02/07

Reading out loud teaches one about good writing, expression, characters and persuasion.  PR practitioners need to know all these things.  Mark Twain and Charles Dickens were notable readers who made a living reciting their works to rapt audiences.  Their reading informed their writing and drove it forward.  They knew what worked with audiences because they had connected with listeners time and again. 

I had been taught to read aloud when I was in boarding school years ago where meals were eaten while listening to a student reader, or if lucky, to records of great readers such as Dylan Thomas.  I had forgotten about reading aloud for decades when a wonderful program appeared on National Public Radio in America.  It is called "Selected Shorts," and it issued from an old theater, dubbed Symphony Space, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  "Selected Shorts" engages some of the finest actors and actresses in America to make short stories leap off the page.  It isn't reading.  It is acting with words. 

When Sara appeared in our lives, we were told that reading aloud to a young child was a good way to help the child learn to read and fall in love with books.  So, we read, and by happenstance, I came to enjoy reading out loud again.

I think now that every PR practitioner should be trained to read text aloud.  It's one of the vital communication skills, and we can never practice it enough.
 

 02/06

I suppose Dell is right, but I am a stubborn sort who will order his next computer with a floppy drive.  I have hundreds of floppy disks filled with "stuff" and I don't want to lose this "stuff."  It makes little difference that I haven't looked at the "stuff" for years.  It's like keeping school papers as a reminder that once you knew something.  There is warmth in recalling that you discussed "symbolism and semiotics."

I guess I should empty  the old floppy disks onto a Zip drive (itself an aged technology) or break down and get a disk burner.  But there's time for that someday when I have to face the decision of keeping my "stuff" or getting rid of it.  You know what will happen then, of course.  I won't recognize anything on the disks, and I will ask why the hell I had this pile of square black objects around the house for so many years.  But that time isn't here yet.  Not yet, but soon. 

Interestingly, Dell is finding that most of its customers are like me.  They want a floppy drive.  Apparently nine out of 10 customers are ordering one.  Like me, they see the drive as a backup.   Apple stopped selling floppy drives on its machines some years ago, but we PC users are traditionalists.  If it was good enough for my long-ago 8086 machine, its good enough for my Pentium.

Surely there must be a better way, and I would like to know what it is.  My career is on floppies.
 

02/05

The Associated Press reports that the Internet is serving as a public contact point and bulletin board for NASA and civil authorities gathering Columbia wreckage and reporters searching for news. 

NASA established an e-mail address for people to send in images and text, and it opened a file transfer link using FTP -- File Transfer Protocol -- so people could send in video and film.  News stations in Texas have adapted their Web sites to post contributions from the public about debris, personal eyewitness accounts and expressions of sympathy.  And, people are using the news sites to send condolences, e-mails about what they witnessed, maps to guide searchers to shuttle pieces, art and poetry.  The news sites provide reporters with an alternative source of data that does not come from NASA.

The Web will be a two-way medium woven into all major disasters going forward.  To date, the Web has been mostly for one-way reporting from authorities and companies to the public.  The shuttle disaster shows how easy it is to interact. 

This is a breakthrough and a caution.  If you have a plant that blows up or a plane that falls from the sky, you cannot control information through a Web site and news conferences.  Information flows independently online, and you need to keep up with it.  While this gets information out rapidly, it is deadly if wrong information goes out widely.  You need to know what is out there even while you getting information out yourself.

It seems to me that one essential element in crisis communications today is Web monitoring. 
 

02/04

Youngsters, of course are the most desirable demographic for advertisers.  Old farts like me, a heavy newspaper reader, are useless to marketers. But, the numbers are disheartening.  Here's Newsday:

• Nationally, 41 percent of young adults read a daily newspaper last year, virtually unchanged from 2001, according to surveys conducted by Scarborough Research in Manhattan.
   
• Only 33 percent of U.S. families led by someone age 25 to 34 bought a daily newspaper in 2001 compared with 63 percent in 1985, according to surveys of consumer spending by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This decline in newspaper purchases is accelerating with a drop of 21 percentage points in the five years ended in 2000, or triple the rate seen during 1985-1995.  This absence of youth has been blamed for shrinking circulation at many dailies of as much as 1 percent to 2 percent per year. The average age of a newspaper reader is 53.
   
• Between 1986 and 2002, the share of newsweekly readers under the age of 35 shrank from 44 percent to 28 percent, reports MediaMark Research, which tracks readership.
   
• The median age of people watching the nightly newscasts anchored by NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings and CBS' Dan Rather is 56, 59 and 61, respectively, according to an analysis of Nielsen Media Research data from last fall. If young people watch television news at all, experts say, they are likely to tune in to cable channels such as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

It's time to rethink how we do news placement in PR if we want to reach the young.  But I suspect you knew that already.
 

02/03

NASA has always been a leader in public relations -- for better and for worse.  A major accident like this one tests the core of the agency, its credibility and its mission.  There are those who have long called for ending manned missions in favor of robotic orbiters.  There are others who indict the manned space program for safety lapses and bad judgments.  Still, in retrospect, NASA has had few deaths over the years -- far fewer than test pilots lost during development of the airplane.

At worst, NASA can be indicted for spin to justify its budget -- and sometimes the hype has been ludicrous.  At best, NASA can be hailed for contributing to fundamental breakthroughs in understanding the universe and for technologies that have become commonplace.  The agency is a mixed bag.  It always has been. 

I have grown leery of the agency in recent years because its call for a manned space station and a journey to Mars have become strident.  There is little scientific justification for either at this point.  I believe, however, that a manned space station will pay for itself over time.  A trip to Mars is beyond my comprehension.  Why would one do it except to say that one can?  I would return to the moon first and there is little justification for doing that.

NASA works hard at PR.  It always has.  It must now start over with a crisis that it did not contemplate or foresee.  But, isn't that the way for most organizations?