Primack Up and Running at CNN.com

After a week off, Dan Primack has landed at CNN/Fortune's web site, more or less picking up where he left off at Thomson Reuters' peHUB. He started work yesterday and already has posted a slew of stories about Elevation Partners, angel investors vs. traditional VCs, and other VC/private equity doings.

Dan's daily email from his new perch, Term Sheet, has yet to start. You can sign up here.

For now, finding Dan's stuff is a challenge. He's working for Time Warner's CNN.com web site, which is a behemoth that includes content not only from CNN, but also from traditional Time titles such as Sports Illustrated, People, Money and Fortune. It took me a few clicks, but I will spare you the search and give you the address of his Term Sheet page: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/category/term-sheet/.

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

I'm sure Primack will build this into a success over time, but for now, I think he has some work to do to stand out on this very crowded web site. For fun, just try going to CNN.com or CNN Money and see if you can easily find Primack and his articles.

peHUB and peHUB Wire Will Continue After Primack Leaves

Big news in the world of venture capital and private equity media and PR: Dan Primack, author of the peHUB Wire daily email newsletter and creator of its web site, peHUB, is leaving Thomson Reuters to create a similar offering for CNN Money's soon-to-be-revamped Fortune.com site.

Over the past several years, Primack has become arguably the single most important journalist covering VC and PE, largely through his excellent work first on the daily newsletter and then on the web site. Lots of people in the industry can pick a beef with Dan over the way he has portrayed certain news or his tenacity in covering things that they would have rather not had covered, but he has proven himself to be a thorough, dogged and very hard-working reporter.

Now he moves on to Fortune.com, where he will be covering not only VC and PE but also Wall Street and M&A through a daily email called "The Term Sheet" and a sister web site. He starts on Sept.7, the day after Labor Day.

While all the other coverage I've seen on the web has focused on Primack's move to Fortune and the CNN.com web site, my key question was about the VC/PE daily newsletter and the web site. Would they continue without Primack, who once wrote about creating the newsletter simply to raise a small amount of advertising money to fund a pet project, and has been both the brains and the brawn behind it ever since?

Larry Aragon, editor-in-chief of Thomson Reuter's Private Equity Week and VC Journal (the print/online pubs that spawned peHUB), emailed me that yes, they would both continue after Dan leaves next Thursday, though he did not identify who would be staffing them. They know they have some big shoes to fill, and it's not a slam-dunk that peHUB will be as strong, or as vital a read, as it is are now.

From a VC/PE media relations standpoint, however, this is great news -- Primack is going to bring his coverage of VC and PE over to the huge CNN.com web site, while Thomson Reuters will continue to have its offering.

Here's some other coverage on the web so far:

Statements from Fortune.com and Primack

Interview with Dan Roth of Fortune.com about Primack

Betnovate

Voltaren

Two Innovative Ways to Use Texting in Media Relations

Here are two tidbit's from yesterday's Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference on email/online pitching (which I moderated):

• Dave Satterfield of Sitrick & Co. said that he has texted reporters to answer questions and make clarifications  during major announcement events, while they were all in the room together


• The Vatican has been sending text messages to followers and the media since 2003. Kevin Dugan of the Bad Pitch Blog said one of the reasons was to reduce the possibility of Vatican-related hoaxes being picked up by the media as legit.

NY Times' Brad Stone Moving to Bloomberg Businessweek

Brad Stone, who's been with the New York Times as an SF-based tech reporter for a few years after being Newsweek's tech reporter, is leaving the Times to join Bloomberg Businessweek.

Despite Media Upheaval, Business Journalists Are Optimistic About Their Futures

A surprising study out of the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University reports that business news journalists remain surprisingly optimistic about their jobs and careers, despite the upheaval and radical downsizing going on in the media industry.

“I found a shocking amount of optimism, grit and determination in those findings,” said professor Tim McGuire, who retired in 2002 as editor of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. McGuire is the Frank Russell Chair for the Business of Journalism at ASU’s Cronkite School.

Specifically, McGuire was surprised that almost a third reported an increase in pay over the past two years and that seven out of 10 business journalists say they are more or just as satisfied with their jobs as they were five years ago. Almost three-fourths plan to stay in journalism for the next five years.

Post on the Reynolds site here, including a slide deck about the study.

Post on McGuire's blog here.

CNBC's Jim Goldman Jumps Over to PR; Jon Fortt Moves From Fortune to CNBC

Burson-Marsteller has named CNBC Silicon Valley bureau chief Jim Goldman as the firm's new U.S. Technology Practice Chair. According to Burson's release, Goldman "will now look to help companies develop strategies to bridge old media traditions and new media opportunities. Goldman will be based in San Francisco and report to U.S. President and CEO Pat Ford and Global Chair of the Technology Practice Jennifer Graham Clary."

Jim's a great guy, but I think he's going to have a steep learning curve. In TV, he's been used to covering the big players -- Apple, Google, Yahoo, Oracle -- and telling big stories about them, such as Apple's iPad and Oracle's multibillion dollar acquisitions. One of the harshest realities of PR is that most of the clients are not nearly as newsworthy as those household names. The job of the PR person becomes to create some black magic that makes them newsworthy.

Jim, I wish you luck. Please feel free to give me a shout when you get to the City if you need some help making the transition.

***

Update: TechCrunch reports that Fortune's Jon Fortt is taking Goldman's place at CNBC.

To Get Coverage on Bloomberg, Show Them the Money

Bloomberg News is all about money and deals, so for private equity and venture capital firms, the watchwords are: show them the money.



[caption id="attachment_1239" align="alignleft" width="120" caption="Dan Colarusso"][/caption]

That's a paraphrase from the illuminating one-on-one session with Dan Colarusso, U.S. Managing Editor of Bloomberg TV, who was interviewed at the PEI Investor Relations and Communications Forum by Emily Mendell, VP of Strategic Affairs & Public Outreach for the National Venture Capital Association.

"We're not try to cover venture capital in a traditional sense," said Colarusso. "We want to get to exits, real business, Bloomberg style -- show us the money."

Other insights from Colarusso:

• They are in the middle of remaking Bloomberg TV. They've hired staff from NBC, FOX and CNN, among others. "We're trying to be television - we're in 50 million homes, broadcasting 13 hours, 6am-7pm."


• They are arming print reporters with handicams to put stories directly up on Bloomberg TV


• The larger Bloomberg strategy is to take their great newsgathering army, get information and distribute through 4-5 different pipelines. There are now 152 Bloomberg bureaus around the world.


• He looks at footnoted.org, siliconalleyinsider, paidcontent.org

****

Next up was an interview with Dennis Berman, deputy bureau chief for money and investing of the Wall Street Journal. It was less nuts-and-bolts and more philosophical. Berman said of private equity that he would like to see less arrogance, more humility and that he would like to see the industry directly addressing the conflicts of interest that can come up. For instance, working with management to take companies private and promising them significant ownership stakes in the new company.

"There's a culture of privacy and secrecy in private equity that doesn't create the benefit of the doubt that you would expect," Berman said.

He also said that the Journal is much less interested in covering venture capital than it used to be. "We're covering it the way we were in 1999. There's not that much interest in it."

Spoken like a true Manhattanite. Memo to the Journal: we here in California are VERY interested in venture capital!

Two Good Examples of What May Be Lost if Print Journalism Dies

There were two great stories in The New York Times yesterday that were obviously produced by talented, experienced, well-paid journalists. I can't imagine an online model that would produce such stories, and it will be our society's loss if or when this type of writing and research is no longer done.

The first story is an important one: the story of homeowners in Florida who have stopped paying their mortgages but who are still happily living in their homes, because the legal system can't process all the foreclosures in that state. I had no idea about this practice, as I live in California, where lenders can initiate foreclosures without court approval. As the story reported, Florida and 18 other states require a judge to sign off on the foreclosure, and naturally, there is a huge bottleneck.

This story was interesting to me for its portrayal of the practical economics of several delinquent homeowners and how this situation affects the larger picture of housing, mortgage finance and the overall economy.

The other story was a beautifully crafted piece about the colorful tops that thoroughbred jockeys wear, called "silks." The "news hook" of the story was this week's running of the Belmont Stakes, but it was what they call in the media an "evergreen," meaning it really could have run anytime. The story painstakingly but smoothly traced the story of silks (they aren't made out of silk anymore), why they all look distinctive, how they are maintained, and most enjoyably, it introduced us to two sisters who live near Belmont and are the "Betsy Ross" of the silk-making industry. I just enjoyed reading it for the pure pleasure of it. And since I pay for home delivery of the print edition of the Times, I can do so guilt-free, like a public radio listener who pledges.

Let's be clear: The New York Times is not in imminent danger of discontinuing its print edition or firing its writers. But many other print media are so endangered, and that's where a lot of great writers, like the ones who produced these pieces, are employed.

Another thing: I'm no sentimentalist when it comes to print media, especially big city daily newspapers. I believe their owners and top editors have bumbled their way to the point we are at. But that doesn't change what will be lost.

Not-for-Profit May Be the Future of Local News

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a new non-profit news web site just opened, The Bay Citizen. It is funded by wealthy individuals and foundations. I think this model is one of the best hopes for funding U.S. journalism.

There's nothing sacred about the objective of turning a profit and creating wealth for shareholders of a newspaper. That's just how most of them developed, back when selling retail and classified ads was a good enough business to more than fund the cost of newsgathering. This coincided with the rise of U.S. metropolitan areas and then the expansion of their suburbs. Sellers of everything from food to homes to cars needed a way to reach these newly congregated consumers, and printed newspapers turned out to be a good way to do that.

Now, in the 21st century, some huge things have changed. The cities and suburbs are largely built, and the people who are maturing in them now have grown up with the Internet. They have almost no need for a printed version of the news, which remains an expensive way to gather and distribute news and information.

Since there's still a societal need for the gathering and dissemination of news, there need to be new ways of doing it, and The Bay Citizen may be one model. Jeff Kaye, an old friend of mine, has  come out with a book on the subject, Funding Journalism in the Digital Age. I've just gotten a copy and haven't read all of it yet, but it's got chapters on possible models such as micropayments, e-commerce and citizen journalism, as well as one on sponsorship and philanthropy.

Why California is No Greece

The esteemed Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently compared the fiscal crises of Greece and California and found a lot of similiarities between the two states. I'm here to argue that he's crazy.

While the governmental budget situations may bear some similarities, that's about the only similarity.

Greece is a smallish European economy that is dependent on tourism and agriculture. It's a weak sister in the European Union.

California is the world's ninth largest economy and the largest in the U.S., generating 13% of the country's GDP. It is the home of the country's high-tech industry, wine industry and entertainment industry. It has huge defense contractors, a gigantic agricultural sector and a major financial services sector. It is the home of innovation. If any economy can find its way out of crisis, it's California's.

Sorry, Dr. Krugman, but come up with a better analogy.

New York Times Plans to Start Charging for Content -- Will it Work?

The New York Times plans to start charging for some of its online content on January 1, 2011, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The decision to start charging had been revealed previously. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller gave the date certain at a media event last week.

Earlier, the Times said that it would start a "metered model," under which the newspaper's website "will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number."

A couple of years ago, they tried to put their editorial/op-ed content behind a pay wall, and the plan failed miserably and they opened it up.

The whole debacle of newspapers posting all their previously paid print content online has been one of the major problems for newspapers in the Internet era. At the time they did it, the thinking was that they had to give away their content to capture "eyeballs," and that they would figure out how to get paid later. They never did, and now they find themselves with millions of readers who have become addicted to free access to journalist-produced content -- which is quite expensive to produce.

If anyone can pioneer a limited revenue model, it's the Times. They aren't the greatest newspaper in the world for nothing. They innovated many elements of the media that we have long taken for granted, such as the op-ed page and front-page news summaries.

The real question is how much they could possibly generate with this metered model, and whether it will contribute in a meaningful way to the high cost of newsgathering.

Top Tech Products of the Decade Were All About Communications

HuffPost has a "top 11" list of tech products of the decade, and I was stunned at how many of them were communications tools that radically reshaped the way we think, interact, and entertain ourselves.

Among HuffPo's top 11:

• iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in your pocket to listen to on demand?


• iTunes: made digital music downloads mainstream


• TiVo: the neutron bomb that hit TV. Do you remember when you had to watch TV in the order it was presented, or pop in a VHS tape to "time-shift"? How last millennium!


• Blackberrys/crackberrys/iPhones/PDAs in general: a computer on your belt or in your purse that is way more powerful than the computer you used to have on your desk, and it's a phone and it's connected to the web too!


• Kindle: still on the upswing, but do you remember where you were when Gutenberg invented the printing press? (don't worry, it was 1439). You'll tell your grandkids about seeing the first e-book. Yes, it's that big.


• USB flash drives: flash memory in general is an absolutely revolutionary tool, as it allows us to record visual images (photos, video) on tiny devices that can go anywhere and record anything (which can then be uploaded on the worldwide communications platform we call The Internet). It also allows us to carry up to 300GB of data in our back pocket and hand it (say, nuclear secrets) to anyone we want.


• HDTV: 50 years after the commercialization of TV, the next step in picture quality, opening up all sorts of possibilities, but mostly, allowing men to watch football on giant screens.

Huffpo's list is mainly "gadgets," in other words tech hardware with some nifty software inside. What about things that were either sold or used only as software, on existing hardware? No diff really, but Huffpo skipped those, so here are a few I'd add:

• Google: came out in 98-99, but it didn't gain popularity until 2000. Changed web search from a frustrating and incomplete exercise into an extension of our brains and thoughts.


• Facebook: changed online personas from sock puppets/imaginary selves to real people knitting their lives together.


• Twitter: it's the first wave of the 'real time web' where information is shared almost as soon as it is created


• Blogging/content management systems: Took the creation of web content away from computer professionals and put it in the hands of everyone.


• Wikipedia: the open documentation and organization of all the world's information


• YouTube: the first major step toward moving TV/video content onto the web. Trust me, by the end of the next decade, you won't use a satellite dish or cable or rabbit ears to get TV content. It will all come over the Internet.


• Skype: buh bye, copper phone lines. Hullo, cheap voice and video phone calls over the web.


• BitTorrent: An amazingly simple way to share huge files containing entertainment (movies, concerts) over the net. I can now download a three hour, 1GB Springsteen show in about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the decade I was trading audio tapes by mail with people. How easy will it be in another decade?

The Ugly Truth About Tiger Woods and All His Enablers

So it turns out that Tiger Woods has been a carousing, hard partying guy, both as a bachelor and as a married man. In essence, this doesn't surprise me one bit -- in fact, it makes a lot more sense than the partial stories that were coming out the first week about his "transgressions." I believe that one of the unexplored tensions in our society is the tamping down and frowning upon mens' natural desires for the attention of women.

What does stun me is all the media and sponsor handwringing and clucking that has ensued now that the stories about Tiger's wild party life have burst into the open. Where were you, golf media, when Tiger had a bottle of Cristal in one hand and a babe on each arm? Were you partying along with him? Were you up in your rooms playing Nintendo? Or were you just flat out clueless?

And sponsors, starting with Accenture: you mean to tell me that you didn't check out Tiger's behavior before or while you employed him? You didn't do any due diligence to find out if the image you were buying was real? And you want me to trust you (Accenture) with my corporate consulting work?

It seems clear to me that the media, sponsors and the PGA tour all turned a blind eye toward Tiger's behavior, for one good 'ol fashioned reason: money. The man has made billions for all the parties above, boosting ratings and selling soap. He was their cash cow, their golden goose. To call him on his behavior would have been commercial suicide.

I understand that too. But spare me the holier-than-thou statements now generally along the lines of "we didn't know" or "he doesn't represent the right image for us." Puh-leeze. How about "we knew all along but we didn't say anything, so we share the blame for this unfortunate situation, and we'll do a better job next time."

PS -- And then there's his wife, Elin Nordegren. She knew before she married Tiger that he was a major ladies man, yet she jumped on the gravy train as well. Here's People mag, via the NY Daily News:

Nordegren's friends tell People she knew about Woods' extracurricular activities but that he promised before their marriage that he would change.

"Elin had talked to other golfers and their wives about Tiger's wild parties," a friend told the magazine. "When she asked Tiger about it, he said he would stop doing it. And she believed him. But he never did."

Death of E&P is a milestone worth noting

Neilsen announced yesterday that it was shuttering Editor & Publisher, the iconic newspaper industry trade magazine that has chronicled the newspaper business for 108 years.

I'd been wondering about the relevance of E&P in past months, so after getting over the initial shock, this decision comes as no surprise. E&P played an essential role in the newspaper industry in the pre-computer and pre-Internet days, but those days are gone forever. And like most of the media is covered, E&P had no real clue how to change with the times. Organizations like Media Bistro simply ate their lunch.

i just wanted to take a moment to note the passing of this trade magazine. It certainly signals the end of an era, amid the continuing death watch for major American newspapers.

"Who Will Pay the Messenger" Is Indeed the Question

I am not a believer that print media is all but dead. But I am a believer that the highest profile print media, namely big city newspapers, are, in fact, all but dead (with one notable exception, the New York Times).

This is not, as many assume, simply because the Internet came along and took away a lot of the advertising base, although that certainly has hastened their demise. It is, in my view, because the managers and journalists who run the nation's big city newspapers got fat, lazy and complacent, well before the popularization of the Internet. They have only now really and truly woken up from this slumber, and it is probably way too late. Sorry guys.

The fact is that, even today, virtually all of the journalism on big city media web sites is subsidized, one way or the other, by the print side of the house. Even if the print side is losing money, it is still employing high-paid veteran journalists, whose articles are then posted on the paper's web site. There, despite robust online traffic, those articles won't generate nearly enough revenue to pay the salary of said journalists.

At some point, this model will become unsustainable, and those veteran journalist jobs will be gone. They will either not be replaced or they will be replaced by much, much cheaper labor.

I took the title of this post from an august conference at Yale Law School a few weeks back called "Journalism and the New Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messenger?" As the rest of the title of my post says, that is indeed the question.

I would have liked to attend the conference, but I only learned of it today, and besides, I don't fly across the country for such things, unfortunately. But in a semi-ironic twist, I may very well wind up watching some of the proceedings from the comfort of my home or office, because they have posted video of the panels.

Two main forms of advertising supported the newspapers we know today: display ads from regional retailers, and classified ads, largely from auto dealerships and employers. These forms of advertising skyrocketed after the Second World War, as new and expanded metropolitan areas developed.

Guess what happened next: the world changed. The metro areas got developed, and the Internet came along. Both types of advertisers no longer needed the traditional regional newspaper to spread their message, and so they largely stopped advertising in them.

It was those revenues that supported the newspaper journalism we know today. And now they are gone, and they ain't never comin' back.

That doesn't mean the practice of journalism goes away. But the cash cow that underwrote it has run out of milk. And for the most part, the managers and journalists who run big city newspapers are still flatfooted. It was probably never likely that they would lead the next revolution, but it's always hard to watch people struggling with their economic mortality.

I'm going to end this stemwinder with a few thoughts about how the messenger might get paid:

• The non-profit model: There's no reason why a non-profit can't be the publisher of a newspaper. It is in this case (the St. Pete Times), and has been for years.


• Non-profit, part 2: Free-standing non-profits, such as Pro Publica, can also raise money, pay journalists and distribute their stories.


• Cheaper labor: pipe the City Council meeting to India. Have a writer there watch it and write the story. Fire or reassign the rumpled reporter who used to sit there to do more in-depth pieces.


• Change the advertising-to-content mix: It's amazing how much stuff publishers are posting on the net, with so little advertising around it. Spread the content a lot thinner, and get more ads.

Good Riddance, Lou Dobbs

Buh-bye Lou: The bombastic and misguided Lou Dobbs has finally given up his perch on CNN and quit the network, more than a year before the end of his contract. For now, he will spew his anti-immigration, white-privileged perspective on his national radio show. I haven't looked up the odds, but if I were a betting man, I'd say 5:1 he goes to Fox "News" after a respectful interregnum.

I'm not a big believer in the so-called objectivity of the mainstream media, but for years Dobbs has even crossed that line and used his show, ostensibly about business and finance news, to spout his wingnut opinions. Because CNN's ratings suck so bad, the bigwigs there had little choice but to live with it, because Dobbs was one of their original and top personalities.

He crossed the point of no return when he insisted on keeping the Obama birth certificate story alive on his CNN show, even after the network itself fully debunked the story.

Good riddance to a flaccid corporate cheerleader and megaphone for racism.

What did you do with your summer?

In a sign of things surely to come, a 29-year-old writer has just landed a sitcom deal with CBS to make a show out of his Twitter feed, ShitMyDadSays.

This is not April Fools, and this is not a joke. The Tweeter in question, Justin Halpern, had already signed a book deal with HarperCollins. He's got more than 700,000 followers for a Twitter feed he only started in August.

BTW, what did you do with your summer?

Here are a couple of gems from what is, absolutely, a very fun guy and his son:

• "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."


• "I hate paying bills... Son, don't say "me too." I didn't say that looking to relate to you. I said it instead of "go away."


• The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain't like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain't spitting it out."


• "Just pay the parking ticket. Don't be so outraged. You're not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked."

How this turns into a PG-rated CBS sitcom is a good question. "Stuff My Dad Says" isn't likely to be half as funny, and "funny stuff that happens in my family" has been done, and done, and done, starting with "I Love Lucy" in the 1950s.

Of course, in today's world, getting the deal, getting to make a pilot and even just getting to make a few bad episodes before being cancelled is an excellent way to a) make a living and b) leapfrog onto other projects.

Per my opening line: this IS a sign of the present and future. Life has moved online (duh) and mainstream, mass market communicators are finally taking notice. Look for more such crossovers on a TV, in a book, or on a movie screen near you.

Is This the West Coast's Top PR Event of the Year?

The PR industry has typically had a serious East Coast slant, mostly for good reason, and that means the biggest PR events usually happen in New York or Washington. Many of the biggest companies in the world are located in the Northeast Corridor, as is the stock exchange, the capital, and the media industry. Here in the West, we have Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and that's about all.

For the past couple of years, I've been involved with PRSA's Silicon Valley Chapter, and our big event of the year is "Media Predicts," a lively dinner, networking opportunity and panel discussion of predictions for next year in technology. It's on Wednesday, Dec. 2 at the Computer History Museum, and it draws 300 people and dozens of top tech PR agencies and corporate PR departments.

This year, we've added two new wrinkles -- an opening stand-up comedy monologue by name-brand comic Will Durst, and a "Student Silent Auction" in which top PR students from San Jose State are auctioning themselves off [proceeds to their school's PR program] to be PR interns at agencies or companies.

As my title implies, I think this is turning into the top must-attend event in PR on the West Coast, assuming you have a business interest in technology [and these days, who doesn't?]. It's a see-and-be-seen opportunity for the tech PR community, which is especially valuable in this Twittering/Facebooking/email world of impersonal communications.

Here's the list of tech media speakers, followed by a list of the companies who have already signed up to sponsor this event and host tables. For more information, go to the PRSA Silicon Valley page or the registration page.

• Ben Worthen, Wall Street Journal & Digits


• Brad Stone, New York Times & Bits Blog


• Byron Acohido, USA Today, LastWatchDog


• Connie Guglielmo, Bloomberg News


• Matt Marshall, VentureBeat & DEMO


• Om Malik, GigaOM


• Steven Levy, WIRED


• Jim Goldman, CNBC (moderator)


• Duffy Jennings, SFGate (emcee)

Sponsors so far:

Premier Event Sponsor:

• Yahoo

Platinum:

• Microsoft


• SAP

Gold:

• Blanc & Otus


• Market Wire


• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide


• Trainer Communications


• Weber Shandwick

Bronze:

• Access Communications


• A&R Edelman


• Brunswick


• Dell


• Eastwick


• Fleishman-Hillard


• BusinessWire


• SanDisk


• Voce


• Waggener Edstrom

Sure Fire Elements of Media Stories, Or How to Get in the Times if You're Looking for a Job (Hint: Be Cute, Young, Blond and a Twin)

Part of my media training curriculum is explaining to people that the media covers only a set group of topics -- they are broad, but they are really all you will find in American mainstream media, so if you want coverage, you better figure out which buckets your story fits in.

They are:

• Novelty: things that don’t happen everyday


• Familiarity: things that DO happen every day, such as the weather, the City Council and the stock market


• Big money and winners: the ups and downs of public and private institutions are always grist for news stories; everyone loves a winner


• Risk-takers: people who put their money, reputation, health or safety at risk


• Cat-fights: want coverage? Pick a fight


• Your wallet: everyone likes to learn more about how to make money, save it or spend it


• Sex, celebrities and scandal: because they have universal appeal

The story that prompted this post is this: cute blond female twins who want to work in journalism. This story appeared in the New York Times. Seriously.

Bucket analysis of this story:

• Cute blond twins = sex


• Want to work in the media = the media's favorite big institution, itself.


• Killing themselves to get a job = risk-takers, esp. if you are a cute blond twin


• And don't forget novelty! They're cute young blond girl twins! How unusual!

Here's another story making the rounds: Rush Limbaugh's desire to become a minority owner of the St. Louis Rams of the NFL. It has generated, for sure, the most publicity ever for someone who wants to buy a non-controlling interest in an NFL team. Limbaugh knows exactly what he's doing -- here's an interview to that effect.

Bucket analysis:

• Limbaugh = celebrity


• NFL = familiarity and big money


• Wants to buy small piece of NFL team = catfight!

See how easy it is!

Journalist pokes his head out into the real world, sees his shadow, and goes back

I just can't get enough of journalists trying to make sense of their relationship to PR.

Today's example comes from Monday's New York Times, where David Carr relates the story of his friend and neighbor, Thomas Moran, who left his thrilling but insecure newspaper job covering New Jersey politics for the safe but dull-as-dishwater world of corporate PR at local utility company PSEG.

At least, that's how Carr characterizes Moran's two worlds. Here's how Carr describes being a journalist:

Sure, being a newsie is a grind...but it beats working by a mile. Every day is a caper, and most reporters are attention-deprived adrenaline junkies who care only for the next story. Journalists are like cops, hugging the job close and savoring the rest of their life as they can.

Let me just say that nothing in my journalism career came close to that experience. It was more like working in an insurance office, people sitting at cubes, working quietly, talking on the phone or typing.

And here's how Carr characterizes Moran's PR job:

"... a good job representing the interests of a large corporation... At neighborhood gatherings, we couldn’t help but notice that the once lively and mouthy Mr. Moran was bringing a dark cloud with him wherever he went...For 18 months, Mr. Moran’s nose was pressed against the glass of his nicely appointed 10th floor corporate office in Newark, watching the world go by, mostly without him.

I'm not going to idealize PR, but I've never felt like I had my nose pressed against the glass watching the world go by in my post-media PR career. To the contrary. I felt like an observer, not a player, when I was in the media, and I feel like a player, and not just an observer, in PR.

The end of the story is that after his miserable time in corporate PR, Moran made his way back to the ivory tower insecurity of the newsroom to get his adrenaline fix.

Chalk one up for the powerful media columnist of the New York Times using precious paper, ink and electrons to prop up and perpetuate the myths of the crusading ink-stained journalist and the zombied PR person. What else would you expect?