On Edelman PR and News Corp.

I got into a little tete-a-tete with prolific media theorist/journalism professor Jay Rosen this week about the responsibility of Edelman PR taking on News Corp. as a client following the phone hacking scandal and backlash.

You can read his whole exchange with other people here. The whole post is well worth the read for the debate about ethics and scope of services; however, I’ll repost my portion of the debate below.

Originally, I got involved in this when Jay posted on Twitter:

As usual, all the PR people who follow me have nothing to say re: our discussion today of @Edelman_Trust’s decision to work for News Corp.

I took a bit of offense to that tweet for a few reasons. First, it’s unfair to assume, as Jay does, that PR people must engage him whenever he takes about a PR company. That kind of thinking reeks of blatant self importance. We’ve got day jobs! We can’t necessarily respond to everything someone says. (For the record, I don’t know the demographics of Jay’s followers, so I can’t accurately say if PR responses were quieter than usual.)

Second, tweet assumes that PR people implicitly agree with Edelman taking on the News Corp. assignment by nature of our silence regarding Mr. Rosen’s tweets. We don’t speak as a unified bloc, nor should we. Just because Mr. Rosen may not have gotten the response he was hoping for from PR people, does not mean we approve of Edelman.

To his tweet, I at-replied:

@jayrosen_nyu Depends on what the scope of work is. PR doesn’t nec. mean “put shiny face on” means “manage reputation” however they see fit

Mr. Rosen then posted on his Storify page:

Good point! But other than Ann Marie, I hear nothing from the PR pros. Several hundred of them follow me on Twitter, but over the years I have noticed that while they preach the virtues of “engagement” most are reluctant to comment on any controversy that involves their profession.

But maybe if we shine a light on this fact we can draw them out a bit. Let’s give it a shot….

“As usual, all the PR people who follow me have nothing to say re: our discussion today of @Edelman_Trust’s decision to work for News Corp.”

We have a winner! Peter Axtman is a PR guy…

“@jayrosen_nyu Depends on what the scope of work is. PR doesn’t nec. mean “put shiny face on” means “manage reputation” however they see fit”

Yes, Peter. But I didn’t say anything about “put a shiny face on.”

I asked: how does Edelman decide that it’s worth the risk (to its own reputation) in working for News Corp. when the company has demonstrable difficulty in telling the truth about what it did to itself, let alone some paid advisor?

Feeling like Mr. Rosen took my words too literally and neglected the point I was trying to make, I responded in a medium that allowed for longer-form thoughts, the ol’ email.

Mr. Rosen then, with my permission, reposted my email in its entirety:

Meanwhile, I received a note from Peter Axtman, who wanted to expand on his comments above. Here it is, in full:

After reading your Storify recap of the Edelman PR/News Corp. debate, I wanted to respond in more than 140 characters.

You’re right in a way: if Edelman doesn’t know what is going on at News Corp or what the depths of their malfeasance, lying, bribery etc are, then they can’t – well, shouldn’t, they certainly can – take on the assignment of managing News Corp.’s reputation. PR doesn’t operate the way defense attorneys do. We don’t want to be willfully ignorant of whether our client “did it” so that we can defend them regardless.

Our job is to manage the reputation. To do that, we need to have a full understanding of what is going on with our client. If they’ve lied to the public, we can certainly take on the job but we need to know that so that our messaging can be something along the lines of “We’re sorry we lied. Here’s the extent of it and here’s what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again.” However, we can’t know the client has lied to the public and then say “Everything is fine here, more along.” I guess that’s the point I was trying to make.

If Edelman is being brought on to bring everything to light with the least possible damage to News Corp.’s reputation, then that’s one thing and that’s fine, as long as both parties realize that there will be reputational damage and have planned the scope of services as such. If Edelman is being brought on to make News Corp. look good without knowing the extent of the malfeasance, then that is unacceptable.

My (speculative, no-inside-information) guess is that considering the swiftness with which Edelman was hired, they can’t possibly know what the extent of News Corp.’s actions are. Again, this is pure conjecture, but if that’s the case, then you’re right, it will do damage to Edelman’s reputation because the truth will always come out eventually and the cover up is always worse than the crime (just ask the folks at Facebook and Burson-Marsteller). If that’s the case, then I suspect Edelman will be caught with their pants down. However, if my speculation is wrong, then I’m fine with Edelman taking on the case.

Thanks, Peter. That’s quite a ways from “everyone deserves to have their side of the story told.”

I stand by my email. There is little risk to Edelman’s reputation if they are fully aware of News Corp.’s actions and have developed a plan with that information. However, if they know the scope of the action in the company, then more power to them for taking on such a massive client.

Tags: Edelman, Media, News Corp., Public Relations

On Loving the Fans

Derek Jeter, almost the second the fans begin to say his name (before they get the “urr” in DEH-rick JEET-urr) holds out his glove toward the fans. He does this without looking, while staring in at the batter. It feels to me like the perfect Derek Jeter gesture. He’s saluting the fans while never taking his eye off the game. He seems to me to be saying, “I hear you, and I love you, but I’m working right now.”
-Joe Posnanski

We hear this refrain all the time:
“I love the fans.”

“The fans in (insert city here) are the best in (insert league here).”

“I’m happy to share this accomplishment with the fans.”

“The fans are really what helped me today.”

But how does the relationship with players and fans really work? Do players love the actual fans? The idea of fans? The idea of a nameless, faceless mob of people that are cheering for a player at any given time?

The Posnanski quote about Jeter sums up the way athletes most likely view fans: as a undefined mass of people who beneficial when convenient. The Jeter-fan dynamic exemplifies the strange dichotomy of the fan relationship. He has marked his career by coming off as aloof and removed, but always courteous and never meanspirited.

As a result, he’s become one of the most popular players in the game for nearly fifteen years. Fans hang onto every development. They identify with him. They spend hours upon hours obsessing over him, rooting for him, reading about him, wearing t-shirts and jerseys (though in the Yankees case, this isn’t quite the case) that supplant their last names with his last name. The fans legitimately love and adore Capt. Fistpump.

When he finally ends the long, drawn-out march to 3,000 hits, Jeter will likely pick one of the mantras from above and profess his love for, thanks to and appreciation of the fans. But what does this actually mean? Not much. Again, Jeter probably likes the idea of a huge amount of people cheering for him, but he can't actually love the fans the way fans love him.

And this is the dichotomy for all fan relationships. There’s nothing inherently wrong with athletes having no real emotional attachment to the people who buy their replica gear, pay their salaries and scream their names; it’s just the nature of a 1-to-many relationship.

Realizing this disconnect, any enlightened fan or organization can connect with fans in a real-life form of synecdoche (My AP English teacher would be proud). For example, Brandon Phillips of the Cincinnati Reds has taken to Twitter to connect with singular fans and treat them to once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

Does everyone have to do this? Is there any obligation to do so? No, of course not, But understanding the dynamics of the fan relationship – whether sports, politics, brands, etc – can help us realize how we are affected by the adorees’ actions.

Tags: Brandon Phillips, Derek Jeter, Fans, Joe Posnanski, Sports

On Why I No Longer Read The Atlantic

I’m a media junkie, but when I kept receiving reminders to renew my subscription to The Atlantic I couldn’t bring myself to spend the money on it.  What gives?

The Atlantic is a fantastic publication. It’s one of the few that is worth the price of a subscription because its content is intelligent, well-reported, thoughtful and differentiated — all the pre-requisites for a mag to be worthy of selling subscriptions in our content-is-free world. To boot, the publication is even doing well financially – mainly on the heels of its excellent Web iteration – while its peers founder in the Internet age.

So why would I want to give up reading a publication like that? Well, dear Atlantic, it’s not you, it’s me. I have realized that I have simply way too many media outlets to consume, many of which I wouldn’t read if it weren’t for the Internet.

On a daily basis, I consume the Boston Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mashable, TechCrunch, ESPN’s SweetSpot blog, SB Nation’s Baseball Nation, Lifehacker, PR Daily, Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog, about 10 menswear Tumblrs, ESPN’s Baseball Today podcast, The Brian Lehrer Show, KEXP’s Morning Show and KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic — not to mention tons of other blogs and whatever I’m linked to via Twitter.

On a weekly basis, I consume (in no order) Sports Illustrated, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, On the Media, This American Life, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me, Only a Game, and All Songs Considered. I’m not even counting the 10 minutes I spend flipping through Time Out: New York which still arrives in my inbox despite never spending a dime on it.

On a monthly basis, I read Wired, Esquire, and GQ.

That’s a lot of content. I haven’t even mentioned TV shows during the season, any sports I may watch and my time-sucking addiction to Longreads, Longform.org and other longform journalism.

Before the Internet, I consumed two of those outlets: the Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated. Now my media intake has expanded exponentially – which is good and bad. On the one hand, I am exposed to more ideas and more thinking. On the other hand, demands for my time and attention are pulled in so many different ways. I barely have time to read books anymore.

The Atlantic is the first extra media weight I shed. I had the least relationship with it after only subscribing for a year, so it was an easy choice. I don’t suspect it will be the last.

As the Internet expands access to content, we will need to find better curation tools to determine what media is worth our time. Of course, Twitter and sites like Longreads and Longform have begun this, but we will have to develop our own abilities to filter out what we want to read and how to divvy up our time among a large amount of media.

Or maybe, I just need better time management for my leisure reading.

Tags: Internet, Longform Journalism, Media, New Media, The Atlantic

On Giving a Minute

We’re increasingly becoming more and more fascinated with all the ways that technology can be used to improve cities.  Our passion has always been urban behaviors, specifically on a mass scale.

With that introduction, we highly recommend this Q&A about Give a Minute, which is bringing crowd sourcing to New York in order to make the city more livable.

As they exist now, most contemporary forms of participatory activity in the public sphere invite critique: if you put forward a plan and put a microphone in front of it, people are going to critique it. And, because community meetings happen in physical space in a very restrictive amount of time, the only people who go are those who already care about the issue at hand, who have the time and disposition to make their voices heard, or the people who are most polarized on either side of the debate. For Give A Minute, we wanted to lower the barriers for entry into constructive dialogue focused around positive collective change rather than specific complaints.

via Urban Omnibus » Give a Minute.

Tags: CEOs for Cities, Give A Minute, Government 2.0, New York, Open Government, Social Media, Technology

YouTube – Jónsi – Animal Arithmetic

One of life’s most underrated moments is when a song you love comes on the radio unexpectedly.  While working on our long, amorphous, dragging Capstone project, one of our favorite songs came up on Pandora.  Jonsi’s Animal Arithmetic is about three-plus minutes of pure joy in terms of the sound, his voice, the lyrics and the visuals for the music video.  Enjoy.

YouTube – Jónsi – Animal Arithmetic.

Tags: Go, Jonsi, Music, YouTube

On Media Neutrality in Tunisia

Encouraging words from Tunisian President Ben Ali regarding media neutrality and freedom in the country.  Whether he believes that media should be available to all or is just placating the crowds is uncertain.  However, it matters not if it provides better access to technology.

“I am telling you I understand you, yes, I understand you,” Mr. Ben Ali, 74, declared. “And I decided: total freedom for the media with all its channels and no shutting down Internet sites and rejecting any form of monitoring of it.”

via Tunisia Leader Shaken as Riots Hit Hamlet of Hammamet – NYTimes.com.

Tags: Internet, Internet Security, Media Access, Net Neutrality, New York Times, Tunisia

On Availability of Everything

We’ve been spending a lot of time reading about behavioral economics in the age of the Internet and loved this line from Patton Oswalt’s Wired editorial.  The quote rings true as the availability of everything all the time can cause us not to appreciate or even think about the fantastic access we have to people, information, culture, data etc.

Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome (or, if not, just as immediately rebooted or recut as a hilarious YouTube or Funny or Die spoof), the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling.

via Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die | Magazine.

Tags: Behavioral Economics, Internet, Patton Oswalt, Wired

On the Future Plans

“It takes a lot more effort than expected.”

That’s what we told people following our first semester in grad school when we were enrolled in Fraser Seitel’s History, Theory & Practice of Public Relations class and John Doorley’s PR Writing I class.

Fittingly, we’d assign that same statement to this blog — the coda of our in-class (convenient qualifier which helps ignore that pesky Capstone) experience at NYU.  We’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing the blog, but as the semester wore on, we were a bit overwhelmed with the time needed to devote to it.  Our regular reader probably noticed a drop off from multiple posts per week to just our one required post per week.

The blog challenged us to have something to say every week.  We needed to find an issue (hopefully timely), review it and make our fingers string together letters that made sense in some coherent way.  The blog is a more stringent version of the current events discussion that many classes have.  Most discussions don’t prod us opine for 400-500 words; but the flip side of that is the blog doesn’t let us stop midway through a thought and drift off for someone else to pick up.

We were most surprised by the time commitment that maintaining a blog requires.  We’d put off the assignment over the weekend, for obvious reasons.  But then suddenly, Monday and Tuesday nights would sprint past and we’d be stuck at the library on Tuesdays (where we fight an epic battle against the level boss known as the Capstone each week) late at night finishing out the post.  We’ve since learned that we need to devote a solid hour to the post, not including the time we spend media monitoring during the week to find a relevant topic.

So where do we go from here? Well, we’re definitely planning on keeping this blog alive.  This blog is our third attempt at maintaining one.  Each of the previous two have fizzled out due to changing interests and demands on our time from other corners of our lives.  We also have left a trail of dead Tumblrs that we’d like to revive, but we’re going to take our social media projects one at a time.

We’re going to hopefully transfer the site over to our own domain name (we already own our name, it’s a matter of figuring out how to host the blog there, but that’s a topic for another day).  We’re hoping to spend more time on the site as a creative outlet and less time commenting on social media, though we s’pose that may  comprise some of the content.  We’ve been itching for an outlet to write for about a year, and this class gave us a reason to start writing.

This site will likely revert to more inanity like our Halloween Costume Manifesto, amusing images we find online or more fanboy discussion of music we like.  The problem we foresee with the site in its continued form is not whether or not to write, but what we spend our time writing about.

Much like the graduate degree as a whole, the blog has certainly been worth the unexpected time and effort required to make the most of it and we hope to continue as the clock seems to tick a little more slowly.

Tags: Blog, Future Plans, NYU, Social Media, Tumblr

On Jumping in to the Conversation

The Chicago White Sox recently adjusted one of their uniforms to change a black diamond with an image of a white sockon it to the letters s-o-x on the arm sleeve.

Source:SportsLogos.Net

Source: SportsLogos.net

On the team’s fan message boards, the move was met with near universal disapproval.  The thread discussing the change was titled “TERRIBLE Uniform Modification for 2011″ (emphasis theirs).

The first post came at 9:29 on Nov. 12 simply posting a link to the change made in the uniform.  The comments then flowed in,with 14 negative reactions posted within two hours of the original link.  The vitriol from die-hard fans continued as the board denizens blasted the team’s decision to change the uniform and their general awareness and marketing strategy.

As the discontent continued to rise, the White Sox PR staff decided they should address the issue, nearly two days later.  While the decision to engage the board commenters — remember, these people are generally the most ardent supporters of the team — was admirable, the staff’s note to the fans was patronizing, however sincere their intentions.

The Sox staffer Brooks Boyer failed to frame the message in a way that shows the team is listening to their fans.  Though he started the email by thanking the fans for their input, he immediately reminded them that none of them liked the changes and then condescendingly acknowledged that the team is just assuming the posters and bloggers will carry the message from the team to the fans because the team “[hopes, they] all know each other, or know of each other through the blogs.”

Boyer then continues with “I hope you guys do not mind one response to all rather than the same response sent out to each of you.”

By starting the team’s response with these first statements, the team is actually saying, “Sure, we’re going to respond to you but without exerting any real effort.  Here’s our message, go play among yourselves and pass along to your friends.”

The email so obviously demonstrates that the White Sox don’t get social media.  The team doesn’t understand that the message board is a place for people to interact with each other in ways they couldn’t have otherwise.  The board is leveling the playing field; it’s a place for people to talk about the team on a one-to-one basis.

Sadly, the team saw the message board as just another outlet where they could continue with the one-to-many style of communication that regular public relations and marketing usually employ.

What’s unfortunate it that the reasoning Boyers then continues to explain for the uniform change is rational, well-thought out and makes sense.  However, he lost the audience by leading off with a patronizing tone.

Ultimately the issue isn’t a big deal.  The fans who take time to write about the team on a message board in their free time are not going to stop watching the team over a minor cosmetic change to a jersey they don’t wear all that often.  However, the uniform change was an opportunity that the team could have taken to win some favor and further evangelize their most ardent supporters.

Tags: Baseball, Chicago White Sox, Major League Baseball, Message Boards, Public Relations, Social Media, Uniforms

On Innovation in Public Relations

Working in public relations, we’ve learned that our profession has a symbiotic relationships with the news media industry.  Despite advances of technology, we still largely require the media to tell our organization’s story and (whether they’ll ever admit it or not) the media still need us to tell the stories they want.

So if the two industry march in lockstep, why does the media industry constantly innovate new ways to deliver news to people  that reflect their tendencies while the public relations industry adapts to these changes?

As PR people, we’re constantly following the news industry and there seems to be funding handed out for new or evolving ventures every week.  Two recent events sparked the interest from us in the innovation gap between the two sectors:

The recent funding SB Nation received

The commencement of the seventh season of TheMidMajoritySB Nation has become the largest independent network of sports blog by adapting to the new ways people want to consumer their news.  In general, sports fans no longer want generalized content about every league and every team from the same site.  Instead, they want highly specialized content that is team- or region- specific.SB Nation has built its name by giving people sites written by knowledgeable and passionate fans that focus on only one team.   The writers, who are paid, are carefully selected for each site, which creates the credibility that Bleacher Report and the Examiner lack.  SB Nation has recently connected team specific sites with regional hubs, consequently creating destinations for fans in a certain region.

The MidMajority has redefined how college basketball is covered.  The site focuses on only the other 25 conferences that do not constitute big-money college basketball, but nonetheless play at the Division I level.  The site’s coverage is dictated by the readers who contribute money that funds the site.

Both of these sites succeed by accessing fans that the conglomerates like ESPN aren’t nimble enough to satisfy.

However, in public relations, the type of innovation above is not seen.  No public relations organizations or companies are fundamentally changing the way we see the industry.  Sure, digital specializations and shops are emerging, but those places are reactions to the change that the media industry has orchestrated.

Could the reason for the lack of innovation in public relations be because we think we need to use the media that exists to tell our stories and communicate our messages?

If so, can’t we find completely radical ways to conduct our business?  Previously media meant stories in a newspaper or TV broadcast by a capital j Journalist.  Now valuable media is produced by fans, in specialized forms.  Media is covers industries or segments of industries that never used to be covered.

Previously and currently, public relations (we’re speaking about publicity) generally means creating opportunities for your client to be mentioned in a media industry.  But there’s got to be other ways that change the dynamic of what people expect from public relations much the same way that startups like SB Nation, The MidMajority, TBD, Politico, Huffington Post, blogs etc have changed the dynamic of the news media.

People’s expectations of gathering news are changing at the same time when funding is flowing like water.  We’re at the right time and place to use change the nature of how people view public relations (and make some money, too); we just need to figure out how.

Tags: New Media, News Media, Public Relaions, SB Nation, The Mid Majority