11/21

 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html

The article involves reporter James K. Glassman, who, with an economist, published a book titled Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market .  Unfortunately, the book came out just before the market tanked and, shall we say, it was a slightly inaccurate forecast.

Glassman in his continuing optimism founded a dot.com cyberjournal and think tank called Tech Central Station.  It's here:  http://www.techcentralstation.com.   Tech Central Station has survived to the present day.

Glassman has, according to the story, aligned himself with GOP lobbying interests, and stories in the magazine reflect that.  That's not so bad, but it wasn't generally known until recently that Tech Central Station is published by a lobbying, public affairs and yes, PR agency,  called DCI Group. And, according to the story, DCI's clients are prominently bannered in ads and defended in stories in the magazine.  The author of the Washington Monthly article, Nicholas Confessore, calls this "journo-lobbying" and effort to "dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups."

What annoys me was Glassman's apparent effort to hide what he was doing.  Now that the news is in the open, he has sacrificed his credibility and the credibility of Tech Central Station.  I call that stupid, and I'm not alone.  Others have noticed.  I picked this story up initially from a blog where the author was venting about Glassman and DCI Group. 

In PR we don't hide our hands often, and we try not to hide them at all.  Why?  Because inevitably it comes out that we are PR people and our credibility suffers for "trying to put one over" on reporters and the public.  I suspect that Glassman and DCI Group have been successful, and they are making money.  I can't wish them well: They've made us look bad.
 

11/20

A Must-have?  Reporters have been noticing that since the Dean campaign began a popular and effective blog earlier this year, all other candidates have joined in with their own versions. They have figured out that blogs are good communications tools to keep everyone informed and motivated. 

Who would have thought that blogs could have taken off  just this year in presidential campaigns?  I wouldn't have.  But Dean's site ( http://www.blogforamerica.com ) has apparently had 2,300 remarks posted daily and 160,000 since June, according to the Washington Post and Matthew Gross who helps maintain the site.  Wesley Clark, who started campaigning late, comes in second with 30,000 posts. 

For all of this communication, no one is sure blogs will make a demonstrable difference in the final vote tally.  I look at it this way.  It can't hurt and for the cost of maintaining and posting to the site,  it is doing little economic harm to the campaign. Moreover, it is showing that grassroots voters don't like to be ignored by modern campaign machinery that blasts messages to the masses.  In fact, one could make the case that the individualized and interactive nature of the Internet is fostering a whole new style of campaigning that no one -- not even Dean -- fully appreciates.   It is almost as exciting as when candidates discovered the power of TV advertising in the 1960s.

It would be nice to see some PR people in the middle of all this but apparently that is not the case.  As recent surveys show, PR people are still not technologically adept.  It is enough to make one hang one's head in shame.

Those of us who blog in PR are a minority, and to some degree we are feeling our way into the effective use of the tool.  But we've started.  Is there anyone following us?
 

11/19

http://www.rhetorica.net/

The professor, Andrew Cline, Ph.D., has been documenting structural biases that infect the media.  Structural bias is not conscious bias  but a point of view that comes with the territory in which one lives, works and thinks.  For example, reporters think of daily deadlines and short articles.  Book writers think of multi-year contracts and lengthy manuscripts.  Cline's discussion of structural bias is here:

http://rhetorica.net/bias.htm

I was intrigued because yesterday he said he had missed a media bias.  It is a tendency to expediency -- the quick fact and deadline story.  If a story takes time to develop and nuance that requires digging, it is less likely to be reported in a news medium.  Here is how Cline describes it:

Journalism is a competitive, deadline-driven profession. This means reporters and editors will be biased toward information that can be obtained quickly and easily. Need an expert/official quote (status quo bias) to balance (fairness bias) a story (narrative bias)? Who can you get on the phone? Who is always ready with a quote and always willing to speak? Much of deadline decision making comes down to gathering information that is readily available from sources that are well known.

I laughed when I read this because that is what we do in Public Relations.  We try to position our clients as go-to people for busy journalists.  We try to make ourselves available to serve journalists' last-minute needs.  We try to frame a story and summarize facts so journalists don't have to flounder doing it themselves.

Call that spin, if you want.  I call it smart service if one is ethical and accurate.  I'm proud to be a media resource.  But, I realize I am supporting a structural bias.  I wouldn't be in business if I weren't.
 

11/18

See the following for a typical theme that has been appearing. 

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

Wal-Mart is in danger of forgetting that any principle driven to logical extreme puts one in a dangerous position with the public.  In Wal-Mart's case the principle is a good one -- to bring the lowest cost to customers on everything from pickles to bikes to shotguns to swimming trunks.  The company believes the customer is always right, and the customer wants low prices. 

But is that always the case?  It might not be when the company hurts customers who are employees and vendors who supply goods.  It might not be when company policies distort the wage and benefit environment for employees who are not part of Wal-Mart but employed by competitors who feel driven to lower costs too.  Thus, the prolonged strike in Southern California where supermarket chains have locked out union employees because the employees are not willing to take benefit cuts that bring pay scales closer to Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart might not have much to worry about at the moment, but with every cost-cutting step that takes more jobs,  drives suppliers overseas and forces vendors to absorb costs and dissipate brands, resentment builds -- and builds again.  At some point, government steps in.  That point has been reached in the matter of undocumented immigrants working in its stores as cleaners.  Fortunately, for Wal-Mart those employees were not part of Wal-Mart but of subcontractors.  However, Wal-Mart is tarnished by association and unions are taking  advantage to make a case against the company.

When you are big, people take shots at you.  When you are as huge as Wal-Mart, expect cannonading.
 

11/17

Footing is misery when I build revenue/expense models, and I have a 3-year school budget that is not footing by $30,000 right now.  I have no idea where it is off, but I've run out of time.  It is approximately right, but it isn't exactly right. 

Some explanation might be in order.  I am on a school advisory board for a nonprofit school and the ad hoc budget committee is tasked with drawing up a budget that will get the school back on a solid financial footing.   After the lead budgeter brought in hand-written numbers because he does not know how to use a spreadsheet, I volunteered to build a model.   So, I unlimbered Microsoft Excel and started building about a week ago.   There are several sub-sheets linked to two main sheets.  These include estimates of student population, tuition, salaries, expenses and revenues that are not tuition.  The lead budgeter had developed a model that he called "need gap" to show how tuition wasn't keeping pace with expenses.  I tried to follow that model but also to keep the generalized revenue/expense format that you see in most cases. 

The problem is the way the budgeter collected and added the numbers is not the way that they are added in the traditional revenue/expense format.  This causes numbers to be all over the place -- some here and some there.  And, it is difficult to assemble a model in two ways.

However, it is important that there be two models because the committee is used to seeing the model in the leader budgeter's format and not in a traditional revenue/expense layout.  That means after the meeting tonight, I will have to take the next round of changes and to trace them through the model until I find the error.  It could be as simple as double-adding, but when there are hundreds of rows, finding that is not easy for me.

One thing I've learned out of all this is that I am glad that I am in PR, and I don't do models all of the time.  On the other hand, I am happy I am a PR practitioner who can do a budget model in a pinch.  It has been a useful tool for clients from time to time.