the numbers of people actually using the Internet to broadcast and/or download pods is smaller than the 6 million figure cited in the organization’s latest study, however. (from Newsfactor)

Jeremy Pepper releases not one but two articles in his excellent PR Face2Face interviews. This time with IABC bigwigs.

And last, but by no means least, Constantin Basturea et al announce that preparations for Global PR Blog Week 2.0 have begun.

Blogging from East to West

BBC: Sweeping article about the impact of blogging in China and Iran. Also covers its use in politics and the impact of blogging on the media (Rathergate etc). It's not all MSM vs the bloggers though:

James Connell, deputy technology editor of the International Herald Tribune, says: "I would encourage my traditional media colleagues to look upon blogs as a positive thing and not a negative thing.

"OK, a few people have been fired and blunders have been exposed, but this could have happened without blogging.

"Anything that makes debate more inclusive and more lively, and anything that makes it easier for the average person to say: 'hey that's not right' to the entire world, is a positive thing."

Fake blog - Alastair Campbell

This has gotta be a fake blog supposedly by Tony Blair's former press secretary, Alastair Campbell.

Charles to media: "Bloody people"

BBC: "These bloody people. I can't bear that man. I mean, he's so awful, he really is." Prince Charles of BBC Royal Correspondent, Nicholas Witchell.

NowPublic and OurMedia

...slurps coffee on an overcast Easter Sunday, catching up on week's flagged news while contemplating going for a run to offset impending chocolate overload...time to check out two interesting grassroots media projects which launched this week: OurMedia and NowPublic.

OurMedia provides free storage and bandwidth for citizen content creators to post and store text, audio, images and even video. It's still in alpha but after seven months of development seems remarkably solid. There's already some great content up there waiting to be discovered and shared. It's a hugely altruistic project and wonderful to see.

One of the disadvantages of the democratization of stored media is that often that the content can fall to the lowest common denominator. My brief search uncovered some content which really must only be of interest to its creator, having little broad appeal such as an old blog banner graphic with the creator's name on it. OurMedia's appeal (at least to me) relies on it being a resource of interesting content, so I hope the cream floats to the top. That said, if content only has a valid audience of one, then perhaps still it's worth keeping for posterity, as long as it's not at the cost of content with broader appeal. I wonder if the economics or funding will allow such casual use and hope that meantime content creators exercise suitable discretion.

NowPublic is a project which aims to put control of the news in the hands of the consumer. The idea is that you can post assignments to citizen journalists who then research and post that news back. Equally citizen journalists who have a story can use NowPublic to find their audience. Like a clearing house for news demand and generation. It's an ambitious project and still in early days. It has echos of WikiNews to me in its approach.

Sadly, already some of the assignments are dated or have since been covered in other news outlets eg the launch of Yahoo 360. I wonder though whether fundamentally it will work. The concept of demanding a news item seems peculiar to me. I'm interested in news about an organization, person, country or topic and want to follow any events surrounding those subjects, so my assignments will be permanent and generic ie tell me anything about Google or France. I can't request a specific story until I'm already aware of it, and that reduces NowPublic to analysis or researching fringe elements of the story.

The financials also seem awkward. None of the assignments I reviewed had budgets allocated to them, though clearly that's the intention of the site. Even if I did allocate a budget, how much would I spend given the huge number of free sources of information at my disposal? Even if I and 100 other news demanders pledged $5 for a story, that hardly provides a staple income for budding reporters to investigate a story, cover expenses and make a living.

I like the concept and I hope it works, but my sense is that news is more about the broadcasting of unknown information, than the demand of known stories.

...drains last drop of coffee...time for that run.

And more on are bloggers journalists?

Wired: Much of the news and blog coverage surrounding the Apple Computer lawsuit has centered on the rights of bloggers versus those of professional journalists. While this is certainly an issue worth exploring, and something the courts will no doubt face in the coming years, this is not what the Apple suit is about...

What it really comes down to, however, is what exactly defines a trade secret, which is what Apple contends was stolen and leaked to three online Mac-centric zines. And whether you are a reporter, essayist, blogger or pamphleteer, judges have shown that they are more interested in promoting business opportunities than protecting the rights of journalists. In the Apple case, it doesn't matter whether you are a Joe Blogger or a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. The results would have been the same.

More on: are bloggers journalists?

CNET: Bloggers should be classified as journalists and given First Amendment protections based on the function they perform, not the form of their transmissions. Properly understood, the First Amendment applies to all those who report with journalistic integrity--offline or online.

In a prescient 1993 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that an author had standing to invoke a reporter's privilege when the court ruled that "what makes journalism journalism is not its format but its content." The same principle and rights should apply to bloggers--if they are producing similar content and using similar journalistic techniques as the mainstream media. Ironically, many of the "established" media outlets have also migrated online, with some even running their own blogs.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., is the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.

LEWIS launches RSS feeds for clients

Quick update on what's going on in the engine room of my agency, LEWIS. We've just launched a service called LEWIS Wire, which provides RSS feeds of the press releases issued for all clients. We've noticed that many clients haven't yet RSS-enabled their press rooms, but that reporters are increasingly looking for press release feeds. LEWIS Wire is just coming out of pilot testing, but there are feeds for each client or one for all the news issued by LEWIS in the US. We've also provided the code for clients to place the XML image onto their site.

Initial feedback has been good, but there's clearly a lot of education still needed around RSS (as today's BlogAds survey shows). Still I think there is an opportunity for tech companies to demonstrate they are in the vanguard and to differentiate themselves by being early adopters of RSS news distribution to help journalists. I'm sure RSS distribution will be a change as big as the one from post/fax to email, so there are advantages in embracing it swiftly.

Funnily, I thought we might put out our own press release about launching LEWIS Wire (which we'd put on our LEWIS feed of course), but it felt too much like the press releases about launching a website from the nineties. And besides, it's free and I expect many other agencies will do the same soon (if they haven't already).

Continuing an RSS vibe, we've also been culling a lot of the internal email we have by using internal blogs and feeds. For instance, we produce a daily digest of the news called What's Happening which goes out to an email list of several thousand (mail me here to sign up), which we've RSS-enabled here. Feel free to subscribe to that if you only have time to look at a few feeds each day.

And finally, a warm congratulations to my LEWIS UK colleagues for being selected as one of the 'Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work For' by The Sunday Times. There are several other agencies in the list (good to see), and a nice one for the trophy cabinet.

Right enough, or this will look like a plug when in fact it's meant to be an insight into what's going on. I've got some other RSS-based ideas, so I'll update on those once they come out of the skunk works.