Stuffola

May 31, 2006

A Painful Death at Peaceful Acres

Just finished reading a Raymond Chandler novel, then stumbled across a news story about a fatal fire that reads as hard boiled as any of Chandler's prose.

"Jameson's body was found, one arm outstretched, just inside the door of his trailer in Peaceful Acres Mobile Home Park.

"On the ground near his body was a litter of empty crushed and blackened beer cans.

" 'He fell asleep on the sofa and woke up a little too late," Whitten said."

For the record, Bill Jameson's final word appears to have been goddamn. Which seems remarkably restrained under the circumstances. So much for Peaceful Acres.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

Stupid Soccer Tricks

These are trying times for some Swedish feminists. The national soccer team has passed on the idea of publicly protesting the extra prostitutes (or sex slaves as the case may be) imported into Germany for the World Cup competition; women bosses in private and publicly traded companies has dropped from 32 percent in 2004 to 25 percent today (sorry, it's in Swedish); and the World Cup team from Paraguay is angling for babes.

That last item isn't such a big deal. But it is amusing that one soccer player's lame attempt to score with a Swedish photographer was the top headline of a Swedish paper this morning (thanks for the English translation, DN). It seems that a player from Paraguay was smitten with a female photographer for Dagens Nyheter (the Daily News). She is part of a reporting team that briefly interviewed some team members and then covered a game between Denmark and Paraguay.

According to today's paper, FIFA, the international soccer organization that runs the World Cup, employs "team liaison officers" to help national teams with various tasks, including translating media interviews. After the Denmark-Paraguay match, Paraguay's liaison officer, Manuel Hoffmann, reportedly called the DN photographer at 1 am to say a soccer player wanted to meet her immediately "to get to know her a little better" (translation is mine).

This strikingly original line failed to work any magic for the player involved (although DN managed to squeeze out a fair number of column inches about it). The photographer went back to sleep but wondered the next day (along with her fellow reporter and at least one editor) why the hell an official FIFA employee would help a soccer player chase women. The liaison officer refused to comment on the record but supposedly told one reporter that it was hard to say no to a player when a whole gang of guys were standing around. (Maybe it seemed easier to dial than face a beating with a cleated shoe.)

In the Swedish article DN helpfully points out that players are supposed to behave "for the good of the game" and that FIFA's Article 7 bans gender discrimination (although it's unclear to me how this qualifies as gender discrimination).

It also mentions that two Chilean players got shipped home after a training match against Ireland because women visited their rooms after the match. Guess the Paraguayan player is damn lucky the photographer turned him down instead of going to his room with a camera and a tape recorder.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2006

Magazine Death Pool

"Book your reservations on the River Styx now! Place your bets on what The Grim Reaper believes will be one of the richer passengers to cross over a few years from now. I have to admit that I am having one of my boatsmiths constructing a special gold-plated monogrammed vessel for the future Conde Nast business title." The principal over at the Magazine Death Pool has many things to say about the upcoming "Vanity Fair of business," none of them favorable.

"The Reaper knows there'll be a BIG party when it launches. And the Reaper knows that the cover will be plastered in the NY Post and other places. They will be diving headfirst into a shaky category that is experiencing its bumps -- even Forbes has quietly put itself up for an investor's stake.

"The Reaper knows that there'll be a big ad campaign to launch it and there'll be millions spent to promote the first two issues. The Reaper knows there'll be plenty of advertising in the first two or three issues from marketers who just want to ride the initial buzz wagon.

..."The Reaper knows that after the bloom is off the rose, people are going to wonder if another flashy business magazine is necessary. Will their target readers actually buy it from the newsstand once it hits issue three or four... or will the love affair die, like it did with Cargo?"

Magazine Death Pool is a good reminder that technology companies aren't the only ventures that go belly up with alarming frequency. My injured arms prevented me from clicking through the whole damn photo gallery but I didn't see mention of the last two mags I wrote for, Absolute New York (which won a photo award recently) and CMO, which went belly up within a few months of each other. (The editors at both magazines were a joy to work for and I miss them all. Sniff. CMO does live on as a website and who knows, it may return.) Other late, lamented mags were there, including FamilyPC, Yahoo Internet Life, the Industry Standard and Upside.

And now I understand why the bookstores I visited in New York last month were out of Budget Living. Oops!

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2006

Disturbing Amazon Reviewers

It's been a very exciting time here at Casa Pain Management. First, I found out that my computer-related injuries, charmingly called "mouse arm" here in Sweden, may be carpal tunnel syndrome and may require surgery. (Kids, don't ignore those twitches.) Then my lower back turned on me. It was something like the scene in Alien in which everything appears to be fine, until one of the crew members starts screaming in agony and an ugly critter bursts out of his abdomen. No alien actually clawed its way out of my back, but it sure as hell felt like one was trying.

After several days of bed rest and effective if boring drugs, I'm back, temporarily at least, at the computer armed with three things: a headset, a voice-recognition program and a substitute-swear-word regimen created by my daughter (my pain-provoked outbursts didn't impress her much). I'm allowed to say ship, kit or cheddar but shit is officially off-limits. As it should be, since it's not included in the vocabulary of my program. (I'm going to try to teach it, but don't tell her.)

Anyway, late last night I stumbled upon the dark spawn of Jeff Bezos' community-building tactics: disturbing Amazon reviewers. These are reviewers who appear to be twisted, cranky or worse. I know tons of people have spent practically their entire lives analyzing Amazon and its citizen reviewers but not me. So I was unprepared for the amount of raw weirdness masquerading as chirpy reviews.

Today's featured reviewer uses her real name on Amazon, but it would be mean to include it here. Read the excerpts below and then judge for yourself: Is Reviewer X scary, sad or refreshingly feisty?

From review of Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science by M.G. Lord:

"This little book tells all about the unlikely beginnings of the JPL, going from science fiction to science fact. My son is a patsy for NASA and takes large groups of young people on tours at this Lab and they stay for days on end. He too will feel what it is to die young when they think he knows too much.

"Like Ms. Lord's grandfather whose door would not open, but two others escaped, before the train demolished the car and dragged him a long way down the track. Her father was only 46 when he died but he looks like an old man. That's what leaks from nuclear and atomic production will do for you. Maybe Jeff will last one more year. He's already having false heart attack symptoms."

Poor Jeff. His life can't be easy. From a review of An Unfinished Marriage by Joan Anderson:

"She feels that 'true learning comes from our own impulses' -- please! When will this person grow up? This book is her sequel. 'Every beginning is always a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.' If her marriage was so bad that she had to go to sea for a year, I wonder what Robin did while she was gone. He'd be a fool to languish in his new job, wondering where he had gone wrong; could be she was the person responsible for all the mess. She was like a peregrine falcon who scavenges off others or perhaps a green-winged teal, called a wigeon. She was not a normal woman, not forgiving and understanding. A man goes where his job is. Christine refused to follow Jeff to his job until she got pregnant. Joan was too old for that ploy."

From a review of the audio CD of High Plains Tango: A Novel by Robert James Waller:

"The Indian Flute Player, like son Jeff, charms the desert animals around the ceremonial fires. Carlisle fights city hall (if there be such in the western small towns) and this one is forever changed by one man. There is a triangle with a waitress in addition to the woman he calls a witch, which makes it decidely uneven. Carlisle, after all, is college educated, but like all men like to indulge in the lower-class women on occasion."

Last but not least from a review of Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door by Lynne Truss:

"My pet peeve is the noisy popcorn eater at the movie theaters. Since it would be counterproductive to complain to the manager, as the theaters get big bucks for those supersize containers of popcorn, I've had to just get up and leave. No one can enjoy a movie when the person sitting behind him continues to chomp on their popcorn without regard to the other moviegoers after a certain time. If I have a small popcorn which I can't consume during the loud previews, I save the rest to eat later in private. Not many people would be that thoughtful; they paid for it and they will eat it as they please. Manners has nothing to do with it -- it is their right."

Gentle reviewer, I beg you: just once, finish your popcorn. It might help.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2006

Cybersquabbles in Sweden

Many things about Sweden remain a mystery to me. Here's one example. Earlier in the week a freelance journalist named Mustafa Can revealed the existence of a “secret” listserv that included journalists, psychologists, business leaders, politicians and literary celebs among its members. Can wrote the article with all the subtlety of the prose found in the latest bodice-ripper. The story in Dagens Nyheter was titled "Uber bullying on the net" and began like this (my translation): “Do you think hate is a fantastic feeling? Do you want to belong to a chosen group of people who consider themselves physically and mentally above everyone else?”

You can tell that the article was written outside of the United States, because the answer to the second question would be self evident: Why yes, I would like to belong to a chosen group of people who consider themselves physically and mentally above everyone else. The United States is a hotbed of private little cliques, it’s blanketed with country clubs and other private organizations that are all about feeling superior whatever more noble objective their rules and regulations proclaim.

But such is not the Swedish way. Swedes may discriminate against people born in other countries or who bear foreign-sounding names but they do not, and cannot, think of themselves as any better than anyone else. At least, not publicly. That all Swedes are equal, or are supposed to be, is deeply embedded in this culture. That's fine by me. That's one of the many things I like about this country. But I can't be shocked, or scandalized, or even especially horrified by the discovery that a composer and writer named Alexander Bard has maintained a private listserv called the Elite list for the past 15 years that supposedly devotes itself to sex-and-drugs gossip and welcomes new members with an e-mail that claims “the lowest common denominator for the members of the Elite list is their physical and mental perfection, … self-confidence, and interest in leading electronic discussions with other beautiful and interesting people with a large and healthy self-confidence.”

(Are we surprised that the guy who launched a list celebrating beautiful people is bald? Maybe Elite was meant to be a confidence-booster.)

Can wonders how well-known journalists can participate in an e-mail list with people they may cover as part of their work, a perfectly reasonable question. Since this story was published on Wednesday, one journalist has lost a job over her membership and Can got a nasty, nasty anonymous SMS threatening to make his life hell forever (I'm thinking that Bard guy and/or his minions must have no sense of humor whatsoever.) Meanwhile, most of the actual Swedish cultural and business elite--the bosses anyway--have yawned collectively and claimed a private e-mail list is not exactly a threat to democracy.

No, the electronic threat to democracy is not the Elite list. According to some, that dubious honor belongs to the anonymous mud-slinging e-mails trashing the head of Sweden's Moderate Party, Fredrik Reinfeldt. It doesn't really matter what the messages claim, except that they claim he's doing something illegal and were sent to journalists, among others.

Reinfeldt has told reporters the e-mail campaign is an attempt to influence national elections. Turns out he's right. The party in power, the Social Democrats, ‘fessed up that an unnamed official is behind the campaign, which is against party rules, and a really bad thing, yadda yadda yadda. The Local website is dubbing it "Sweden's Watergate." According to Dagens Nyheter, this is the first time electronic mud-slinging has surfaced in a Swedish political campaign.

Bet it won’t be the last. So-called whisper campaigns have become a well-entrenched, if disturbing, part of political campaigns the world over. Today's lesson: You can run but you can't hide. The least endearing aspects of human nature will find you wherever you go.

(Yup, I'm on an extended cliché tear. Holler if I 've missed any.)

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2006

Pitching the Press: LG Mobile Phones Edition

Recently a PR practioner mailed me (and presumably many others) the following pitch. Is it good? Is it bad? Weigh in with your own critique.

"Once again, LG Mobile Phones is at the forefront of innovation in marketing efforts and initiatives. In particular, LG has entered two realms of marketing opportunity previously left untapped by mobile phone manufacturers.

"By aligning with superstar music producer Jermaine Dupri and Grammy nominated recording artist Mariah Carey, and developing 'LG Presents the Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri Post Grammy Celebration,' LG phones is intertwined with the entertainment industry on a level never before seen, with both performers and entertainment media.

"With their sponsorship of Cirque de Soleil's 'Delirium' tour, LG will have an intimate presence with the upwardly mobile, young professional audience that Cirque de Soleil performances tend to attract. These marketing initiatives have to potential to greatly expand LG's presence in key (and hard to reach) celebrity, young male and female demographics.

" 'LG Presents the Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri Post Grammy Celebration' was the hottest post-Grammy event in Hollywood. This exclusive event was attended by high-profile entertainers including Britney Spears, Anthony Keidis, Mischa Barton, Cedric the Entertainer, Carmen Electra and many more.

"All of these celebrities received their invitation on a video message featuring Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri, which was pre-loaded on a 'V' and sent to each individual. This opportunity offered LG the chance to supply product to the entertainment industry's most key influencers, with custom phones having been gifted to the two celebrity hosts (hi-res images of these one-of-a-kind 'V's by LG and the phone invitation are available upon request) in addition to the unique invitation.

"Another unique partnership that LG has forged during this process is with Red Engine Jeans, who have created a very tasteful co-branded jean that was included in the celebrity gift bags (images available.) Furthermore, LG's presence at this event--along with their entertainment devices like the 'V'--will give them exposure from entertainment media outlets that traditionally do not cover consumer products.

"Cirque de Soleil has long been one of the most surreal and mythical theater experiences available to audiences in North America. By signing on as one of three title sponsors, LG Mobile Phones will have the opportunity to generate greater brand awareness with the aspiring professional adults and sophisticated, affluent audience that attend Cirque performances. This 64 market tour allows LG to promote it's brand in cities and regions that are largely considered afterthoughts by mass marketing campaigns, essentially taking the form of a high-profile grassroots initiative."

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2006

Danish Cartoon Clash Continues

A team of four reporters wrote a great piece for today's British Observer on the roots of the cartoon clash and how a tiny (circ. 100,000) newspaper triggered global rioting with 12 crude cartoons of Mohammad.

"The initial publication of the cartoons brought no response other than some angry letters. But when in mid-October two of the artists received death threats, the menaces were widely reported and rekindled debate, prompting vicious, anti-Muslim comments on Danish talk shows. Coming soon after a series of new, strict laws relating to marriage and citizenship, enforcing obligatory Danish lessons and clamping down on imams, the row plugged straight into pre-existing tensions. A minor storm was on its way to becoming much bigger."

"...One showed the prophet with a bomb as a head, another with either horns or half a halo growing out of his head, a third showed a ragged line of suicide bombers arriving in heaven to be greeted by an anxious-looking prophet telling them: 'Stop stop, we ran out of virgins!'. Crude in execution and thought, the cartoons offended not merely because they breached the Islamic prohibition of representations of Muhammad, but because they depicted the prophet, seen as a man of peace and justice by Muslims, as a man of terror and violence."

The Observer explains how after the Danish newspaper editor decided to apologize (in a nearly insulting way, if you ask me), the editor of Berlin's Die Welt newspaper decided to republish the cartoons (which also ran in France and some other European papers) partly as a defense of press freedom and partly as a response to what he saw as double standards.

"The Arab world couldn't have it both ways. Anti-semitism is rampant in much of the 'hypocritical' Middle East, the editor wrote, with Jewish rabbis depicted on prime-time Syrian TV as cannibals. In this context, he felt poking fun at Muhammad was fair enough."

But was it fair? Simon Jenkins nails the issue in the British Sunday Times today. "Despite Britons’ robust attitude to religion, no newspaper would let a cartoonist depict Jesus Christ dropping cluster bombs, or lampoon the Holocaust. Pictures of bodies are not carried if they are likely to be seen by family members. Privacy and dignity are respected, even if such restraint is usually unknown to readers. Over every page hovers a censor, even if he is graced with the title of editor.

"To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best policy would have been to apologise and shut up. For Danish journalists to demand “Europe-wide solidarity” in the cause of free speech and to deride those who are offended as “fundamentalists . . . who have a problem with the entire western world” comes close to racial provocation. We do not go about punching people in the face to test their commitment to non-violence. To be a European should not involve initiation by religious insult."

Exactly. Exactly. Adding insult to injury, of course, was that tiny matter of the Danish prime minister refusing to see 11 (eleven!) ambassadors from Islamic countries who wanted to discuss the issue with him. Snubbing them might have played well to local voters but making them welcome and actually listening to their concerns at the first opportunity would have been a good way to model the virtues that Westerners supposedly hold dear. It might even have dampened the outrage that led, early this morning, to an attack on the Danish Embassy in Beirut. (The Swedish embassy was also damaged in the fire, and reportedly 18 people were injured.)

It would be nice to think that politicians and newspaper editors are learning something from this. But I'm skeptical.

"Of all the casualties of globalism, religious sensibility is the most hurtful," writes Jenkins. "...It is clearly hard for westerners to comprehend the dismay these gestures cause Muslims. The question is not whether Muslims should or should not 'grow up' or respect freedom of speech. It is whether we truly want to share a world in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from our own. The demand by foreign journalists that British newspapers compound their offence shows that moral arrogance is as alive in the editing rooms of northern Europe as in the streets of Falluja. That causing religious offence should be regarded a sign of western machismo is obscene."

It's also stupid. It completely plays into the hands of extremists who find it much easier to convince fellow Muslims that Westerners are unholy pigs who deserve eradication when we ridicule and insult their most holy symbol and then snub 11 representatives of Islamic nations.

Of course, there are extremists on both sides. Here's the response one guy has to a picture of young Danes lighting candles to encourage a dialog between the Danish newspaper and Muslim protestors.

"These misguided souls are unable – or unwilling – to see that with Islamists no dialogue is possible. With Islamists you either accept their outlook or else. We in the West settle our differences through debate and democratic process. They do it through chicanery and brutality."

This doesn't have to be a pissing contest. But extremists on both sides want to make it one. There's no guarantee, though, that it's a contest the Western world can win.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:56 PM | Comments (2)

February 03, 2006

Danish Newspaper Sparks Culture Clash

Good morning, class. Today's lesson is a thought experiment in the responsible exercise of free expression.

Let's pretend that the New York Times magazine wants to publish an article about the reluctance of some Catholic families to allow their sons to be alter boys in the wake of allegations that several priests in a particular parish sexually abused many children.

Next, let's pretend that NYT magazine's art director really liked to push the envelope, so he or she asks Andres Serrano to illustrate the feature article. The resulting photo, "Lube Priest," shows a half-empty jar of Vaseline, a full set of Rosary beads sullied by drops of some unknown liquid, a pair of size-6 Superman briefs, a crumpled black shirt with a clerical collar and a small photo of the Pope in an ornate gold frame.

The photo shows these objects in artful disarray on the floor as though they've been tossed there in a hurry. The foot of a bed, with a lump of twisted sheets, towers over this twisted still life in the background of the photo. Although we see only a fragment of the bed, it seems enormous and ominous and it overpowers the other objects. After publication of the article and illustration, some art critics hail "Lube Priest" as a masterpiece, others dimiss it as drivel and ACLU types defend the photo and newspaper by invoking the Constitution.

Since this is a thought experiment, your assignment is to imagine how Christians, Catholic and otherwise, might respond. Would they:

1. Salute the New York Times for fully exercising the rights of a free press by commissioning this illustration?

2. Personally regret the actions of the New York Times but support it publicly because of American respect and veneration for an independent press and press freedom?

3. Castigate the New York Times editors as atheist lunkheads and inundate them with sharply worded criticism, anonymous bomb threats, cancelled subscriptions, mass prayer protests on the sidewalk outside its building and other expressions of extreme outrage?

I suspect many people would choose number 3. I'm guessing a commissioned illustration with sticky Rosary beads, the Pope, a priest's collar and little boy's underpants would create a massive, immediate uproar. People would call for the illustration to be removed from the newspaper's web site, for the original to be destroyed, for the newspaper to apologize for its deeply offensive act and for the art director to be fired.

I would hope no Catholics expressed their anger violently. But some deeply religious anti-abortionists have killed doctors and bombed clinics, so I suppose it's both possible and indefensible.

In any case, I suspect Christians might explain why their anger is justified by saying something like this:

"In calling for an end to the display of this blasphemy ... people were not asking that their fragile sense of identity or boundaries be left undisturbed, but that their God be respected. ..."

Or they might say, if critics insisted on defending Serrano's art and its publication, something like this:

"To think a religious object can be extracted from its context and ‘purified,' ‘restored' or ‘improved' by doing to it something unthinkable among adherents of that tradition, is condescension. ..."

In fact, that's exactly what some people did say in response to Serrano's real-life "Piss Christ." And I'm thinking that outsiders, including non-Catholics and agnostics, understand why "Piss Christ" was deeply offensive to Catholics. And they would understand why Christians would be livid if the New York Times had specifically commissioned "Piss Christ."

Everybody with me so far? Good. Now, deliberately commissioning an illustration that a large number of people are guaranteed to find blasphemous and, thus, deeply offensive rarely occurs to editors but apparently it happens. An editor at Jyllands-Posten in Denmark heard about the difficulty a Danish author had in finding an illustrator for a children's book about Muhammad. Artists were afraid to illustrate the book for fear that they might be threatened. That's because images of Muhammad are considered blasphemous by most Muslims.

But Denmark isn't Iraq or Iran, so why the hell should Danish illustrators be too cowed to whip out a few editorial cartoons featuring Mohammad? I suspect the editor's thinking might have run alone that line and contributed to the newspaper's decision last September to publish an article about the issue, along with 12 caricatures of Mohammad it commissioned as illustrations.

This was not an especially wise move. Some of the illustrators now have guards. A boycott of Arla products has cost the Danish-Swedish dairy company millions. The newspaper has received bomb threats, Scandinavian citizens have been asked to leave certain areas, and it's possible that someone will die because of these stupid, stereotypical, offensive (one Mohammad has a bomb in his turban) and, yes, blasphemous images.

Several European newspapers have republished the images in support of the Danish newspaper, which issued on of those lame, Harry Shearer-ish type of non-apology apologies a few days back. Several other newspapers are under pressure to run the illustrations but have wisely refused. One British newspaper reader whined that the papers kowtowing to a misguided sense of political correctness. Hmm. Not everybody in the U.K. supports the monarchy but the mainstream papers don't run Photoshopped pictures of a nude Queen having sex with a servant. Is that political correctness? I don't think so.

There's an enormous cultural clash here. Westerners don't get it. Illustrations are no big deal to us. I've seen comments that Muslims should just "get over it." But that's like asking Britains to think it's okay if the London Times uses the Queen in some horrifying way or asking Catholics to be cool about a naked Pope and a poodle shown in Time magazine. Would we take such images in stride? I don't think so.

The New York Times piece on the controversy gives short shrift to the seriousness of the issue. "An international dispute over European newspaper cartoons deemed blasphemous by some [my emphasis] Muslims gained momentum on Thursday when gunmen threatened the European Union offices in Gaza and more European papers pointedly published the drawings as an affirmation of freedom of speech."

The New York Times reporter notes that he conflict "is the latest manifestation of growing tensions between Europe and the Muslim world as the Continent struggles to absorb a fast-expanding Muslim population whose customs and values are often at odds with Europe's secular societies." But not so fast. The Muslim population in Denmark is a lousy 4 percent. Maybe the Times could have mentioned that fact, but no.

The AP's Richard N. Ostling does a much better job of setting the controversy in context: "The spreading Muslim protests against newspapers that reprinted cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad stem from the deepest religious roots. Islam forbids visual depictions of the prophet, and regards violations by Muslims as highly sinful and by non-Muslims as the ultimate insult. The prohibition is in part an application of the Koran's strict opposition to idolatry. ...

"The Koran does not specifically address artwork of Muhammad, and through history a few Muslims have painted him. But the ban has been virtually universal in all branches of the faith from its earliest days. ... Zahik Bukhari, director of Georgetown University's American Muslim Studies Program, says the cartoons, first published in Denmark, constitute a triple offense for Muslims: first by depicting Muhammad at all; second by treating him disrespectfully; and third because 'in the present circumstance it is a symbol of the clash of civilizations that they want to insult the prophet and the whole of Islam.' "

Last I checked, the practioners of a faith get to decide what's blasphemous and what's not blasphemous. That is not up to outsiders to determine, no matter how much we want to.

The Danish paper ought to issue a real apology, not a pretend apology. According to one of the illustrators who works in the paper's art department, the newspaper's editor is a jerk who was itching to be provocative. Well, the editor was provocative all right. Not smart, not thoughtful, not educational. Just provocative. And now Norway, Sweden, Denmark and their citizens get to pay the price. Thanks a fucking pantload, as Denise Caruso might say.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2006

Google, China + Business as Usual

Google's under fire for its decision to follow Chinese law and censor some search results. This isn't news to any technology fan with a pulse. But I've been a little taken aback at the volume of the outcry over Google's new service in China. But then, perhaps it's anything but surprising that the blabosphere gets its knickers in a knot over the intellectual insult of restricted search results and not, say, the broken bodies of the people in China, Mexico, and elsewhere who churn out a big chunk of the goods we buy.

People I respect are among those critical of Google's move, but I don't get it. The company is simply practicing business as usual and, unlike Microsoft or Yahoo, without directly harming any individual Chinese citizen thus far (although, lord knows, that could change in the future).

Google isn't Enron. It's not Halliburton or even Hill & Knowlton. So why the enormous outcry? I think it's so fierce partly because it feels so personal. Journalists and bloggers can't imagine what it's like to sit inside a sweatshop sewing name-brand jeans with bleeding fingers. But we use Google services every day of the week.

And so we gnash our teeth, wax indignant and cite Google's infamous "do no evil" creed in support of our case. But it's beyond naive for an adult to take that language at face value and believe that anyone or anything outside of Google might be allowed to define its meaning. Some people are shocked, shocked that Google is participating in legal commerce. But that's the idea, after all.

On Friday Google's senior policy counsel, Andrew McLaughlin, claimed the company debated the issue for years and ultimately decided that "filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely."

That spin wildly overstates the case. As McLaughlin himself pointed out, Google.com is a bad experience for users in the Republic of China because the service is slow, incomplete and unavailable to users there about 10 percent of the time. Sucky service does not equal "failing to offer Google search at all," however, no matter how far you stretch it. But unlike the new service, Google.com wasn't optimized for Chinese users. Google's China baby will be fast, available and, yes, incomplete. The company decided it was a fair tradeoff.

Critics don't agree and they don't have to, but the company's reasoning makes sense to me. Whether Google can escape additional complicity with a horrific regime remains to be seen. The slippery slope is, after all, damn slippery. In the meantime, there's ample opportunity to be outraged over additional legal business dealings in China and elsewhere, and Google bashers should get a grip. The idea of censored search results will hardly be a surprise to Chinese Web surfers, although it seems as though the company could do a much better job of flagging it.

Google *is* a scary company but not because of its China policy. I don't use Google mail, for example, because I think it's creepy and potentially dangerous for any entity--animal, vegetable or mineral, government or corporation--to have access to all my e-mail, all my contacts, plus details on practically every step I take in cyberspace via cookies that track my IP address during all my Google searches.

It's not much fun to be seen as Darth Vader in the public imagination. But Google execs had best get used to it. Their vast ambitions, coupled with the nearly inevitable arrogance that so often builds within enormously successful companies, virtually guarantee that a Google backlash will continue to build.

It's how the world works. And maybe that's just as well.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2006

Glenn Fleishman Stalks Corporate Spin

I've long admired Glenn Fleishman for lots of reasons. He's really nice, he's really smart, he writes well (not as common as you might expect, even among professional writers) and he's alarmingly prolific. The freelance journalist, book author and blogger behind seven blogs is soft launching his eighth, about radio and the future of AM and FM right here.

Over at Wi-Fi Net News, Glenn has been covering the struggle to create municipal wireless networks for ages. He recently weighed in on plans (hopes?) to build a 1500-square-mile wireless network across Silicon Valley and highlights the gap between reality and the highly polished talking points parroted by corporate critics of municipal wireless.

“ 'Andrew Johnson, a Comcast Bay Area spokesman,…said companies that have spent billions of dollars to build wired networks shouldn’t be undermined by taxpayer funds focused toward a rival.' "

As Glenn notes, "Interestingly, virtually no municipal RFPs now involve taxpayer funds, but incumbents continue to play from that script. This RFP will involve roughy $40,000 from a few dozen cities."

” ‘The free market should be allowed to play out,’ he said. ‘A municipal subsidy, or a provision of a municipal WiFi network would not be the best use of taxpayer funds.’

"In other words, regardless of the fact that broadband firms have been spreading the notion that high-speed access is critical to individual businesses and entire communities, those communities have no right to ensure that they have what they want if they’re paying for it directly despite massive public subsidies paid to incumbents, which are never mentioned in the same breath as the 'billions' spent."

Exactly. Because if it's good for Comcast, it's good for the nation. Just keep saying it, no matter how bogus. Much of the time, spin wins.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2005

Conservative Punditry Pays (As Usual)

"As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants - all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.

"Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.

"Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts with lush fairways; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two."

It's entertaining to read embittered AP writers carp about Tom DeLay's lavish lifestyle but it shouldn't come as a shock. Rulers are supposed to exist on a higher plane than the mere mortals who elect and support them. That's one of the reasons Time magazine was so relieved to see the last of Jimmy Carter's cardigan and embrace Ronald Reagan's imperial presidency. It was a long time ago and my memory may be going but I vividly recall reading an exceptionally gushing article about Reagan's stylish inauguration. The subtext was obvious: Washington breathes sigh of relief as low-rent peanut farmer and spouse slink home, replaced by classy, more appropriate power couple.

So Mr. DeLay represents business as usual, allbeit cranked up a notch or two compared to some of his peers. Apparently paying columnists--at least, conservative ones--is business as usual, too. Even more than I realized.

"A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients. Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley News Service, told BusinessWeek Online that he had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s."

How'd I miss that gravy train? Nobody offered me a bonus for my columns at Fortune.com or FamilyPC. Damn, I should have interned with the National Review instead of Mother Jones in college.

" 'It was a lapse of judgment on my part, and I take full responsibility for it,' Bandow said from a California hospital, where he's recovering from recent knee surgery." One is tempted to hope the surgery came after a kneecapping by indignant members of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Or Jon Carroll even. But that seems unlikely. As Dave Barry once noted, working journalists tend to have poor do-it-yourself skills.

"Bandow isn't the only think-tanker to have received payments from Abramoff for writing articles. Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, says he, too, took money from Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist's clients. 'I do that all the time,' Ferrara says. 'I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future.'

"Ferrara, who has been an influential conservative voice on Social Security reform, among other issues, says he doesn't see a conflict of interest in taking undisclosed money to write op-ed pieces because his columns never violated his ideological principles."

You know the punchline: That's because he doesn't have any.

"Ferrara's boss has a very different take on the Abramoff op-ed writing than did his peers at Cato. 'If somebody pinned me down and said, Do you think this is wrong or unethical? I'd say no,' says Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation. Giovanetti says critics are applying a 'naive purity standard' to the op-ed business. 'I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.' "

I'm beginning to get that sense myself. I'm lovin' the logic here. Other people do it, so it's okay. I'd write it anyway, so it's okay. I truly believe it, so it's okay.

If these payments are on the up and up, then why weren't they public knowledge to begin with? Why were there no disclosure statements so the poor saps who read the columns and watch these guys preen during TV appearances and listen to their self-important utterances over the radio know exactly where the pundits get their paychecks?

And if payments on the side are such a fine practice, if they are simply rewards for doing what the pundits would be doing in any case, then why aren't other people getting them? Why aren't you getting a little extra from those nice lobbyists for the good job you did last month? Why isn't the grocery clerk getting a little extra for her great bagging skills? Or your doctor? (Oh, right. Maybe she is getting a little something extra, although not from Abramoff.)

There's a term of art for people like Bandow, Ferrara and Giovanetti but sleaze doesn't entirely do them justice. These folks aren't journalists or editors but they play them on TV. As a result, their slimy dealings taint actual journalists and editors. Which sucks for a lot of reasons, including the fact that we're plenty capable of screwing up on our own. So guys, give it a rest.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:03 PM | Comments (1)

December 15, 2005

The Ghostwriter in the Machine

"Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine admitted that a 2000 article it published highlighting the advantages of Merck & Co.'s Vioxx painkiller omitted information about heart attacks among patients taking the drug. The journal has said the deletions were made by someone working from a Merck computer. Merck says the heart attacks happened after the study's cutoff date and it did nothing wrong." Merck should have tried a more fashionable excuse and claimed, say, that a company editor mistook the study for a Wikkipedia entry.

Merck's not the only one suffering. Poor Michael Anello. Tuesday's front-page story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) probably didn't much help his freelance writing career. "Ghost Story" leads by describing a 2001 article in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases that was ostensibly written by one Alex J. Brown, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Why then was it included as one of Anello's writing samples on his business web site? Because he wrote it. Most of it, anyway. The pharma companies have plenty of spinmeisters on hand for the pesky press but Anello is a solo practioner. Imagine picking up the phone and having a WSJ reporter on the other end. Yikes!

Anna Wilde Mathews writes about ghostwriters as the "open secret" of medical publishing. "Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the bylines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats."

A handy chart illustrates how pharmaceutical companies fund medical researchers to study their products, then hire medical marketing and communication companies to oversee the production of articles based on those studies and bearing the name of those researchers as primary author even though, in some cases, they may not have added so much as a comma. (The comma example is mine, based on a conversation I had with a friend in the industry.) Talk about your closed system: it's sheer genius at work and the WSJ has excerpts from various documents to prove it.

The bad PR about Merck and the New England Journal of Medicine is probably just a brief hiccip for this smoothly humming marketing machine. As Wilde Mathews points out, ghostwriters help scientists (it's easier to author lots of articles if you don't have to actually write them all), journal editors (it's easier to edit clear, professionally written articles than amateur prose) and the pharmaceutical companies that underwrite them. You can bet pharma cos pay for approved marketing messages and approved marketing messages only, no matter what the companies claim publicly. I mean, would you pay to be trashed in print, even if the damaging facts were true?

Me neither.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

Late to Wikki Mudslinging

I am so late to the Wikki mudslinging festivities. I had no idea Adam Curry had been buffing his image on Wikkipedia by judiciously editing a post on the history of podcasting. But since anybody gets to be an editor, why not?

Which means he's probably not the only one. As one wag claims (gotta scroll way down), "In related news, a bearded Al Gore has been holed up in a log cabin in Tennessee, wearing only a pair of tattered boxer shorts, where he has been secretly editing Wikipedia entries to make sure he gets props for inventing the Internet."

Poor Al, stuck with the myth that won't die.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)

Wiki Author Apologizes, Would the Tabloids?

The guy who posted "false and scandalous entries" about a journalist on Wikkipedia as a joke has not only apologized for his unfortunate behavior but also resigned from his job. This is part of the scandalous entry, now excised from Wikkipedia: "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."

There's more, all of it nonsense, about the journalist's move to the Soviet Union, starting a PR firm (no, that wasn't the scandalous part), and other phony tidbits. Seigenthaler was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant and one of the pallbearers at Kennedy's funeral so the 78-year-old was angry and horrified to discover that the lies in Wikkipedia had spread to Answers.com and Reference.com. It didn't make him any happier to discover that it might be impossible, without a lawsuit, to discover the hoaxster's identity.

The responsible party came clean without any prodding by a lawsuit and appears to be a stand-up guy in several ways. "Brian Chase, 38, a manager at a small delivery service in Nashville, presented a letter of apology Friday explaining his role to the journalist, John Seigenthaler, a former editor of Nashville's Tennessean and a founder of the First Amendment Center there," notes the piece in USA Today. "Seigenthaler urged Chase's boss, James White, not to accept his resignation."

Here's the baffling part: Brian Chase voluntarily identified himself as the author, apologized in writing, then resigned from his job over this incident, which appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with his employment. Zip. Nada. Noll. Meanwhile, media professionals (let's not call them journalists) over at the National Enquirer made hay on Friday over the alledged overdose and collapse of Michael Jackson, everybody's favorite future dead celeb. I know about this only because my kid voraciously reads the lurid front pages of the Swedish tabloids every chance she gets. On Saturday, as we stood in line to pay for our groceries at a local market, she kept darting away to read a little more from the Expressen's front page, which featured a huge pic of Jackson and a screaming headline: "Michael Jackson Found Lifeless After Overdose." (Here's the web version.)

Because I only saw the headline, I thought Jackson was a goner. Later, when I read the piece online, it claimed that the guy was basically in the hospital fighting for his life, "according to several American media" (my translation) but not, as it happens, Wikkipedia. I kept reading, and discovered that "several" apparently meant two: the National Enquirer and the Drudge Report. Now anybody who pays attention knows that Matt Drudge mostly links to celebrity news and does not usually constitute a source in his own right. (Sometimes he breaks a story but rarely and he's not regarded in the industry as the most reliable source.) In this case it's very clear that Drudge linked to the National Enquirer's report, which promptly got yanked. Traces of the story remain but I can't locate even a Google cache of the original. It wasn't hard to find a story disputing the claim.

Jackson is one sad, scary, messed-up guy. I wouldn't want him in my house or near my neighborhood. But his character is not the issue when it comes to accurate reporting. Jackson's spokesperson has denied the overdose report. That hardly resolves the issue. No offense intended to Jackson's mouthpiece but it's not unknown for press handlers to misspeak on occasion. If the National Enquirer's report turned out to be bogus, I wonder what would happen. Would the upstanding media professionals at the Enquirer and Expressen demonstrate as much honor as Brian Chase, media amateur, by apologizing and then resigning?

I think we both know the answer. Not a chance.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

Web Notes: PDF Files

Please stop assaulting me with unidentified PDF files. Hell, with PDF files generally. Not you, gentle reader, those other folks out there. Those web wieners who've decided that PDF files are so darn swell there's no need to identify links that lead to them. Which means that innocent visitors looking for more info click hopefully on what appears to be a normal html link and then blam, there's yet another unwanted PDF file on the ground. That, my friend, is crappy marketing and the result of anal-retentive management.

Here's the thing: I want to know that there's a PDF file on the other end of the link *before* I click on it because PDF files require both time and space, items that are often in short supply here at Casa Branscum. It is true that web wieners are not committing rape, robbery or arson in this case, merely thoughtlessness, but it's annoying nonetheless.

Speaking of annoying, why is so much perfectly innocent information, especially info provided for the press, in PDF format anyway? Why must I download a PDF file to get background info on an executive instead of quickly checking an html page with that info? In Adobe's case, it's because the company developed Acrobat and the format. But a supposed global leader in Internet media and market research doesn't have that excuse--and by the way, Nielsen/NetRatings, time to start labeling those Latest Breaking Press Releases as PDF files, doncha think?

There are many fine uses for the PDF format. But it is not the universal web solvent and not an appropriate format for press releases. I'm not the only critic of this practice. It's just dumb, so stop already.

In unrelated news, I'm happy to report that grillz is now a more popular search term for enticing people to Stuffola than amputee. What a relief that Stuffola is finally attracting a less disturbed group of visitors (not that Stuffola has a problem with being disturbed). Welcome!

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2005

Spinning Iraq: Immoral, Ineffective or Both?

Why am I not surprised to discover that the U.S. military is paying a contractor to manufacture pro-U.S. articles that Iraqi publications are secretly paid to publish? That's right: Because the administration did virtually the same damn thing here in the United States. As you may recall, the main difference is that the secret beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse here in the U.S. were freelancer (or freelancers, who knows?) and columnists rather than newspapers and radio stations. (Speaking of largesse, The Hill notes that many of the former colleagues of bribe-glutton and ex-Republication Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham "are mulling what to do with tens of thousands of dollars they received in campaign contributions from Cunningham’s co-conspirators." Hey, life's a bitch.)

"As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military 'information operations' troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times."

Kudos to LAT reporters Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi for their scoop, although you gotta wonder if it was practically handed to them given one clearly pissed-off anonymous source: " 'Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it,' said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media." He or she must be late to the party. All the reigning rulers plant propaganda.

The lucky contractor churning out what the LAT calls "basically factual" but one-sided news stories is the Lincoln Group. The unsurprisingly closed-mouth company "won a $100 million contract with the Special Operations Command to assist with psychological operations," according to GovExec.com, which covers the Lincoln Group's sketchy history and the founder's Republican ties. (You just know the author got carpel tunnel trying to google the company into submission.) The 30-something founder, it turns out, has a Silicon Valley connection. Hey Dan Gillmor, know anything about Christian Bailey? He apparently moved to SF in the late 1990s, started an e-commerce company called Express Action in 1999, sold it, and moved on to better and clearly bigger things.

There are a couple of amusing items in the LAT piece.

"The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media ... comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled 'The Role of Press in a Democratic Society.' Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations."

Even though many of them are enormous profit-making enterprises, standards must vary widely among U.S. newspapers as well. How else to explain this nifty new reward program? (In the U.S., government propaganda is bad, while corporate propaganda is simply business as usual.) Then there's the following quote, which made me chuckle.

"Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, said that he did not believe that planting stories in Iraqi media was wrong. But he questioned whether the practice would help turn the Iraqi public against the insurgency. 'I don't think that there's anything evil or morally wrong with it,' he said. 'I just question whether it's effective.' "

That is the question that has always haunted the people who pay PR practioners, covert or not. But that's not an issue for the Lincoln Group. The client is always right, and the Lincoln Group has 100 million reasons not to question the project. As it happens, I have a real flair for news headlines, especially in Arabic. Just holler, Chris, if you need another freelancer.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2005

Design Disappointment

Just got back from eyeballing the fashion-designer-decorated Christmas trees at the Birger Jarl hotel, which touts its design credentials with every drop of a press release.

"This is yet another interesting angle of our image, in which Swedish colour, form and design are in focus. The concept allows for many combinations of interaction between people, material and form," claims Marianne Hultberg, Managing Director of Hotel Birger Jarl, in a press release (I'd link but it's a PDF file). "It is especially exciting to be able to unite an old tradition with completely new concepts, to the delight of our guests and everyone in general," she says.

What a disappointment. It happens that I had an errand at Immanual Church, which appears to be part of the complex housing the Birger Jarl. It's not like I made a special trip, in other words, but my ten-year-old could have turned out something more interesting. A colorful, pulsating clump of mini trees made me think of America (except for the ceramic troll in front) but not, say, Design with a capital D. None of them did.

A couple were pretty, so that was something. (There's supposedly one dressed up as a Midsommar Maypole but I didn't spot it.) The Amnesty tree was worthy but dull, a real-life representation of the organization itself. (Hope one of the nice Amnesty volunteers doesn't come into my office right now and beat me to death with an Amnesty-logo-etched drinking glass, even though I deserve it.) One amusing tree was bedecked with tree-shaped air fresheners that had glossy fashion and ad pics glued on the back. But the display, on the whole, sucked. That doesn't make it an ineffective PR ploy, of course. The hotel was able to squeeze ink out of a variety of local newspapers and blogs so I suppose it paid off. But next time, hold a contest, make a big deal out of it and actually give the designers (by donating money to their favorite causes, perhaps?) a reason to feel more passionate about their creations.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

Online Sales = Big Butts?

Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury, among others, has reported on the new Pew Internet and American Life Project survey, which estimates that one in six American adults online has sold something through an Internet classified ad or auction site. (The word estimate is mine, btw. Why doesn't every journalist add that qualifier to survey items--what, it's too obvious? I think not.)

"The number of visitors to online classified sites jumped 80 percent from September 2004 to this September, according to data from comScore Media Metrix that was released as part of the Pew study. Craigslist was the most popular classified ads site, with 8.7 million visitors in September. Close behind was Trader Publishing Co., which operates nearly four dozen vehicle, merchandise, housing and employment sites, such as BargainTraderOnline.com and ForRent.com."

As Bazeley notes, "Much has been made about the effect that craigslist has had on newspaper classified advertising" but as far as I can tell, no one has considered the effect that Craigslist, eBay and other online sites may have had on the expanding American waistline. The so-called obesity epidemic has been linked to many factors, including excessive TV, a lack of exercise, the growing size of food portions and even movements in personal income tax rate and in the gender wage gap. So why can't online sales be a contributing factor?

Big butts are unhealthy, however we got them. And now, it turns out, they're unhealthy in an unexpected way. As Jessica Heslam writes in the Boston Herald,"Rapping about big behinds made Sir Mix-A-Lot famous, but a new medical study says those plump rumps don’t do women any good when it comes to getting a shot in the traditional spot. Researchers say a majority of people, especially women, aren’t getting the proper dosage from backside shots because the needle can’t get through the blubber. As few as one in 10 women (and six in 10 men) may be getting proper dosages from injections, said Dr. Victoria Chan of Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin."

CBS News explains why this matters: "The medicine gets injected into the buttock muscles, then filters into nearby blood vessels. Such shots are used for a variety of medicines, including vaccines, painkillers, contraceptives, and antinausea drugs." I may be joking about the online sales-obesity connection but drugs that can't do their job are no fun, especially for women who end up with pregnant or ill as a result.

At least there's one bright spot on the horizon: the obesity rate in Mexico is expected overtake the U.S. rate soon. Alas, no word yet on how their pets rank compared to our pets.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2005

The Internet Metaphor Battle: Place vs. Plumbing

As mentioned earlier, Bruce Schneier has reported on what he calls the real story behind Sony's rootkit misadventure: "the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us." ZDNet's David Berlind agrees that's noteworthy but says the overall digital rights managment situation is the larger issue.

"Sony's rootkit, as bad as it was, isn't the real story. The way the entertainment cartel is applying DRM as a whole is the real story. They're applying DRM in a way that the Sony fiasco was inevitable. This wasn't the first time lack of DRM interoperability manifested itself in the end-user experience in an ugly way, and it won't be the last. ... Unbeknownst to most people, what started with music (let's just say audio) already applies to video and it's not going to stop there."

Where will it stop? With total corporate control if we're not careful, and we're not just talking audio, video and text. That's not how Berlind put it but it's a fair description of the bleak future painted by Doc Searls in the passionate plea for activism pointed to by Berlind. Doc is in rare form and no wonder: he's a modern Paul Revere trying to spur his beloved community to action before it's too late.

"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net's free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?

"Do you believe a free and open market should be 'Your choice of walled garden' or 'Your choice of silo'? That's what the big carrier and content companies believe. That's why they're getting ready to fence off the frontiers.

"And we're not stopping it."

Doc's scary links document the threat to the Internet as we know it and explains why the words we use are so important.

"In this debate the radicals are the carriers. We need to fight them, just as Larry and crew need to fight the copyright extremists: by re-framing the subject. To start we acknowledge the necessity of the transport metaphor; but also its insufficiency. Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it's not only packets, or 'content' or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context."

Read Doc's essay, then read his blog for responses and contributions from other folks. I'm no visionary but I worry that Doc is right. After all, corporations do whatever necessary to make a profit. If telcos and cable companies need to gate every little stretch of the Internet to thrive, they'll do it--if we let them. (For a historic perspective on how corporations exercise power, don't miss Ted Nace's book "Gangs of America" for educational and entertaining reading.)

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)

November 18, 2005

Sony: Weirder and Weirder

Before the move to Sweden, I envisioned my kid embracing age-old Swedish traditions. I saw her in the woods, picking berries or mushrooms. In summer I imaged her splashing in the Baltic Sea while, in winter months, she'd skate across frozen lakes. Yeah, right.

The global sway of American pop culture had completely escaped my notice before the move. These days I get frequent reminders of it. The one this morning arrived in the form of earnest 11-year-olds swaying on stage while mumbling the lyrics to "Wake Me Up When September Ends" under the considerably more energetic direction of the spiky-haired music teacher at our elementary school. (You haven't lived until you've heard class 5A sing "twenty years has gone so fast.") I like Green Day too but jeez, whatever happened to "Du Gamla, Du Fria"?

Luckily Sweden isn't so Americanized yet that corporate execs here could secretly collect information from customer computers without expecting a jail sentence. Sony's probably big enough to survive this debacle (including lawsuits and more nasty PR) but what about First4Internet, the British company that provided both the flawed copy-protection software and the flawed uninstaller? To the glee of many, it appears that some of the free code used by First4Internet in the digital-rights management software it developed for Sony was used in a way that violated the terms of its copyright. As The Register put it, "The irony of a company using code from someone who circumvented DRM to develop an even nastier form of DRM - without even saying 'Thanks!' - will surely feature in geek trivia quizzes for years to come."

Confused yet? I have been so Andrew Kantor's column in USA Today is a gift of clarity about the degree of evil Sony has wrought. I understood that Sony's DRM format caused a security problem. But not the all-important fact that Sony's patch for "removing" the original software also created a security problem--among other failings. As Kantor explains:

"In order to get the patch, you have to provide your name, e-mail address, and other personal information to Sony. When you finally download the thing, it does the patch thing, and then it installs all sorts of new stuff that Sony doesn't tell you about. And it continues to send your listening habits to Sony and its partners, but now it has a bunch of your personal information too. But wait. Incredibly, there's more. The patch itself, it turns out, opens another big security hole."

Talk about criminal cluelessness. Sony first produced CDs that 1. secretly installed software on your computer, 2. secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to, 3. created a security hole in your PC and finally, 4. damaged the operating system if anyone tried to remove it. Sony's considered response to the outrage provoked by this news was first to deny there was a problem, then to demand lots of personal information before giving you a software fix that 1. secretly installed software on your computer that secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to and 2. created another, larger security hole in your PC.

No wonder I couldn't keep the story straight. It's pure Hollywood. And while it may be Sony's biggest screwup, it's not the company only screwup. "Sony's general incompetence when it comes to digital music boggles the mind," notes David Pogue. "First there was its 'iPod killer' music players, which were initially released without the ability to play a little file format called MP3. Then there was its disastrous Connect music store, whose design was so wasteful of screen space it was almost unuseable. And now the astonishing move to copy-protect all of its music CD's--ironically, in some cases, over the strident objections of the actual bands--with software that behaves like spyware."

As David points out, angry consumers aired their complaints in public forums like Amazon reviews, where they vowed not to buy affected CDs. Information Week went to town with this headline: Bloggers Break Sony. "There's a whole new set of rules that people have to live by," Factiva CMO Alan Scott told Information Week (Factiva just happens to make text-mining software to help execs track the gossip about their companies). "Whether it's blogs or user groups or NGOs, it's all about honesty and authenticity. This is just the latest painful example of a major company finding that the old tools and the old actions don't work."

Those old tools and old actions, also known as lies and lying, do work often enough. Just not this time. And as much as we'd all like to see these go away, I'm confident that in certain circles dissembling will always be in style. Even now I bet there's a bunch of executives nationwide using Sony's situation as a case study in crisis PR when it should be a case study in ethics. Sony's actions were wrong before they became public knowledge and they're wrong now. Too bad the company hasn't figured that out.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)

November 17, 2005

The Real Story Behind Sony's Rogue Rootkit

Bruce Schneier delivers the goods in a terrific Wired News article that ticks through several entertaining aspects of Sony's use of a secret software tool, a rootkit, to protect its CDs and its bungled attempt to help people remove it. There are so many twists that it's hard to see the big picture. Sony's hubris, he notes, is plenty large.

"Sony BMG's president of global digital business demonstrated the company's disdain for its customers when he said, 'Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?' in an NPR interview."

That attitude, while breathtaking in its miscalculation, is not the real story, according to Schneier.

"The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us," Schneier writes. "What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn't notice Sony's rootkit as it infected half a million computers? ... This is exactly the kind of thing we're paying those companies to detect -- especially because the rootkit was phoning home.

"But much worse than not detecting it before Russinovich's discovery was the deafening silence that followed. When a new piece of malware is found, security companies fall over themselves to clean our computers and inoculate our networks. Not in this case."

Read Schneier report's for names, dates and details. Schneier, a security wiz and cofounder of a corporate IT security firm, is asking questions that need to be answered. "What happens when the creators of malware collude with the very companies we hire to protect us from that malware? ... Who are the security companies really working for? What will they do the next time some multinational company decides that owning your computers is a good idea?"

My guess? Roll over and play dead for as long as they can. Just as many of them did this time around.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gay Scat, Nylons & Sony: The Evil of Stealth Software

As you probably know, Sony is busy backpeddling from a boneheaded decision to use a secret form of digital rights management software on its CDs. As the London Free Press explains, "This anti-copying software would automatically install on a user's computer when the music CD was inserted in a computer disk drive. ...The application was designed to install at a 'root' or system level and be disguised so it could not be found by normal means. Also, the computer user would need to read the entire user agreement and understand the wording in order to have any awareness of the application and how it would operate.

"Second, the media player Sony used with the CDs would send the Internet protocol address of the user's computer and their listening habits back to Sony -- without notice to the user. As if that wasn't enough to create a public relations problem, the application could be co-opted by a hacker. Designed to hide a legitimate objective (preventing unauthorized copying) it could also be used to hide other objects, including malicious code taking advantage of the Sony technology. It did not take long for an exploit to appear."

Insert Scream-like expressions of horrified PR execs here.

What's interesting about Sony's stupid move (aside from reminding us of the age-old truism that companies are perfectly happy to mislead their customers when it suits them) is how much it mirrors the common, sleazy tactics of so many Internet bottom feeders. My PC was hijacked recently thanks to an unknown person in Odessa and Integrated Search Technologies, which appears to specialize in software that both forces itself upon consumers and downloads third-party software PC users haven't requested.

The hijack happened because I wondered why this blog (and others) got a slew of trackback spam that promoted mainstream branded products (including autos from Ford and Toyota and phones made by Nokia) along with the usual collection of links to gay scat (who knows?), casino and big boob sites. So I followed a trackback link to a faux Nokia 7280 review at mobile-nokia.info/ nokia-7280-high-fashion-lipstick-phone while recklessly using IE (Foxfire is my usual choice).

Quicker than you can say foolhardy, a security warning appearing on my screen and asked if I wanted to install and run something from Integrated Search Technologies (IST). The answer was no no, a thousand times no but the evil scum who engineered this particular piece of marketing madness didn't care what I wanted. The first gray box was replaced with another: "Click YES to have access now."

The bottom of the IE window said it was “installing components…ysb_regular.cab” so I shut down the PC. When I restarted, a file called download.xxx was sitting on the desktop. After I deleted the program, I used Firefox (under my settings, it should *not* allow a web site to download or install software without my permission, although I did allow Javascript, to go back to the site and saw this:“Applet Installer Applet started." In a panic, I unplugged the PC. Later I turned off Javascript in Firefox and went back to the site. No problemo.

The WHOIS registry lists an Odessa address as the registrant behind the faux Nokia wonderland that hijacked my PC but he or she is not the power behind the sneaky software. According to DOXdesk, that dubious honor belongs to IST, which provides ysb_regular.cab or the ISTbar, “an IE toolbar, homepage- and search-hijacker."

DOXdesk is wildly helpful in explaining how it works: “Installed by ActiveX drive-by download on affiliate sites; typically porn in the case of XXXToolbar, from April 2003. An ‘aggressive’ downloader is usually used: if you refuse the download, a JavaScript alert complains that it won’t take no for an answer and opens the download window again.” In my case it didn't open the download window again, it simply downloaded the program despite my frantic attempts to stop it.

According to DOXdesk, all versions of this corrupt bit of coding "also install other third-party software which includes advertising." This is not the worst part, though. The worst part is this: the software “can download and execute arbitrary unsigned code from its controlling server. This is used both to update the software and to install third-party software.”

IST describes itself as "a leading Internet marketing solutions provider, specializing in effectively targeting valuable customers at the moment they are most interested in a particular product or service. IST targets the customers through several different delivery methods such as highly effective toolbars and plugins available for Internet Explorer." Plenty of folks would disagree with that description, including those who've filed a complaint with the FTC against the company.

Until recently, I would never have compared companies like IST and Sony but now I do. Smooth move, Sony. You gotta wonder why this behavior is legal for Sony, for Integrated Search Technologies or for any other company or individual. Regulators, are you listening?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2005

Journalism 2.0: It's Not the Meat, It's the Motion

A while back I linked to Nicholas Carr, who had some interesting things to say about the rise of Web 2.0. For a guy who appreciates diversity of opinion, Jeff Jarvis seemed quick to dismiss Carr as an elitist curmudgeon after "linkjuice." Plenty of other smart folks have hammered him as well. Carr may be wrong about some things but he's not wrong about the near-religious cult inspired by the Internet and all the delicious, gleaming possibilities that seem to hover just beyond our grasp. Jarvis dismisses that point, perhaps because he hasn't spent as many years as I have interviewing tech execs peddling products that are Going To Change The World For The Better Forever and that, ideally, we're supposed to drop to our knees and worship on the spot.

But no matter--bloggers will blog, vloggers will vlogg and professional media companies will continue to morph if they must. So fuck the amateur vs. professional debate. Fuck the Web 2.0 debate. I want to see a debate about public service and the practice of journalism. What does it mean? What should it mean? Is do-gooder journalism even possible?

Here's the media revolution so far: Individuals, such as myself, get to play pundit from the comfort of our homes, while companies have tumbled to the wisdom of hiring bloggers to promote their brands. That the blogosphere is safe for both gasbag cranks and corporate communications isn't my idea of massive progress. Yes, I'm being cranky. There's tons of great stuff as well. But where's the public service journalism? The press has a duty to keep the public informed in large matters and small. Community listings are a public service, to be sure. But where are the muckrakers? There are a few, very few, practitioners and you gotta wonder if ambitious public service journalism has a future in the United States in any medium. Lord knows it hasn't made much of a splash in the recent past. That's no surprise. There's always been a conflict between profit-driven journalism and public service, and there always will be. As well as disagreement about what constitutes public service.

Here's what I mean by public service: life-saving or life-enhancing journalism on behalf of the public good. Journalism that triggers meaningful change (hectoring Dan Rather or Trent Lott, however satisfying, doesn't qualify). Journalism has never been an especially effective means for improving life for citizens (particularly the less-powerful ones), and it seems even less effective now than it once was.

My first journalism job was as a fact-checker for Mother Jones, which was a bastion of investigative journalism. I was young enough to believe that simply working there constituted a kind of public service. I was wrong. Writing about injustice is not the same as righting injustice. Even if conventional media organizations cared about making the world better, odds are they couldn't. Tell me I'm wrong about this. Show me how journalism--not all of it, just some of it--is actually attacking corruption, eradicating pollution or maybe just making life a little easier for the elderly neighbors next door. Seriously. I'm begging you.

A smart and happy crew of true believers is busy building a better Web. Will we build a better journalism? Dan Gillmor and others are working on it and good luck to them. I hope so-called citizen journalism doesn't stop at online bulletin boards. And that journalism 2.0, once it jells, will be a genuine cause for celebration rather than business as usual in a slightly flashier suit.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:41 PM | Comments (1)

October 25, 2005

The Kinky Appeal of Avian Flu

The Avian Flu is coming. Are you scared yet? You should be. Various newspapers and helpful outlets like The History Channel are doing their best to scare the bejeesus out of us. But why would we allow ourselves to be scared? Physician Abigail Zuger shares her experience in a terrific essay in today's New York Times. Some of her patients prefer to worry about unlikely health threats rather than actual health threats. (Don't miss the emphysema sufferer who prefers worrying about avian flu to quitting cigarettes.) Once again, denial trumps reality. And why not? Reality is a bitch.

"Of four patients I saw in a single hour last week, three announced how scared they were of the avian flu. I reassured them, but there was quite a bit I did not say, and here it is.

"I did not say: If you want to be scared, then how about that drug habit of yours you think I don't know about? How about the fact that you are 100 pounds overweight and eat nothing but junk? How about the fact that in a few short months Medicaid is going to stop paying for your very expensive medications and no one knows how just high that Medicare Part D deductible and co-payment are going to be? I did not say: If you want something to be scared of, how about the drug-resistant Klebsiella that is all over this very hospital, an ordinary run-of-the-mill bacterial strain that has become so resistant to so many antibiotics that we've had to resurrect a few we stopped using 30 years ago because they were so toxic.

"That Klebsiella is one scary germ. It's in hospitals all over the country, and by now it's probably killed a thousandfold more people than the avian flu.

"But you don't hear much about our Klebsiella. Like our bad habits and our dismally insoluble health insurance tangles, our antibiotic-resistant bacteria are with us, right here, right now."

Speaking of dismally insoluble health insurance tangles, it's nice to see Wal-Mart's charm offensive include more affordable health insurance for its employees. Although that won't solve all their problems. If they get seriously ill the first year, they're screwed thanks to a $25K cap on benefits. And if Barbara McNees has her way, the naughty ones won't get coverage because they won't deserve it. McNees is president and CEO of the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce and as a representative of small businesses, she's understandably concerned about the employer cost of health insurance.

"We must deal with the 600-pound gorilla sitting in the national living room -- health care spending that is approaching one-sixth of U.S. gross domestic product. This will require nothing less than wrenching changes in health care delivery, health care financing (e.g., no payments for preventable patient injuries such as hospital-acquired infections) and individual accountability for behavioral choices."

Individual accountability for behavioral choices: Does that mean smokers would no longer be entitled to health insurance? That only wealthy people would be able to afford character defects, at least when it came to medical treatment? Isn't getting lung cancer, say, accountability enough? Do we have to thumb our noses at people who may have made some poor choices and deny them insurance coverage as well? That is one scary concept. Scarier, even, than avian flu. McNees may spring from upstanding, Puritan stock that never exhibited human weakness or fraility in any way. Most Americans can't make that claim. We're flawed; so are the people we love. But not as flawed as McNees' idea or a health system that leaves millions without coverage.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:02 PM | Comments (1)

October 20, 2005

I Do Not Hate Microsoft: WSJ Edition

In response to John Dvorak's claim that tech journalists are besotted with Apple because they use Macs rather than PCs, WSJ Personal Technology columnist Walt Mossberg has this response:

"I can't speak for other writers and reviewers, but I use both platforms daily. And which machine I use has nothing to do with my reviews. I have praised Apple products in reviews written on Windows PCs, and praised Microsoft stuff in reviews written on Macs. The argument is just ludicrous.

"The truth is that Apple is the most innovative computer company, and the only one that largely aims at consumers and very small businesses. All the others are mainly focused on big corporate customers, as is Microsoft. There's nothing wrong with that, but I am focused on consumers, and the consumer space is also where change -- and thus news -- happens fastest.

"I have no problem with Microsoft's p.r. people -- they are smart and professional and I work well with them. But Apple has been on a roll for five years or more, with great products. As I have said publicly, if the products go south, I'll turn on them in a New York minute."

Walt left his response in the comments section of yesterday's posting (thanks!), and I hope other journalists drop by to respond.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2005

Do Mac-Lovin' Hacks Hate Microsoft or Love Apple Too Much?

PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak claims that tech journalists love Apple because they're so starry-eyed over the Macs they use. The upshot, he claims, is reporting that's biased against Microsoft.

"As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today's newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. It's a fact. ... The newsroom editors are generally so out of touch that they can't see this bias. Besides, they use Macs too. There are entire newsrooms, such as the one at Forbes, that consist entirely of Macintoshes. Apparently nobody but me finds this weird.

"Even Jack Shafer, who recently wrote about Apple's skewed coverage in Slate fails to point out the connection between the skewed coverage and the existence of this peculiar conflict of interest based on the national writers' use of Macs. I often confront these guys with this assertion, and they, to a man (I've never confronted a female reporter about this), all say that they use a Mac 'because it is better.' Right. And that attitude doesn't affect coverage now, does it?"

It's an interesting question. If you're covering Microsoft and you use a Mac exclusively, I can see how that might be a problem. But John's not talking about wet-behind-the-ears newbies. Read the whole column and it's obvious he's including tech veterans like Steven Levy, John Markoff, Walt Mossberg, Katie Hafner and a bunch of other folks who've been around the block a few times. He doesn't name them but they certainly appear to be among his targets (and I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong).

Jack Slater doesn't name anyone either but all this pro-Apple propaganda is coming from somewhere. If you agree with Dvorak and Slater, send me examples. Let's see if there's anything to this use-a-Mac, slobber-over-Jobs theory of journalism. My bias is that I know Levy, Markoff and Hafner and, because they are friends, can't be trusted to write objectively about the issue. But I can write fairly and accurately about it. But can Dvorak or Slater? What kind of computers do they use? If they use PCs, doesn't that bias them against Apple?

I think reporters slobber over Apple because (as Shafer points out), Apple is much better at spinning compelling narratives than Microsoft and much better at dealing with the press overall. (Nobody working for Apple ever called me to complain because I failed to include an Apple product in a round-up of dubious products that I trashed in print. Believe it or not, someone from Microsoft did.) The fact that various publications praise Apple products that, soon after, fail on the marketplace doesn't necessarily mean that reporters are biased. They could simply be wrong. Reporters, like other folks, are wrong at times. Especially when it involves crystal balls. For a while there was practically a death watch over the company because it was doing so poorly. In those days the press got slammed for bias against Apple.

John may be right but his argument seems a little silly to me. Do you have to drive a Ford to report fairly on Ford Motor Co. or wear Levi-brand jeans to cover Levi-Strauss? What about the gender and race issues? Male reporters can be trusted to cover abortion but give 'em a Mac and they lose all sense of proportion? Maybe, but I'm not convinced. What about you? Details, I want details.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:18 PM | Comments (2)

Writing for Dollars: Police Blotter Edition

A pair of British financial journalists is accused of using a daily stock column to inflate the value of their personal portfolios, according to the London Times, which is covering the court case. The men deny the charges against them.

James Hipwell and Anil Bhoyrul, who wrote the Daily Mirror’s City Slickers section, displayed a 'cynical disregard' for their readers and the law by fabricating stories to enhance the value of their holdings, it was claimed. Using a "buy, tip and sale" approach, they would first spend thousands of pounds on shares, highlight the stock as "tip of the day" 24 hours later, and sell it at a profit as soon as the price rose, London’s Southwark Crown Court was told.

The prosecutor claims that "some of the stories behind the tips 'were in fact untrue, inaccurate or otherwise factually misleading', including a story about the alleged development of an Aids vaccine." And while we know there's no justice in the world, I'm pleased to share this additional tidbit: "...the journalists did not always make a profit. In fact the Aids vaccine tip actually saw the share price drop." Which is a small punishment to be sure, but nothing like the pain of spending eternity in hell, which is what these guys should get if they are guilty as charged.

In other corruption news, the Skandia redecorating scandal lives on, South Korea wins the Ms. Congeniality Award and friend and fellow scribe Glenn Fleishman, who is anything but corrupt, recently declined to comment publicly on a tech deal because of a conflict of interest. Nice to see somebody's showing a little restraint. Hey Glenn, got any stock tips?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2005

Web 2.0: The Triumph of Amateur Hour?

I have never, ever understood the cult of professionalism adhered to by some journalists (bloggers have no journalism degrees, bloggers bad amateurs, bloggers threaten professionals, so must be crushed). Nor have I been on the bandwagon to eviserate those bastard pros that some "citizen journalists" have been riding for years. This either/or bullshit drives me nuts. It doesn't have to be a contest. But it is, and Nicholas Carr articulates in lucid, deadly prose both the problem with Wikipedia worship (he cites examples) and why, despite its flaws, the Cult of the Amateur will probably triumph.

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia. ... Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media." Here's O'Reilly: "While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls 'we, the media,' a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."

But wait, there's more:

I'm all for blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do. ... The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time.

Thanks to Dave Kearns for the link. More on the amateur-pro grudge match later.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:54 PM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2005

Biz Author Faces Critic

Earlier this week Vision Thing's Ethan Johnson posted a podcast with Laurence Haughton, who authored It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do. It's rare that critics face the authors they've slammed online or elsewhere. But Laurence, who must be a Cluetrain fan, didn't take the dressing down lying down. He invited Ethan (and me, because I linked to the review, which was hilarious if deadly) to have a conversation about his book. Ethan accepted the invitation literally.

The podcast meanders a bit initially, then the author gradually takes over center stage for a long and detailed explanation of, and plug for, his book. He isn't defensive about the original review. Ethan doesn't attack like an ego-driven media pitbull but asks questions like the business manager he is. The result, for me at least, is a fairly engaging back and forth. Nobody capitulates, both guys are respectful and the conversation is a useful introduction to the topic. As well as whip-smart book marketing.

Why isn't professional broadcasting like this more often? Hmm, could be there's a future for this podcasting stuff after all. Wink wink. Nudge nudge.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2005

Did H&M Bribe Reporters?

Eventually Sweden will be just as crass, commercial and consumerist as my beloved U.S.A. In the meantime, there are still a few pockets of resistance and a few quaint cultural differences. Swedish contestants in the multiple rounds of qualifiers for the Eurovision Song contest, for example, tend to wear the same expensive, sparkily outfit at every single event. Apparently they're not required, as American contestants would be by peer pressure if nothing else, to bankrupt themselves with a new costume for each appearance. That's so sane, so Swedish--you gotta love it!

One cherished national ideal is that Swedes are honest. And mostly they are. But not always, so newspapers report on the apparent exceptions (think bribery and corruption) with enthusiasm and zeal. That's as it should be. The hubbub over a recent press junket is intriguing. On October 6, Karin Olsson reported in Resume (a trade pub that covers Swedish media, marketing and PR) that homegrown clothing retailer H&M was being investigated for bribery because it paid for leading fashion journalists to view its fashion show in New York last April. H&M picked up the costs of this "luxury trip," as Resume calls it, which included a two-night stay in a supposedly swanky hotel, the flight and one dinner, which were worth about $2000 (15 000 SEK) per person. (A junket is utterly against the rules at many U.S. publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. Others appreciate the help and don't bat an eyelash.)

According to Olsson (here's an English summary from a different pub), disapproving colleagues blew the whistle by contacting the head of some official corruption office. About 200 journalists from several countries flew in for the event. H&M declined to tell Resume how many of that total (including 15 Swedes) had their trips sponsored. Here's my English version of the Resume-H&M exchange:

H&M "We think it's completely wrong to talk about bribery. We made no demands. It's not in the interests of H&M to expose journalists to anything that can be considered pressure," says press spokesperson Annacarin Björne.

Resume But didn't you pay for the publications so they would write about the clothes?

H&M This is about giving all journalists an opportunity to travel given that so many publications have small budgets.

Resume Do you mean you only invited editorial staffs that were poor?

H&M It's up to every editorial staff to decide whether to take the trip. But we don't want to discuss this further given that there will be a preliminary investigation.

Olsson helpfully contacted the police officer investigating the case to see if a staffer at H&M or any of the jet-setting fashion scribes had reported a suspected crime. You know the answer: Nope. As Björne told Resume, junkets like this are "normal in this industry." And not only fashion. Press junkets are common in the travel and entertainment industries. Online scribes are also wooed now that Blogville is a regular stop on the buzz-building circuit. Tech journalists are often invited on free trips and radio pundits get free trips as well. (Earlier this year the Department of Defense chased airtime by underwriting a trip to Iraq, an especially savvy move now that opinionated blather is regularly mistaken for actual news reporting.) It's not just media types on this gravy train. Policiticians are intimately familiar with the pursuasive power of junkets, they've been taking them for years. Bureaucrats and judges, too.

Hmm, maybe Olsson and Resume were right to get their knickers in a knot. Is the entire U.S. power structure getting handouts, or does it just seem that way?

One of the Swedish fashion editors (she either went on the trip or sent someone else) said the freebie wasn't an issue because her publication wasn't going to write any more about H&M now than it did before the trip. She was saying that there is no actual conflict of interest if the publication's coverage isn't affected. Was H&M wrong to host the junket? Were journalists wrong to accept? Or is the problem not that reporters took a free trip but that readers won't know about it?

People have attempted to buy the attention of reporters about as long as there have been reporters. But rarely do they attempt to buy actual column inches. Publicity hounds are usually so besotted with the fabulousness of themselves, their company or their product that they're convinced that press coverage is inevitable. If they can get a reporter to sit down, shut up and listen to their pitch (or watch their demo or view their fashion show), they think a cover story is bound to follow. Often this conceit, while charming, is dead wrong.

(I'm never surprised when someone wants to buy my attention, only that they believe it's a cheap purchase. At Macworld we used to sling all the freebie T-shirts into a box. When the box was full, we'd take it downtown and give the shirts to homeless people, people who really needed them. In fact, we didn't want toys or meals or t-shirts, we wanted interesting, reliable info. That is, stories of interest to our readers. This is not news to any PR pro but it is a remarkably tough concept for some execs to grasp.)

Now I'm no paragon of virtue, and I'm not convinced there's an easy answer to every ethical question, inside journalism or out of it. Is it enough to disclosure real and potential conflicts of interest to your editor? Your readers? The planet? Should journalists disclose their conflicts more publicly than judges or senators and, if so, why? (Last time I checked, hacks weren't empowered to haul people into jail or enact legislation. Don't tell me we have a greater public trust than folks with true power.) And why do ideas about press disclosure seem to apply to writers and reporters but not to the editors who assign, shape, edit (often drastically) and approve the final published or broadcast story? It's a mystery to me.

What's your take? Anybody try to "bribe" you recently?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:49 AM | Comments (2)

October 08, 2005

Calacanis, AOL and 25 Million Smackers

Blogville's a twitter over Jason Calacanis' recent sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL for an estimated $25 million. In an unrelated but still lucrative deal, Dave Winer sold Weblogs.com to Verisign for $2.3 million. (Scroll down.) Congrats, Dave.

Here in Stockholm, it's a quiet autumn Saturday with birdsong in the air, crunchy leaves underfoot and virtually no pulse-revving blog or RSS announcements in the offing. As a public service I'll tear myself away from the lovely surroundings to provide a few snippets of punditry related to this greatly hyped purchase.

From rival Nick Denton:
"The acquisition of WIN by AOL is exhilirating news, in many respects, most of which I shouldn't list here. For what it's worth, Gawker isn't for sale. The whole point about blogs is that they're not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It's way too early. Like a decade too early."

From potty mouth Mike Butcher:
"Big media is going to get into blogs, there's no doubt. Look at Murdoch and MySpace. The mistake they will make is forcing their staff to start linking to internal brands, pissing in the pool and potentially turning readers off." I hate when that happens, don't you? "AOL executives normally produce more than $25m just going to the toilet. The bubble isn't over. However, I think it won't go much farther. If you actually look at some of the blogs on Weblogs Inc, they are just ghost towns - filled with 'Here's the best of the WEN network' posts. AOL must know this, surely?"

Calacanis himself on what's next:
"AOL loves the fact that I’m 'out there' blogging and debating the issues in our industry." Sure it does--to a point. "However, let me be clear and say I’m not becoming the Robert Scoble of AOL (at least not at this point). I’m not going to be talking about things outside of Weblogs, Inc. all that much because, frankly, I’m not involved in them! I can’t tell you what’s going on with Netscape, Moviephone, AIM, etc. I can forward you to an AOL PR executive who will be glad to speak with you...."

Thanks but no thanks, Jason. I think we can find one on our own.

From Dana Blankenhorn on Corante:
"AOL is said to be giving Calacanis autonomy, plus a five year contract, the question occurs how much autonomy will he get, and what kind of budget? After Blogger was bought by Google similar promises were made, but Blogger has yet to fulfill its technical or financial potential, and Six Apart (which remains independent) still hosts more blogs than any other platform. ... If this business is so good why is it worth so little?"

Because it's not that good, at least not yet. But we may get there. As Forbes explains:
"The next Steven Spielberg could be your neighbor down the street. The next Madonna could be in the cube across the aisle." And I could be the next Mike Tyson and pop the writer in a hurry if this story doesn't get to the point soon. "...Media conglomerates are now betting they can get compelling content on the cheap, either by enlisting the ranks of nonprofessionals or by asking customers themselves to make their own media."

Why not? The reality-TV craze has put professional actors out of work. As an industry executive told the Washington Post last year, "Reality works because it is relatively cheap to make.... Prime-time reality is a nice little business -- if it is nonunion." The pay for top media execs is pretty sweet (scroll down), while the rates for freelance writers, at least, have declined 50 percent since the 1960s. That's pretty damn cheap. But maybe not cheap enough for the corporate crowd. We'll see.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2005

New Gal in Blogville

Author Michele Cozzens, whom I raked over the coals about predatory PR, turns out to be a good-hearted victim of circumstances. (Um, sorry about shotting first and asking questions later.) In any case, Michele has started a new blog that details the challenges of running a mom-and-pop business. Welcome to Blogville, girlie. I think you'll like it here.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:15 PM | Comments (1)

October 04, 2005

Author Bites Back

Last week's tribute to Ethan Johnson's blog, the Vision Thing, included excerpts from a wickedly funny critique of "It’s Not What You Say…It’s What You Do," a business book by Laurence Haughton. I'm happy to report that Haughton dropped by to leave a couple of comments on that posting. But comments get buried and I wanted to salute the author's willingness to listen to the criticism and come back swinging. (If my book ever sells, I'll be in bed with the covers pulled up, refusing to read any reviews at all. Just so y'all know.)

Enough background, here's the message from Laurence Haughton: "I may have not been clear enough for Ethan. The group was a select group of front line managers asked to find the root cause of surgical delays. Their insight was to explore all the issues that experience has taught them 'could' lead to a surgical delay and then select the top 3 or 4 for further study. This was instead of the typical response of just trying to cure whatever first came to mind as many executives do. Their goal was to look deeper for the real causes before they leaped to a fix. That's not so stupid is it?...

"Don't imagine a conversation. That's what blogs are about. Let's have a conversation."

Love to. Of course, I haven't even read the book but that didn't stop me from swiping a review, did it? (You know the old saying, those who can, do; those who can't become pundits.) Thanks for your response, Laurence. Stop by any time. Response anyone? Mr. Vision?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:15 PM | Comments (2)

October 03, 2005

Psychic's Powers Short-Circuit

Um, shouldn't she have forseen this? "A psychic author whose speaking engagement at the Ripon Memorial Library was canceled last month has been rescheduled for Nov. 10 -- minus the portion of her program that a library flier said would 'communicate with the dead.' Psychic Irma Slage said Friday that she agreed Thursday to alter her program, dropping the 10-minute period at the end where she takes three 'psychic questions from the audience.' "

Way to market your book, girlie.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2005

Salon on the New Media Backbone

In Salon Eric Boehlert analyzes the media's new willingness to ask the government hard questions and makes an obvious but important point:

"It's hard to decide which is more troubling: that it took the national press corps five years to summon up enough courage to report, without apology, that what the Bush administration says and does are often two different things, or that it took the sight of bodies floating facedown in the streets of New Orleans to trigger a change in the press's behavior.

"Think about it. It took the worst U.S. natural disaster in a century -- with a Civil War-like refugee crisis and undiluted chaos throughout New Orleans -- for the mainstream press to conquer, at least temporarily, its collective fear of offending Republicans and the White House and its trepidation toward the angry army of press haters complaining about liberal bias and report what it believed was the truth.

"The consensus among observers of this press phenomenon is that reporters in the besieged city experienced such a huge disconnect between what they were seeing up close and what they were hearing from relief officials (e.g., Brown's early assertion that the federal relief effort was 'going relatively well') that they couldn't help boiling over on the air. No doubt that's true. But for how many months (years?) have reporters in Iraq been witnessing the disconnect between the often burgeoning, bloody insurgency and rhetoric from White House officials who insist the insurgents are actually in their 'final throes'? Why have so little anger and passion about Iraq appeared on TV screens? One answer: There's a powerful conservative push-back against the press when it hits hard on Iraq -- which so far has not occurred regarding Katrina."

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2005

CNN's Cold Fish

One word about CNN's Carol Costello: Yuck. The anchor of CNN Daybreak tried but failed to communicate genuine sympathy for an individual stranded inside New Orleans' Super Dome but was moved to tears (which she wiped away, discreetly, on camera) by a tape of CNN reporter Kathleen Koch visiting the remnants of Koch's childhood home. There Koch plucked up seven bricks as mementos for each family member, a gesture that triggered Costello's waterworks. And I'm not moved, I'm angry.

I'm angry because during Costello's stint this morning she's sounded more concerned about the lawlessness of a few individuals than the suffering of the great majority. When an eloquent man identified as Alan Gould was interviewed off camera about life inside the Super Dome, he was blunt. He said a "genocide" was underway there. He said (this is not verbatim), "We need the president to come down, take charge and get us out of here." He talked about the dead and dying, about his fears for his life and the lives of his wife and five-year-old daughter. He said it does not take five days to send a bus to New Orleans. When Costello reassured him that National Guards would be arriving "in the days to come," Gould was bitter and wondered how many more people would die before they arrived.

Costello didn't ask why Gould used the term "genocide" twice. Instead she asked about gunmen inside the Dome and Gould said there were no armed men there any more. People had banded together, Gould said, and asked the armed men to leave and they did. Costello asked why some people were shooting at rescue workers and the police, why wasn't everyone banding together to help each other like those in the Super Dome? Gould couldn't answer that question. His observation about the situation stays with me: "We're all we have," he said. "We're all we have."

Later Costello asked both a CNN producer stuck on a roof and a CNN reporter stuck on the roof with him why the police couldn't stop the lawlessness inside the Super Dome and go help a woman who had reportedly been held hostage. In the midst of explosions, apparently from the train yard, Costello said it was unknown if the fires have been set deliberately, then later implied that they had been set. During the time I watched she sounded much more indignant about the outbreak of crime in New Orleans than about the shortage of water and food and help that everyone CNN interviewed said was still needed. It baffles me: is she trying to channel imagined Middle American outrage or does the potential threat to residents from armed thugs (which existed way before the hurricane, by the way) scare her more than the immediate threat of dealth and disease to thousands of residents? Costello's reaction to the crooks seems out of proportion when measured against the suffering that CNN is showing. It's not like the dead people inside the Super Dome have died from gunshot wounds.

The hurricane coverage took a break at one point and CNN plugged an upcoming report on Iraq. Over the image of a burning car, a reporter soberly intoned that when there are attacks in Iraq, ambulances should come "right away. Frequently they don't. Such is the primitive state of Iraqi services." The timing was ironic because just before the break we'd learned that such is the primitive state of services in Louisiana that people in New Orleans can't get medical help either. Kathryn Jezer-Morton and Gray Miles, local freelance journalists, confirm that sad fact in Salon:

While chatting with some of the National Guardsmen, another guardsman approaches and informs us that a woman is in the middle of a stroke around the corner. The guardsmen shrug. There is no emergency medical tent in the downtown area, and many people in need of medicine have no way of getting what they need, even inside the shelters. On our way into the French Quarter, a wild-eyed man flags down our car, begging us for insulin or information about where some can be found. We cannot help him.

It is horrifying that some individuals are shooting at rescue workers and police officers. As the city's major explained in a radio interview rebroadcast by CNN, the looting got out of hand because most of the city's resources went to rescue operations. Now thugs and desperate drug addicts, he says, are roaming the streets and he can't stop them. That may be the biggest news angle to Costello but it's no news to the people trapped in the Super Dome. Criminals have always preyed on the poor and weak, just as politicians have always ignored them. And if Costello wants to get her panties in a knot, she can get indignant about that last part. People needed help several days ago. And it's not just poor black people who are pointing that out. Kathleen Koch, Costello's fellow CNN employee, said there may be help available but no one in the area can find it.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)

Katrina and the Media: All Wet?

"Journalists Begin to Fear for Their Own Safety in New Orleans." From Editor & Publisher:

On Thursday afternoon in New Orleans, a 'Times-Picayune' reporter and a 'New York Times' photographer witnessed a deadly shootout, got roughed up by police, hid in fear, and now plan to flee the city to save their lives.

That awful situation helps explain why the growing number of poor Americans is largely ignored by mainstream media. Reporters and editors don't live in those neighborhoods. They visit them, only briefly, under duress. And who can blame them?

The horrifying aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has resulted in the kind of video that I associate with third-world countries, not the United States. Today the BBC has shown crowds of sweaty, hungry, thirsty and mostly poor people surrounded by filth and destruction. A few women, weeping, have begged for help, begged not to be left to die like some others who survived the flooding but waited in vain for rescue. The government isn't God but people are dying. How are TV broadcasters responding?

I wish I knew. I live abroad and don't get network TV news. But I do get CNN, which is transmitting CNN America. There the gloves are off. On a taped special this morning, Anderson Cooper was asking hard questions on behalf of the victims of the hurricane. At first I was struck by how blunt and direct he was, so like British newscasters and so unlike most American ones. Then I realized I was comparing this story to the mostly meek coverage of Irag. Since this particular disaster occured in the U.S., maybe Cooper believes he can afford to be blunt and ask why American families are going without water. Maybe he doesn't have to fear, at least for the moment, that his patriotism will be challenged over aggressive reporting.

As it happens, there's a continuing shortage of safe drinking water in Iraq, a problem that's existed for some time. That's not the only thing that links New Orleans to Bagdad, according to a piece by Will Bunch in Editor & Publisher (thanks, Tim):

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. ...

... Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not everybody buys that argument (In a letter to Editor & Publisher, Professor Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton says it's "absurd to think that because we spend money that is legitimate by constitutional standards -- for national defense against terrorists in Iraq -- we 'don't have enough' for levee projects.") Should be interesting to see how the mainstream news outlets frame the issue. Bloggers, sez the Financial Times, are all over this question and so are the Democrats, according to the Washington Post.

That might spur some he-said/she-said type of supposedly balanced reporting. After residents are no longer in immediate danger, I'd like to see a well-reported, detailed and accurate analysis of the response to Katrina by local, state and national governments both before and after the hurricane arrived. American taxpayers and, especially, the victims of Katrina deserve that much.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:18 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2005

Why Is It Harder to Critique Cars Than Opera?

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize for criticism went to Dan Neil, an automobile critic for the Los Angeles Times. Weird or wonderful? Check out Diane Barthel-Bouchier's terrific essay on the topic, "Gearheads Among the Eggheads."

Car critics differ from art critics in several interesting ways. Both rely on expert knowledge and skills of assessment and interpretation. They both also reveal personal taste: one man's ugly SUV may be another man's "cute 'ute." In addition to these attributes, though, the car critic needs more highly developed physical skills. He literally has to make the car perform, to test it the way a musician might test the abilities of an instrument, to whose performance the music critic then intelligently listens....Opera, by contrast, with its supposed sensory overload, relies primarily upon sight and sound. You don't touch the elephants in Aida; you don't smell Tosca, or, at least, you're not supposed to. Car criticism calls on four senses minimum, beating opera two to one.

...Most car critics leave the high culture to ex-English majors, and work instead on perfecting the homespun metaphor. Metaphors are useful because critics must do the impossible. They must communicate the feel of a car to someone who has his hands on a magazine. So they use images to which the reader can clearly relate. The O-Z Rally is "exactly as racy as a pound and a half of Velveeta." A Mustang Boss 202 sounds like "BBs bouncing inside an empty Folgers can." Some metaphors have a surprisingly long half-life. When Car and Driver's Tony Swan described the Caterman race car as having "all the handling stability of a hog on ice," one reader detected the distant echo of a 1940s critic's assessment of either a Packard or a Mercury as cornering "like a hippopotamus on wet clay" ( June 2004, p. 21).

Go read it.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2005

Genre Fiction: Assault on Civilization or Damn Fine Read?

(Note: I've turned Comments back on for the opinionated.) Melissa Banks's new novel got slammed as chick lit in a recent New York Times book review. A funny and seemingly plausible analysis of the review and what might have prompted it (found via M.L. Rose's blog on writing and publishing) reminded me of the compliment that Joyce Carol Oates gave author Peter Abrahams in a New Yorker review earlier this spring. "Peter Abrahams’s strongest novels seem to suggest, despite their allegiance to genre, a fascination with something beyond mere form."

Ouch. Outside of an unfortunate experiment in junior high, I've never written fiction so I don't have any writing skin in the game. But I've spent a good part of my childhood and significant chunk of adulthood in libraries. Maybe that's because my mother was a writer but I was thirteen before her first book was published and my library card had logged a lot miles by then. Mostly it's because my mother was a reader and I, in turn, became one. It one of the few still-welcoming environments for poor people and the only way I've found to travel while trapped at home. As an avid reader who likes literature but loves genre fiction, I have a proposal for all the players in book publishing, including reviewers: Can y'all just stop slinging the shit?

Human categorize. We like top ten lists. We like hierarchies. We trash the folks above and below us in hopes of clinging to our spot. And we try to move ahead, using luck or influence or talent or hard work or brown-nosing or money. Because book publishing supports the star system, like virtually every other media-related business these days, I understand why authors want to set themselves apart as better or different or more literary or more cultured or more popular. (Besides, some writers suck. Who wants to be compared to them?) More importantly, I understand why publishers encourage it. If more writers refused to squabble among themselves, were honest about their advances and royalties (like ballsy and brave Paperback Writer), perhaps banded together more and bitched about each other less, they might actually get a better deal.

But I'd be satisfied if writers just stopped sniping for awhile. The literature vs. genre fiction debate has been going on far longer than the bloggers vs. journalists mudfest but is just as stupid and pointless. There are genre authors who explore the deepest questions of existence and lightweight lit no more substantial than cotton candy. Literature comes in all guises. What's this obsession over form? Why is genre still a dirty word? As John Updike notes, "...it could be argued that all fiction is escapist: by its means we escape our own heads and lives and enter into other heads and lives. Whether the head belongs to a Hobbit in Tolkien or to one of Virginia Woolf’s sensitive, externally unadventurous women does not change the nature of the escape: what gives relief and pleasure in fiction is its otherness."

When I was clinically depressed and found no relief in drugs, I crawled out of my bed and plodded to the local library. I carried home two slim volumes : Lying Awake, by Mark Salzman, and The Nanny Diaries, by Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin. One is serious literature, the other brain candy. The first day I read Lying Awake. The second day I read The Nanny Diaries. The third day I got out of bed.

Think one book was superior to the other? Honey, think again. Lying Awake inspired fresh mental moxie. The Nanny Diaries made me laugh my ass off. Both books offered powerful medicine that brought me back to life. Both.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 07, 2005

Craig's List in Stockholm + Apple and Intel = What?

A while back I whined less than attractively to someone at Craig's List. I wanted a Stockholm branch and I wanted it now. Time passed (months? years?) and yesterday I noticed: oh my gawd, we've got it! Only it's sooo disappointing because nobody knows that Stockholm has Craig's List yet. There were all of 13 jobs listed yesterday and most of them aren't even related to Stockholm. But dude, if you are in Stockholm and you can, like, shoot a digital camera and, like, ask questions, you can get $150 and all the hearing damage you want by covering the Sweden Rock Festival this weekend for an LA-based "motorcycles and entertainment lifestyles magazine." Cool or what? If you can't make the festival, no worries: just spread the word about the Stockholm Craig's List, okay?

In other news, several friends had fun speculating on what the spawn of the Apple-Intel partnership should be dubbed. Suggestions include Mactel (Tim Holmes), Apptel or Inpple (Peter Linde), Mintel (Joseph Holmes' son Julian) and Intellimac (Ulf Molin). But no, Steve says it's going to be MacIntel.

Pete Gontier was paying attention as the rumors flew across the web before the partnership news was confirmed. He wrote, at the time, "There is sooooo much misinformation. And by this I don't mean I know what's going to be announced and the press doesn't. I mean the press doesn't even have remotely decent sources to interview." What, you need an example? "The hapless Peter Glaskowsky is my favorite. He works as an analyst for The Envisioneering Group, in Seaford, N.Y. 'It's a bunch of bull,' he's quoted as saying in eWeek, then goes on to detail how uninformed he is before dropping this stinker: '...IBM has no other customers willing to buy large quantities [of the G5].' Yeah, as if Apple is subsidizing IBM! This guy must be somebody's nephew. Within a few hours, the president of Glaskowsky's firm, Richard Doherty, had silenced Glaskowsky and gotten the NYT to quote Doherty about a 'seismic shift' which is 'bound to rock the industry.' Thanks for the specifics, fearless leader!"

Pete's not the only one to blow the whistle on Glaskowsky. As Web Pro News put it: "A decision that was eleven years in the making became official during the opening of the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference. Paul Thurrott and the Wall Street Journal had it right. Peter Glaskowsky and Leander Kahney were dead wrong."

I suspect I have more sympathy for both analysts and journalists than Pete does. And since I know John Markoff I have a hard time believing that Doherty forced a quote into the story. Remember, newspapers run on deadlines and it's often hard to find truly knowledgeable sources on short notice. Still I understand that it's painful to read quotes from people who don't know what they're talking about. Luckily, this doesn't seem to be a problem for Stuffola's hardy audience of 84 readers. For that I'm grateful.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 03, 2005

A New Take on the Bible + Standing Tall to Pee

According to a release on PR Newswire: "A new edition of the Gospels of the Bible for the first time shows Christ as a woman, named Judith Christ of Nazareth, and God as female. In all other respects, the classic texts of the Gospels remain unchanged." I doubt this development would have been welcomed by my late uncle, a Southern Baptist minister and a truly wonderful, caring man. He supported women in many ways but this would not have been one of them. As a militant agnostic, Judith Christ doesn't exactly rock my boat either. And yet...

I'll never forget a particular afternoon in the late 70s when, as a college student, I was at home in a decrepit apartment carved out of an old Victorian and listening to All Things Considered while I puttered around. Suddenly something sounded weird to me, kind of off. I remember actually looking at the radio while I tried to figure out what was wrong. Then it hit me. Two women had spoken in a row. Can't remember if it was two female hosts, only that it was unexpected and new to hear one woman follow another on the program. After college I moved to San Francisco and practically burst into tears of pride and gratitude when I saw a female firefighter on the street for the first (and last) time.

The phrase "our mother, who art in heaven" hits a different chord for me than "our father, who art in heaven." Is this kind of gender switching just plan silly? Maybe. I'm not an intellectual; I don't do theory. But I am the mother of a ten-year-old daughter who, despite my best efforts, still wants to emulate Brittany Spears (and the enormous H&M billboards that show models in skimpy outfits) and wear too-sexy outfits at a too-young age.

Like a black child clutching a white doll, little girls of all colors grow up in this God-the-father-fearing society understanding that they don't really measure up. They're good for some things, like sex and shopping, but not so good for other things, like becoming Pope or running government. This new Bible won't change much but maybe it will give some young woman an unexpected but welcome feeling of recognition and acceptance. Maybe.

In other feminist news, turns out that the guys-stand-gals-sit model of urination is fairly new, according to an article by Kim Bannerman Pigott (available via an EBSCO Masterfile Elite database) in the Winter 2005 issue of Herizons. "From the earliest days of childhood, we're separated into two camps: those who sit and those who stand. Yet as recently as 150 years ago, women stood as often as men to relieve themselves and in many countries--India and the Philippines, for example--it is still a widespread and acceptable practice. In The Histories Herodotus wrote, 'Women [in Egypt] urinate standing up, men sitting down,' a revelation that shocked his Greek sensibilities. Among the matrilineal Tualag people of the Sahara, this method of division has continued into the present day."

Then there's my hillbilly mom, who reported that her aunts, back in the Arkansas hills of the 1940s, used to pee like the guys while they were working out in the fields. The Herizons piece offers helpful tips for newbies: "You may want to start practicing in the shower." Or, failing that, consider the P-Mate.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2005

Five Facts About Robbie Branscum

My mother died eight years ago today, a few weeks shy of her sixty-third birthday. (When she was close to forty, mom decided to cut three years off her age so I had a funny conversation with the kind New York Time reporter who wrote her obituary. I hadn't realized mom had fudged her birthday, while he was surprised to discover a reference book on authors had the wrong date.) Eight years ago my grief was so fresh and sharp I felt nearly blinded but the pain has eased into a dull throb. I think of my mother nearly every day. It's hard not to feel cheated but at least mom had the luxury of dying at home during a nap, perhaps dreaming of a luscious meal since she drifted off to sleep during one of KQED's Saturday cooking shows.

At mom's funeral, one of her friends thought I was disrespectful by highlighting the fact that she had never finished eighth grade. He didn't understand that I was amazed and proud of the self-described hillbilly from the sticks, a self-taught single mother on welfare who transformed a powerful storytelling talent into twenty-one published novels. That's a fact to be proud of, not hide.

Here are five facts about Robbie Branscum.

1. She was a kick-ass mom. My mother loved me fiercely and did what she could to meet my needs even though we were poor. Here's one example: When I was 13, my plastic glasses were the opposite of fashionable. All the cool kids--hell, all the kids--had groovy wire rims but we were welfare trash with no money, and the state would only pay for new glasses if there was something wrong with the ones I had. Gotta say, that seems like a reasonable policy to me now that I'm a middle-aged taxpayer. At the time, though, I was convinced my outsider status would worsen. So one day after school I sat on mom's bed in the living room to explain the problem, then wallowed in a teary hole of self-pity.

"Let me have your glasses," mom said. I gave her my glasses. She put them on the floor, stepped down hard, then handed me the pieces. "Let's go get you some new ones," she said. My mother became my hero that afternoon. I am a good girl: I color inside the lines, I stop at red lights, I keep the mattress tag intact. It would never, ever occur to me to stage an eyewear accident. But my mother had suffered from a childhood of poverty herself, a much more damaging poverty in the Arkansas hills where she was raised by a resentful grandmother who preferred other grandkids and gave mom ugly dark granny boots instead of the dreamy white majorette boots she craved for so long. This was mom's chance to rewrite that story. (Thanks, mom.)

2. She had a generous heart and was deeply religious. My mom would give people practically everything she had (and sometimes stuff that I had, which I didn't much appreciate at the time) if they were needier than we were. As a young married couple, my parents used to pick up hobos, bring them home for a good meal, then send them off with a camp quilt to keep them warm during the cold winter months. Mom befriended fans and would-be writers and lavished them with support and attention. And mom was thoughtful. When she had a stroke just before the birth of my daughter, who happens to be adopted, mom kept it a secret and made my sisters and other family members promise not to tell me so my husband and I could concentrate on our new baby instead of worrying about her health.

3. Mom was funny and laughed hard and often. She was happy to be the butt of her own jokes. "Remember, beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes clear to the bone," she would say and then burst into laughter. After the stroke impaired her short-term memory mom told me, "it's been a real money-saver. I read the same book over and over again and enjoy it every time."

4. Elevators, escalators, didn't matter: mom was afraid of anything that went up. As a country gal who grew up barefoot, she was never comfortable in cities, formal clothing, or places more than two floors high. Once she traveled to San Francisco for a meeting with an editor on one of the top floors of a downtown skyscraper but never made it. She fled the elevator on the second or third floor and the editor had to come down and meet with her in the ladies room.

5. She was a kick-ass writer. Mom never forgot how it felt to be a child. She remembered every slight, every insult, every joy, and every pleasure and communicated all of it so vividly that her books are like a direct flight back to childhood. Also, it's impossible to read one of mom's books and not get hungry. The rich descriptions of the food in her books makes your mouth water, even if you've never ever craved pinto beans and corn bread in buttermilk.

A few critics thought her prose too purple but not the folks who gave her awards, not the kids who eagerly read her books, and not the teachers who still recommend them. (I just found this from a 1990 review of a different author: "At its best, Grove's tale calls to mind the poignant, pithy novels of Robbie Branscum and Zilpha Keatley Snyder.")

Here's the preface to "The Girl." This autobiographical novel, about an abused and nameless eleven-year-old girl, is her finest work:

"The sun beat down hot orange, turning the red dirt clay blood color. The hollow was a bowl of steam where sweat ran down you day and night, your clothes in the day wet and clinging, the nights you'd be naked. Frogs croaked in unceasing supplication for rain. Trees rustled dryly, dust floating in little lazy puffs from their dusty leaves.

"From the knee-high, thirsty dead grass came the rattle of an angry snake. Other snakes, water moccasin and diamondback, dripped poison, blindly striking at all who came near them. Dogs dug deep in the earth to find coolness, tongues red, dripping, sides heaving, and sometimes they went mad from rabies or the heat. Fat hens made dust beds in the yard with their wings. Roosters halfheartedly looked for worms. Two black tumblebugs rolled a ball of cow shit between them, one pulling, the other pushing. Inside the small ball were their eggs, and they'd roll the ball until the eggs were hatched.

"Old women with arthritic knees knelt stiffly to pray. Men with skins burned to whang leather lifted red-rimmed eyes worriedly to the sky. It wasn't hell, just another dog-days August summer in Arkansas."

Want to read more? Nearly all of her books are out of print but many can still be found in school and public libraries all across the country. (Of course, you can also buy used copies online.) Happy reading!

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 24, 2005

Note to NYT: We're All Self-Appointed Journalists

"The collision between the Internet and Chinese authorities is one of the grand wrestling matches of history, visible in part at www.yuluncn.com. That's the Web site of a self-appointed journalist named Li Xinde," writes Nicholas Kristof in today's New York Times. Then he goes on to write about the guy's amazing reportorial accomplishments under the near-constant threat of arrest.

Last I checked, Nicholas Kristof was also a self-appointed journalist. So was every other hack on the planet, including each and every reporter and editor employed by the New York Times. Journalism is not brain surgery and in the U.S., at least, doesn't require a license, an examination, or being touched by the right hand of God. It simply requires that you decide to become a journalist (that would be the self-selection part) and then go out and practice journalism.

Naturally it's easier to be taken seriously if you are published or employed by a commercial media organization (started to type credible then thought of Fox) but that doesn't make you any more of a journalist than the newbie reporter in China. Yes, he's a newbie. No, he's not on anybody's staff and no, he's not working for money. But he's producing journalism of the most valuable sort. The sort that actually makes a difference. Perhaps Kristof was merely highlighting the guy's outsider status in China and I misread his intention. Maybe.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 23, 2005

Digital Life New Ad Vehicle for MSNBC

"MSNBC.com, a leader in breaking news and original journalism on the Internet, announces the launch of Digital Life, found within the site's Tech & Science section. This new, interactive lifestyle technology subsection allows users to enter a digital representation of various living spaces in the home and quickly discover the way technology has transformed each." The living room, anyway.

Dear reader, do we suppose Digital Life was created because actually expecting MSNBC readers to rise from their computers and walk into their own kitchens or bathrooms or bedrooms to note the vast and sweeping, if largely imaginary, technological changes they will find there is simply too much work? Do we imagine the birth of Digital Life was prompted by MSNBC's confusing organization of technology coverage until this very announcement, which signals a new an exciting trend in consumer responsiveness? Or do we believe that the most effective way for MSNBC to get Best Buy to sign up for an 11-month sponsorship and brand marketing campaign was to unveil Digital Life and, with it, spanking new sponsorship opportunities?

Need a few moments to ponder that? Didn't think so. " 'Through ingenuity and great collaboration we have created a product that has yielded the single largest sponsorship of any feature in the history of MSNBC.com,' said Kyoo Kim, Vice President of Sales of MSNBC.com, 'proof once again that advertisers understand the power of the Internet and are using online leaders like MSNBC.com to reach their key consumers.' "

Fine by me and I hope Best Buy is very happy with its purchase. I know who pays the content bills in this world. Michael Rogers, a columnist for the new section, is a real sweetie but the conceit is a stinker. In a world of podcasts and videocasts and streaming video (not that I necessarily approve) was interactive floorplans the best sponsorship fig leaf they could muster? A scary thought. Folks at Ziff Davis and MIT are bound to be pleased about MSNBC using that name but we don't care: media folks flatter each other all the time with this very special type of tribute. I'd swipe a good headline in a heartbeat.

Speaking of heartbeats, my pulse went up a notch or two after discovering this sexy branding expert, who's waiting for an opportunity to raise your pulse as well. Just how sexy is he? "His high energy and brain power are truly infectious. You will be roused into action by his stimulating presentations." Triple XXX marketing action: Who knew?

In related news the Times of London announced today that "scientists in Israel have cracked the complicated cognitive code that determines whether individuals are able to understand sarcasm. Yeah, right. No, really. The findings, published today by the American Psychological Association, could provide vital clues to the best way of helping people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, as well as those with some forms of brain damage, to improve their communication skills."

So hey, there's hope for me yet. You too.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 21, 2005

Video Journalists: Promise or Threat?

An interview with video journalist advocate Michael Rosenblum has kicked off a lively debate at Lost Remote. Commented one reader, "I've been a one-man band, and it was absurd. Cover a press conference? No problem. Try to cover a big fire? Do I shoot or find interviews? Can't do both at the same time." Here's an excerpt from the interview:

LOST REMOTE: What is a video journalist?

ROSENBLUM: A Videojournalist is a television reporter who works alone with a small digital camera and laptop edit the way a print journalist works with a pad and pencil or a laptop. This is about reporting and authorship. As anyone can pick up a pencil and paper and try to write (or a typewriter or a wordprocessor), so we also encourage anyone with the urge and a vision to pick up a camera and an edit system and see that they can make. This is, after all, how most writers get started. TV should be the same.

LR: For a TV newsroom, what are the advantages of VJs?

ROSENBLUM: In a typical TV newsroom, there may be 70-100 employees while fielding 5-6 Betacams. This is as insane as having a newspaper with 70 reporters but only owning 5 pencils. The cameras are the pencils -- they are the thing we make TV with. The thing that is actually on the air. When you only field 5 camera crews every day, every story must make air. It makes people very conservative. Very nervous. We can't take risks. We can't ever fail. Good journalism requires the ability to take a risk and fail from time to time. Creativity requires the ability to take a risk and fail. Maybe there's a story here. Maybe not. Let me try. With 5 crews, you can never do this. When you field 50 cameras a day, not unusual, in fact, more the norm, you cast television journalism in a whole new light -- the abiilty to take a risk. What we do now is just make TV. In the future, we will be able to be journalists. Not just regurgitate stories from the newspaper and the wires.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 20, 2005

RSS Feed Frenzy, Note-Sharing Journalist,

Don't be late to the RSS party warns Rebecca Lieb over at ClickZ: "Are you an advertiser, marketer, or publisher? Then it's time to get serious about this whole RSS thing. ... All signs point to the fact RSS is on the brink of mainstream adoption. Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are developing strategies to encourage subscribers to feed at their feeds and to monetize those feeds with ads. Major agencies, such as Carat Interactive, have launched practices around blogs and feeds. Venture capitalist funds are flowing to firms such as NewsGator and FeedBurner. Acquisitions and rollups have begun in earnest: AskJeeves bought Bloglines; NewsGator snapped up FeedDemon this week."

Not so fast, sez the fine folks at Marketing Sherpa. "Given RSS's increasing popularity among online publishers, bloggers and marketers, there's a lot of buzz on its potential to reach millions of interested consumers directly through opt-in feeds to consumers' RSS readers of choice. However, 'potential' is the key word. RSS lacks hard numbers of almost any kind, making it impossible to base a business case for relying on it as a publishing or marketing tool... at this time. And yet otherwise sensible marketers and publishers are talking about replacing email with RSS offerings (asking readers to choose format which they'd like to get info in) -- and hundreds of bloggers have chosen to *only* offer RSS feeds instead of an accompanying email alert."

The marketers I've been interviewing would probably disagree that RSS lacks hard numbers of almost any kind, but none of them would be daft enough to say marketers should put all their eggs in the RSS basket--or any other single marketing technique. That's just plain dumb.

BusinessWeek.com's Blogspotting columnist Stephen Baker is letting readers download notes from his interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher. (Thanks to Frank Barnako for the link.) These are very sketchy notes, not the kind that lead to Pulitzer prizes (those don't get shared), but I was still surprised to find them. It's not what journalists do. It's part of our intellectual capital and no, I'm not joking. It's an interesting exercise but don't look to me to emulate it.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:37 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 18, 2005

Global Warming Slugfest

My friend Richard Reynolds points out that the New Yorker is hardly alone in covering the global warming story: Mother Jones' May/June issue has a terrific (if depressing) cover package on the topic. I started to type "issue" but it's only an issue in a political sense. Unfortunately, American journalists have contributed to the idea that global warming is a wacky, unproven theory. As veteran journalist Ross Gelbspan points out in Mother Jones, "A prime tactic of the fossil fuel lobby centered on a clever manipulation of the ethic of journalistic balance. Any time reporters wrote stories about global warming, industry-funded naysayers demanded equal time in the name of balance. As a result, the press accorded the same weight to the industry-funded skeptics as it did to mainstream scientists, creating an enduring confusion in the public mind. To this day, many people are unsure whether global warming is real."

That's the result of the kind of journalism that substitutes a supposed objectivity for actual analysis and that achieves "balance" by volume. Most of the time reporting is just the filler between the ads that keep the mainstream media machine humming. That's okay. That's the system. But now and again there are topics of enormous importance that beg for serious, thoughtful and appropriate and sustained coverage. The U.S. media have fallen down on the job, says Gelbspan: According to one study, the U.K. media have devoted about three times as much coverage to global warming as their Yankee counterparts.

Gelbspan does not suggest critics of global warming should be ignored. "There are a few credentialed scientists who still claim climate change to be inconsequential. To give them their due, a reporter should learn where the weight of scientific opinion falls -- and reflect that balance in his or her reporting. That would give mainstream scientists 95 percent of the story, with the skeptics getting a paragraph or two at the end. But because most reporters don't have the time, curiosity, or professionalism to check out the science, they write equivocal stories with counterposing quotes that play directly into the hands of the oil and coal industries by keeping the public confused."

Newspaper columnist Bill Steigerwald was so troubled by the lack of balance in reporting by the MoJo crew that he called up Professor Fred Singer, a critic of the global warming theory, to help redress the problem. But as Gelbspan puts it, "When the subject is a matter of fact, the concept of balance is irrelevant. What we know about the climate comes from the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history—the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s conclusions, that the burning of fossil fuels is indeed causing significant shifts in the earth’s climate, have been corroborated by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. D. James Baker, former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, echoed many scientists when he said, 'There is a better scientific consensus on this than on any other issue I know—except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.' "

Scientific consensus sucks if you're an SUV-loving, energy-hogging, first-world consumer of the highest order, as many of us are. (Don't you touch my remote, bucko, and I'm not kidding.) It's not so surprising that people (including government officials, corporate executives and just plain Joes) would prefer not to think about the ramifications of the extraordinarily broad support for the existence of global warming among the science set. Especially if the existence of global warming puts a damper on a professional career or chosen industry. That does not excuse the many U.S. media types who have been weenies on this topic and it does not excuse Steigerwald for prizing "balance" over smarts.

Writer George Monbiot has made some interesting global-warming-related discoveries on the media front. "For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, 'are not shrinking but in fact are growing. ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.' " This seemed odd to Monbiot, so he called the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read Bellamy's letter over the phone. A hasty response ("complete bullshit") and further investigation determined that Bellamy had somehow channeled Pierre Salinger and picked up the info off a crackpot web site run by a guy with a fondness for Lyndon Larouche-sponsored publications. Which leads us back to Professor Singer.

It turns out the statistics published by the Larouche magazine "were first published online by Professor Fred Singer, one of the very few climate change deniers who has a vaguely relevant qualification (he is, or was, an environmental scientist). He posted them on his web site www.sepp.org, and they were then reproduced by the appropriately named junkscience.com, by the Cooler Heads Coalition, the National Center for Public Policy Research and countless others. They have even found their way into The Washington Post. They are constantly quoted as evidence that manmade climate change is not happening. But where did they come from? Singer cites half a source: 'a paper published in Science in 1989.' Well, the paper might be 16 years old, but at least, and at last, there is one. Surely? I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures; throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat."

Nobody's perfect. Maybe Singer was simply wrong about the year. Maybe the paper actually exists. And maybe the New Yorker is staffed soley by commies and Mother Jones employs angry radicals out to destroy America. Assume it's all true. That still doesn't make more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries wrong about global warming. Or as Bill Moyers put it last Sunday, "A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence."

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2005

God No Fan of Extreme Capitalism, Author Claims

Maybe the author doesn't say it directly but that is the implication of this press release:
"As Americans weve all been taught to believe that Christianity and Capitalism go hand-in-hand. Free to choose, Free to be all we can be, and just about any other freedom seems to somehow be wrapped up in the phrase 'Democratic, free-market capitalism.' But the books author, James A. McCune, suggests our current system doesnt quite have it right: 'Make no mistake, the Bible favors free markets, but it also requires very important safeguards to make the system work for everybody, safeguards that arent a part of our system today.' McCune continues, 'Not only is capitalism as its practiced today not Biblical, it only works well when three important conditions are present: (1) There must be reasonable prosperity, (2) There must be a reasonable balance between the supply and demand for labor, and (3) There must be a reasonable balance of power between the major global players.'

So where *is* the Bible verse on free markets? I spend years in Sunday school only to miss that crucial teaching.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 05, 2005

Tween Marketers Go After Boys

"Riotweb.com, the new online destination for tween boys, is now live!" gushes the announcement. "Areas of the site include MuSick, where boys can create a uniquely gross song in minutes; the Chimp-o-Matic, where RIOT the Chimp can be added to any photo; and the wonders of Monkey Pee, Monkey Do. ... GLOB, the mysterious and opinionated RIOT blog-master, keeps boys totally up to date on sports, games and entertainment." This gift to boys comes courtesy of Riot Media, "a media company and lifestyle brand dedicated to serving the lucrative tween boy market."

A fart-centric site is way overdue and I for one welcome it. But can a single monkey and lots of fart jokes fuel a new publishing empire? Dave Pilkey pulled it off with Captain Underpants--and he didn't even need the monkey. That doesn't mean it's easy to do.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 03, 2005

Reporters Don't Read Their Mail

The ever-helpful Tom Murphy points to a survey of 50 newspaper reporters. Among the findings: "26% of those surveyed open less than 50% of press releases they receive via e-mail" and "76% don't believe that blogs provide a useful research tool." The latter fact might incense Dave Winer (happy belated b-day!) and it may make those reporters look like dinosaurs but it makes sense considering the small amount of original reporting in Blogville. After all, who has the time or money for original reporting? Few bloggers. Hell, there are actual newspapers that seemingly run nothing but wire service reports and rewritten press releases. When original reporting does surface, sometimes the amateurs get it wrong (just like professionals do at times). A few blogs reported on an explosion at Harvard that went unreported by Big Media. Did a meth lab explode? Nah, it something less dramatic: a car fire. Maybe you'd put that in the paper. Not me. I suspect a fair number of blogs are great sources for article ideas. But for research? Not just yet.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Happy Birthday Pirate Publishing

Today Dagens Nyheter profiles Piratförlaget (Pirate Publishing), an upstart book publisher that rocked the staid world of the Swedish book industry when it published its first book at the end of April five years ago. Pirate was founded when Sigge Sigfridsson, Liza Marklund and Jan Guillou--three best-selling genre novelists--abandoned their publishers to start their own publishing house with the help of Guillou's wife, Ann-Marie Skarp, who became head of the company.

The publisher Guillou left was spitting mad and called the action a declaration of war. He also said, according to DN, that the Swedish book industry was facing something entirely new: a pirate publisher. The cheeky authors adopted that as the company name and established better terms for themselves and the other authors eventually added to the roster. Those better terms included a 50-50 split on book revenues (after expenses) and a willingness to market books more aggressively than the competition. Sigfridsson eventually left to start another publishing house but Pirate has defied all predictions of failute. While other Swedish publishing houses are making an 8-percent profit margin at most (5 to 6 percent is common), Pirate has racked up a 20-percent margin this year, according to DN. (The company publishes 12 to 15 books annually, most of them crime fiction.)

Pirate's marketing moxie must be heartening for their writers. A TV commercial for Liza Marklund's fourth crime novel pushed sales up by 50 percent, according to an executive. Marklund (an attractive blonde) appears on the covers of all her books. Here's what she says about the marketing (my translation): "We have crazy ideas and do them. 'Should we blanket the entire Åhlens department store with my face?' "Sure, let's do it.' "Should we put up ads for the book at every bus stop in Sweden?' 'Sure, let's do it.' " An advertising campaign for Guillou's latest book won a prize from the national advertising industry.

I understand why the other publishers were pissed when Pirate was founded five years ago. They muttered darkly about Pirate "skimming off the cream," about the potential loss of development costs for unknown writers (the successful-authors-subsidize-new-authors theory of crappy royalty structures) and so forth. But these writers were making huge chunks of cash for the publishers; why shouldn't they get at least half?

One of Pirate's authors, Leif GW Persson, claims that "writers are the most exploited group that exists." Sigge Stark, one of the ten best-selling Swedish authors of all time, earned a mere 30,000 swedish crowns over her lifetime, he claims, while her publisher made millions. Guess the Pirate folks just wanted to even the score a little. Dunno if they anticipated the eventual competition. A couple of newer upstarts supposedly have offered Persson a 60-40 split and even better deals. So far he's stayed with Pirate. "Pirate is going to taste the same medicine it gave to others," he says. Goodness, more money for authors? Sounds like a fine idea to me.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 02, 2005

Book Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" is a book by British documentary filmmaker and journalist Jon Ronson that was prompted when Uri Geller told him he was a psychic spy for U.S. intelligence services. Ronson's willingness to actually investigate Geller's assertion rather than simply dismiss it (as Ronson claims other journalists did) led him to a once-secret U.S. Army unit and a collection of government and military New Age wackos (my description, not his) that helped establish a theoretical basis for an army of peace-lovin' psychic warrior monks. According to Ronson the concept of the warrior monk was corrupted over time and ideas meant to strengthen a peaceful, New Age force instead helped inspire the alledged murder of a CIA scientist (Frank Olsen in 1953) by the CIA itself and, much later, the torture of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib. The torture was not an abberation on the part of low-ranking soldiers, according to Ronson, but the result of deliberate efforts by intelligence officers to experiment with new (painful, nightmarish) ways to extract information from prisoners. (Ronson and former prisoners aren't the only ones making that claim. A high-level military investigation apparently agrees that was the case for some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to the New York Times.)

A glowing review by Janet Maslin prompted me to snag a copy while in New York last month (the Boston Globe liked it too). Last week I sat down and practically mainlined the volume over the course of a single day. It's a relatively short (259 pages), compelling, often funny read that made me laugh out loud several times. The goats of the title refers to 100 "debleated" animals originally used for training army surgeons but later used in a program that was supposed to teach an elite group within the Army how to kill a goat by staring at it. Presumably the group would work its way up to enemy soliders after getting the hang of goat slaughter.

My spousal unit read the book and agreed it was compelling but said he couldn't suspend his disbelief. Ronson's stated worry when a supposed pyschic predicts disaster in his neighborhood and his later relief when it seems the disaster will happen elsewhere (but then doesn't happen at all) is too much of a stretch, he said. "How can he pretend to believe these people?" hubby asked. "How can he describe someone as a level-headed pyschic? That's an oxymoron."

I don't think so. I understood what Ronson means, even if his practiced naivete gets wearing at times. For me, at least, it's easy enough to believe that U.S. military and intelligence agencies include people with a fierce belief in mind power, psychic networks, remote viewing and other formerly extreme ideas. Those ideas have been adopted by plenty of folks across the country. I'm probably related to some and I certainly am acquainted with others. So the thing that struck me about Ronson's book wasn't the adoption of psychic tactics by the Army, however bizarre that might be. What struck me was the apparent unwillingness of journalists (American and otherwise) to pursue potential stories that make us uncomfortable. Time and again Ronson points to reporters who dismiss leads rather than investigate them (or investigate them fully) because, he suggests, we don't want to challenge our beliefs about our government and military.

As Ronson explains early in the book, "It was Uri Geller who set me on the trail that led to the goats. ...There had long been rumors (circulated on the whole, it must be said, by Uri himself) that back in the early 1970s he had been a psychic spy working secretly for U.S. intelligence. Many people have doubted his story--The Sunday Tims once called it 'a bizarre claim,' arguing that Uri Geller is nuts whereas the intelligence establishment is not."

It's not easy to determine who is nuts and who is sane these days. Ronson makes an attempt, and I'm willing to believe his nonfiction book is just that. Thing is, readers do have to take it on faith because it's a he-said, she-said volume, without footnotes, an index or an appendix. That sucks because if this book is true, it should be covered in the news pages and not merely in the book review sections of newspapers and web sites. eSkeptic's review bolsters some of Ronson's work, which is a relief. Next time, Jon, make your evidence more obvious, okay?

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 27, 2005

Media Meltdown Approaching?

The Newspaper Association of American held its annual conference in San Francisco this year. Susan Mernit has a roundup of good links about it and a funny comment about the conference coverage that ran in the The San Francisco Chronicle: "When the Craigslist guys are quoted as citizen journalism experts, you know it's past the tipping point." Hard to argue with that.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2005

Why Shopping Magazines Suck

Material girl Stephanie Zacharek sounds off in Salon about the dismal state of shopping magazines (reg. or day pass required). "With all this thoughtful, interesting design around us, how much hand-holding do we -- or should we -- really need when it comes to deciding what we like and don't like? Domino assumes we need a lot: Feeling a sudden hankering for a chartreuse vase? Domino gives you two whole pages of them, lined up in a row. You might scrutinize them for 30 seconds, and lust after one in particular for about three seconds, but before you know it, you've turned the page and you're onto the next obsession. That might be wallpaper, or a selection of hooks and bowls to help you arrange your jewelry on a dresser, or a panoply of cool TV sets. Domino manages to increase our anxieties about having too many options even as, supposedly, it attempts to ease them."

Goodness, a publication that preys on the anxieties of its readers? How novel. (I'll probably like Domino anyway. I'm a sucker for shelter mags.) The classic American women's magazines often have good service pieces and useful, sometimes heartwarming stories but they also treat their readers like nitwits. Or if not nitwits, the kind of people y-o-u m-u-s-t s-p-e-a-k t-o s-l-o-w-l-y. So if the shopping magazines do the same, they're merely taking part in a long, if not honorable, tradition. This morning the mail person slipped Easy Shopping Magazine through my mail slot. It's produced by Bonnier Responsmedier. To a hardened American consumer, this sad publication is an outdated and pathetic form of direct mail. Outside of a masthead page with an editor's note, it's no magazine at all, just a stapled, 86-page collection of random advertisements. Buy books! Join a music club and get cheap CDs! Subscribe to three issues of a real magazine and get cheap crap as a premium! Get a low-rate loan! Or buy address labels, lots of them! As far as I can tell, Easy Shopping Magazine doesn't consider its readers nitwits; it doesn't consider them at all.

In other Swedish publishing news, the two afternoon tabloids (Aftonbladet and Expressen) are competing to scare the bejesus out of their readers. Today's Aftonbladet cover story on kids and the Internet includes this headline gem: Your child is hunted by 4000 men ("Ditt barn jagas - av 4000 män"). Even if you don't read these papers, their coverage is inescapable thanks to the enormous ads with sleezy, reader-snagging headlines that seem to get posted twice a day at every kiosk, tobacco and candy store in the country. If there's a shortage of grisly crimes (which get imported from Britain or Germany, if necessary, for coverage), the papers are happy to warn loudly about normal aches and pains that turn out to be the symptoms of hidden, deadly illnesses. Last week Aftonbladet had this on the cover: Burned Out? You Could Have Dementia ("Utbränt? Du Kan Vara Dement"). Covering health issues is the kind of thing American women's magazines generally do well and without hysterics. Hysterics must be key to tabloid sales here because they never stop. My nine-year-old finds these papers utterly compelling so I have to drag her away from the display after a few minutes. The routine goes like this:

Me: Why do these papers make things so scary?
Kid: Because they want people to buy the papers.
Me: Why?
Kid: Because that's how they make money.
Me: Can you trust everything you read in newspapers?
Kid: No.
Me. Exactly right. Time to go home.
Kid: I just need to finish reading about these two teenagers who killed the girl's mom and then kidnapped her little sister.
Me: Murder is sad when it happens but it happens rarely. We don't know anyone who has been murdered. The paper just wants to scare us. We're leaving NOW.

Bet my kid moves to New York to work for the National Enquirer or the Daily News the minute school's over.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 07, 2005

Just Three Things

"While I'm writing the book I do not back-track to read and mess with what I've written, edit or rewrite the new material as it lands on the page, change my mind about the story, hate myself, hate the work, avoid the work, wait for the planets to align correctly before I write, let my inner rabid bitch off her leash, wonder how what I write will affect the reader, worry about the state of my soul, chakrahs or ego, or otherwise railroad myself." Paperback Writer is a kick-ass novelist who is funny and prickly and alarmingly productive. I haven't read any of her novels but stay riveted to her blog for quirky lists of ten and excellent advice for wannabe novelists. She had no patience for whiners or hothouse flowers and takes a resolutely practical approach to her craft.

Bloggers Without Borders sounds like the punch line to a joke but maybe that's because I don't know anything about them. Just doesn't have the moral gravitas of, say, Doctors Without Borders. Maybe it's just me. (Thanks to Phil's Space for the link.)

Speaking of blogging, why are PR bloggers so obsessed about blogging about blogging? Tom Murphy tackles the issue over at NatterJack PR and better him than me but the short answer? Laziness, a state I practically define.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2005

Winning Photoblog

Congratulations to Joseph Holmes, a friend whose photoblog, Joe's NYC, just won two Photobloggies, one for best photojournalism and the other for best new photoblog. I like to make fun of awards (the awards I don't win, anyway) and these awards were strictly a popularity contest. That's fine by me. Sometimes the popular kids are popular for a reason. Way to go, Joe!

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Media Overkill Plus Big Closet News

Eric Boehlert's "A Tale Told by an Idiot" on Salon (subscription or day pass required) is blunt about the recent Terri Schiavo circus:

"It was fitting that reporters were in danger of outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday morning. When one man began to play the trumpet moments after Schiavo's death was announced at 9:50 a.m., a gaggle of cameramen quickly surrounded him, two or three deep. Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a 'furious debate' nationwide?

"... The 'furious debate' angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream. Clearly, the press went overboard in its around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case. But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost to be expected from news organizations, particularly television, desperate for compelling narratives that can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And it's not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a manufactured one, or that it didn't spark genuine interest. It did. What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks ..."

An important topic, sure, but Salon really dropped the ball on the closet front. Could this be a match made in heaven? "MINNEAPOLIS, March 28 /PRNewswire/ -- For homeowners with little time to get the house in shape for spring, organizing the home or garage is as easy as visiting a local Target. Beginning in April 2005, Target will carry the California Closets(R) Life, Stuff, Storage(R) line of ready-to-assemble furniture from the leading designer of custom home storage solutions and Dorel Industries, Inc. From dressers and shelves for organizing apparel and shoes to utility cabinets and a gardening center for storing tools in the garage, the new ready-to-assemble storage and organization products offer high-quality, design solutions that allow Target guests to live and work the way they want."

Target guests? Too weird. That only products from Target allow, hmm, let's call them shoppers, to live and work the way they want to is the kind of malarky that must be throttled. Still, I'm grovin' on the CalClosets-Target connection. Wonder if it will make the king of custom closet fittings seem somewhat down-market. But if the Kmart thing worked for Martha, the far-more-fashionable Target will probably be a happy home for the life-stuff-storage folks.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 30, 2005

Medieval Manor/Media Reformers

Yesterday we made it to Glimmingehus. And what might that be? So glad you asked. "Glimmingehus, situated in the county of Skåne in southern Sweden, is the best-preserved medieval manor in Scandinavia. Jens Holgersen Ulfstand began to construct the stately fortress in the year 1499. You can search for ghosts at the fortress, try your hand at Middle Age-chores, relax in the herb garden or enjoy a medieval meal." But can you do the hokey-pokey? We didn't spot any ghosts but my daughter did get a dark red-purple egg, dyed with onions, to etch with a lovely Easter design as swanky, fine folk did waaaay back when. We had a fine time but I can't wait to get home to Stockholm.

Meanwhile, are you itching to reform mainstream media? Hey, take a number. There's an entire conference planned for folks like you and it's called the National Conference for Media Reform. "Fed up with the media? Want to do something about it? Activists from across the country will converge in St. Louis on May 13-15 to mobilize to fix our broken media system. Please join us for one of the most exciting and inspiring events of the year. The three-day conference includes panel presentations, workshops, discussion sessions, video screenings, book signings, and speeches and performances by renowned guests."

I don't mean to be cranky--no, wait, I *do* mean to be cranky--since when has any conference anywhere fixed anything? Hey, if you conference goers can fix the media system, be my guest. Once you get that little job out of the way, feel freel to tackle those other broken systems we all find so annoying, including health, politics and the ever-growing heartbreak of advertising clutter.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:01 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 24, 2005

High School and the Blogosphere: A Consideration

Ages ago Doc Searls, who is justly popular and whom I adore, posted the following: "This isn't high school here. We don't have to suck up to the popular kids, or try to be like them." No, we don't. But honestly, who doesn't want to be one of the cool kids? My rueful feeling about being number 50+ on the Google search for "Deborah" instead of in the top ten reminds me that while the blogosphere isn't high school, it's not always so very different. Remember those compare-and-contrast essays from our school days? Here's my extremely serious, fair and accurate comparison of the two:

1. In high school, girls rule, boys drool. In the blogosphere, boys rule, girls drool.

2. In high school, it's jocks vs. nerds. In the blogosphere, it's wonks vs. nerds.

3. In high school, there are the popular kids, then everybody else--and it really, really matters. In the blogosphere, there are the popular kids and then everybody else. And so what? We're adults now and this is blogging, not serious business. (Um, except when it's serious business.)

4. In high school, there's plenty of foul language. In the blogosphere, there's plenty of foul language.

5. In high school, teens can't wait to enter the real world as independent adults and escape their adolescent misery. In the blogosphere, adults can't wait to start blogging to escape the real world and its misery.

On balance, then, it's clear that the blogosphere is almost exactly like high school, from the school assemblies to the awards to the pointless insults. But at least we get to skip P.E.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:41 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

Ourmedia.org Coolest Org Ever

Marc Canter, J.D. Lasica and friends have just launched one kick-ass operation. Way to go, guys!

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2005

MessageCast, Blogging, RSS, Advertising and Cold, Hard Cash

MessageCast wants to win the hearts of bloggers as well as corporate clients. During Friday's telephone conversation, MessageCast head Royal Farros told me his company is still working out its business model but plans to pull in advertising revenues by wooing bloggers to LiveMessage. Then he gave me the goods in a Stuffola exclusive. The idea is that MessageCast will add context-appropriate ads to RSS feeds. Nope, that's not the news. (You knew that.) The news is that by the third quarter of this year, MessageCast plans to roll out a keyword program that should be as attractive to the folks who read blogs as it is to the folks who create them. How? By sorting single RSS feeds into categories.

The keyword program is for people like Robert Scoble, says Farros. (I didn't come up with this example, Robert, honest.) A commercial service like Marketwatch provides a variety of topic-based RSS feeds for readers but many (most?) bloggers, including me and the Scobleizer, use software that publishes a single feed that encompasses all the items we blog. What LiveMessage keywords will do is allow a loyal but time-pressed reader to be alerted whenever Robert mentions, say, Microsoft or Firefox or his upcoming book. According to Farros, the LiveMessage keyword program "will allow you to be able to type things in and then well be able to parse the RSS feed and say, 'This says Firefox. Get this to Deborah.' " (Of course, a more realistic example would involve phrases like "get rich quick," "easy money" and "hangover cure" but maybe that's just me.)

Clearly MessageCast (like so many other, eager hopefuls) wants to succeed the way that Google did, by making nice with all the denizens of cyberspace. That means satisfying users (aka the advertising audience), bloggers (aka content providers), the advertisers and the instant message system owners (for now, Microsoft; later, if the partnership stuff works out, AOL and Yahoo).

I like the idea of a LiveMessage keyword program for several reasons. I never tinker under the hood of my car and I only muck with HTML when I have to. Although I adore the legions of girl geeks, I am not one of them. I will only learn a new technology if I'm staring down the barrel of a loaded gun: at the absolute last minute and under duress. Maybe there are lots of ways to split the RSS feed on my blog into multiple topics but I'm too lazy to find out. Should MessageCast give me an easy, painless way to make that service available to my readers, though, I'll register in a hurry. Especially if I may make money in the process, thanks to the ads.

The future LiveMessage keyword program is also interesting to me as a reader. First, a little context: Last week a blogger whose name escapes me (it was a one-post stand on my part) complained about the fact that RSS readers treat trusted news sources (hereafter TNS') and the self-indulgent blatherings of people like me (and him, for that matter) equally. Since this guy quickly skims through headlines, he sometimes mistakes a blog for a TNS (the horror, the horror) thus wasting time. In a similar vein, my friend Pete Gontier mentioned a while back that he thought RSS readers were overrated. At the time I had just signed up at Bloglines (remember, I'm the Reluctant Adopter so I'm always late to the party) and was massively enthusiastic about RSS readers. For, like, three weeks. Now I haven't gone near my account in months so by now I'm very very afraid of it. Guess I'm just not that into RSS readers. They encourage oversubscription (it'll be fun! so easy! let's subscribe to 50!) so trying to read new stuff is like trying to drink from a fire hose; it can probably be done but do you really want to drown in the process?

That's why I got so chipper after Farros told me about his plans for LiveMessage. Remember, LiveMessage sends alerts via instant-messaging systems (but not in IM windows, so it's not true two-way communication as I oh-so-mistakenly implied in my earlier post). You can configure LiveMessage to chase you down, so it can send an SMS to your cell phone if you're not online or send a standard e-mail to your inbox or PDA. Anyway, the point is that nobody will have to drink from a fire hose and settle for personally sorting through every headline or full post from a RSS publisher. Just as we can sign up for Google e-mail alerts to follow specific news developments today, in the future (knock wood), we will be able to sign up for LiveMessage real-time alerts to follow specific topics covered by participating publishers, from the well-heeled Big Cos to the less-solvent independent bloggers. That ability should be good for readers and writers and maybe even marketers too. Why?

Back to Robert as an example. Over at the Red Couch, Robert advises corporate bloggers to write in a granular style. "You want people to talk about you, right? And pass around your information, right? So, make it easy for them. Make one post contain one idea, or set of links. One guy who makes it hard is Mike Gunderloy. His list of links is one of the best on the Internet for programmers, but look at the RSS file his site generates. It has his entire list of links in it. But often we want to e-mail or IM just one of his links. He makes it hard on his users. Instead, it'd be better to split the list up to make it more friendly to RSS news aggregators and make it easier to talk about each link and pass that around in e-mail or reblog it."

No, no, no, responds Cori Schlegel. "Granular blogging is great for granular blogs. Other kinds of blogging are better for other sorts of blogs. Some people (like you, Robert) blog in a stream of consciousness fashion, and read blogs the same way. Others blog differently, and that's just fine. A wide variety of voices is what's needed here."

That's true: a wide variety of voice is what we have, and what we need to keep. But Robert is also right: from a marketing perspective, it makes total sense to whip out Perfect Little Link Nuggets that are easy for readers to digest and share. Some folks generate PLLNs naturally; lots of others don't. If the LiveMessage keyword program works and Mike Gunderloy signs up for it, it may not matter so much that he throws everything into his blog because LiveMessage will help readers pull out the stuff that's important to them. (Note: It will help readers but I don't expect it will do all the work and pull out individual paragraphs or sentences tied to keywords from a single posting but if I'm wrong about that, MessageCast can let me know.)

Company execs say the current LiveMessage offering, never mind the future service, is unique. Well? "They are pretty unique, in that they provided a unified messaging system across different channels," notes Charlene Li, the principal analyst at Forrester Research who kindly responded to my e-mail SOS on the issue (thanks again). "To my knowledge, no one else is doing something exactly similar. But it wouldn't take much for the marketer to allow consumers the ability to *choose* where they preferred to get marketing/content alerts -- through their RSS readers, e-mail, or IM. The difference is that MessageCast is platform agnostic and follows the reader wherever they are. Great for the marketer, but at times, could be cumbersome for the reader to configure just right."

In my first interview with Farros, we discussed click-through rates, not conversion rates or actual sales. Everybody loves to hear the ka-ching of the cash register but Farros couldn't tell me if the use of LiveMessage had actually spurred sales among customers. "Right now most of the stuff we are doing is in information delivery, not necessarily in sales delivery," notes Farros, who adds, "We completely love that focus and we hope that explodes for us."

But he's also big on the blogging-advertising angle. "Remember the old days when you had to buy radio spots or buy TV spots or buy magazine ads and 30,000 dollars upfront and bingo cards and you never knew how they pulled and it was just a disaster," says Farros. "Think of what Google and Overture did for the market. They just took this old way to advertise and threw it right out the window. Now I'd love to spend a million dollars on online advertising because today, I can spend 5000 of it, get a sense of if it's working or not. If it's not working, try something different, if it is working, go in and buy 50,000 of it and have a nice step function up to success."

When it comes to bloggers and revenues, "what we eventually split with the content providers will be heavily dictated by the major platforms" but whatever arrangement MessageCast ultimately develops has to be fair, he says. "To me, thats the ultimate formula. Every important component gets their piece of the pie. ... The great thing about the blogging space is that if everything is fair, everything explodes virally. And if things aren't fair, you get called to the mat instantly."

So will LiveMessage explode in popularity or go down for the count? Operators are standing by here at Mixed Metaphor World to take your comments. Is the vision behind MessageCast smart or sucky? You tell me.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2005

Charmin Scores

Oh my gawd. Real Simple touts the MegaRoll as a problem-solver under "Life Skills." What next, a tribute to vibrating dish brushes?

According to Jack Neff in Ad Age last November ("Charmin preps super-size roll"), "P&G recently made toilet paper rolls smaller before it made them bigger. P&G, along with rivals Georgia-Pacific Corp. and Kimberly-Clark Corp., raised toilet paper prices in July by around 6% through sheet-count reductions. The brands similarly reduced sheet counts in another price increase in 2000 on the strategy of maintaining price points for packages on retail shelves. Some retailers and industry executives correctly predicted triple and quadruple rolls inevitably would follow the downsizings.

"Previously launched Charmin Triple Rolls had faced resistance from consumers and some delistings because the rolls had proved too big to comfortably fit in toilet paper holders, retailers said. The problem, said one buyer, is that consumers have resisted modifying their toilet paper holders in the past. 'It's not convenient, and consumers just aren't willing to do things that aren't convenient,' he said." Yeah, but Real Simple sez it *is* convenient so there.

As it happens, I rent office space from a Neanderthal who doesn't provide paper towels in the bathroom (eeww) and the TP supply is spotty. So I'd snap up a gross of MegaRolls in an instant if they were available.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

Cool Blogging Visualization

Natalie Glance of BlogPulse and Lada Adamic of HP Labs have analyzed "the degree of interaction and behavior among top conservative and liberal political bloggers during the November Presidential election." You won't be surprised to discover that there wasn't all that much interaction between the two groups, according to the paper, called "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog." There are some interesting numbers tossed around but I'm not convinced they mean much. Does it matter that "conservative blogs showed a greater tendency to link to other blogs"? The report says 84% of the conservative blogs linked to other blogs, and 82% received a link while 74% of the liberal blogs linked to other blogs, and 67% received a link. Okay but so what?

Here's the real news, if you ask me: "Conservative blogs tended to rank higher overall than liberal blogs, with the top 20 conservative blogs falling in the 44 most-cited blogs while the top 20 liberal blogs fell in the top 77 most-cited blogs." Download a PDF of the report at BlogPulse so you can watch the cool GUESS visualization of the community structure of political blogs. Maybe I'm easily entertained (don't answer that) but it was a joy to watch the speedy graphing of blue and red blobs flinging links, growing and even occasionally interlinking. Cheap fun, don't miss it.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2005

Circuits is Dead, Long Live Circuits

Guess I haven't been paying attention. Turns out the NYT memo on the demise of Circuits got posted at Romenesko a mere 18 minutes after it was sent to staff late Monday afternoon. Michelle Slatalla's column will survive as part of a new "mid-week cousin of Sunday Styles, focused on fashion, fitness, beauty, smart shopping and lifestyles." But wait, there's more: "On Thursday, the focus will be technology, and Bizday will absorb the core content of Circuits, including David Pogue, whose popular column will begin on the Bizday dress page. On Saturday, the focus will be personal business. On Monday, we will be beefing up and enlivening our coverage of media and related business, such as marketing." Ooh marketing, gotta go work on some queries. Now that I've read the memo, the changes actually make sense. Guess there's a reason why Bill Keller's running the joint and not me.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)

Hot Blogging Action

San Francisco's first blogging politician is doing so on the government's dime, notes the SF Chronicle. Meanwhile, today's NYT covers celebrity blogging via Wil Wheaton and Rosie O'Donnell. I thought Media Bistro was a little unkind when it carped recently about all the blog coverage in the Times. After today, I'm not so sure. Still, I'd hate for the paper to pull the plug on Circuits: after all, today's blogging tributes appeared in Arts. Besides, I like Wil's blog and hadn't known about Rosie's so the coverage was a good thing. In any case, last week the New York Post made this claim: "The New York Times has finally caught on to the idea that the dot-com bubble has burst. Executive Editor Bill Keller is said to be planning to end 'Circuits' as a stand-alone section covering the high-tech world by the end of April." Well that wasn't a bit snippy.

Circuits needs tweaking, not axing. Katie Hafner, David Pogue and Michelle Slatalla are terrific writers, though Slatalla and her readers deserve a meatier topic. That online shopping gig is getting old. But I'd write that column in a heartbeat: it's fun, free form, easy, the total dream date package for a freelancer. No wonder she sticks with it. ("Valley Talk" was a delight from beginning to end and I would have kept writing it but tragically for me, Fortune figured out that whole end-of-tech-bubble thing several years back.) Circuits could be compelling much more consistently, given the folks who write for it. But are there enough advertisers willing to back it? I'm sure Pogue's column and blog will survive in some form, he's become a cottage industry (and more power to him). But where will it land?

Link to the Post item (scroll down), found via Jossip.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)