Context & Continuity

...and lock the door behind you, please.

Editor & Publisher has ceased publication. Megan McArdle at the Atlantic's website chalks it up as another moment in the the media death race.  If Editor & Publisher can go under, could Publisher's Weekly be far behind?

NYTimes, 11.10.9: Bible That Vanished on Kristallnacht Is Heading Home

I can't say I agree with the writer or editors of the the New York Times when they decide to describe the recovered book a Hebrew Bible, especially as the erudite readers of the NYTimes will be able to understand the meaning of Torah or even Tanach.  Nevertheless this is a fascinating story, especially as it concerns how this is the first Hebrew Bible that contains chapter numbers. 

“It doesn’t mean money to us,” Dr. Ariel Muzicant, the president of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, Vienna’s Jewish community, said at the ceremony. “It’s about spiritual value.”

The atlas-size Bible, which was printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1516, several generations after the Gutenberg Bible, according to scholars, bears faded gold Hebrew characters on its three-inch-thick spines. And, “for the first time in a Hebrew Bible, the chapter numbers appear in the margin,” according to the catalog issued by Kestenbaum & Company, the auctioneer, which estimated its value at $20,000 to $30,000.

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What You Should Have Read in Today's NY Times.

The Obamas’ Marriage

Another Washington dusk, another motorcade, another intimate evening played out in public view. On Oct. 3, just a day after their failed Olympics bid in Copenhagen, Barack and Michelle Obama slipped into a Georgetown restaurant for one of their now-familiar date nights: this time, to toast their 17th wedding anniversary. As with their previous outings, even the dark photographs taken by passers-by and posted on the Web looked glamorous: the president tieless, in a suit; the first lady in a backless sheath.

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Going Along for the Rides

Curtis Sliwa, 55, has spent the last 30 years riding the New York City subways as the founding member of the Guardian Angels crime-patrolling group. He has a second career as a radio talk show host on WABC-AM (770). He spends each Sunday touring the subway system with his 5-year-old son, Anthony, while his long-suffering wife, Mary, also 55, waits at their home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

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Block-a-Thon

On Sunday morning, 40,000 people will run, walk and wheel their way 26.2 miles through New York’s five boroughs in a whirlwind tour of the city at its most festive. My personal marathon, restricted to the long rectangle created by Baltic and Warren Streets and Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn, offered something more subtle: a glimpse at a day in the life of my neighborhood.

The idea came to me on my umpteenth walk with Barnaby, a basset hound with a trace of beagle that we adopted from a shelter in June. Somehow, the thought “This is pathetic — I’m walking miles every day without getting anywhere” morphed into “What if we kept walking — without going anywhere? Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?”

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Keep Those Eyes on the Skies

Were they asleep? No, just glued to their personal laptops — a violation of airline policy — to figure out together a complicated new pilot scheduling system while their Airbus A-320 flew on autopilot with 144 passengers on board. “The ultimate example of distracted driving,” one Washington lawmaker called it last week.

Air traffic controllers tried to make radio contact for 91 minutes. The military put four fighter jets at the ready, fearing a hijacking. The White House situation room was alerted. A flight attendant finally roused the pilots’ attention by telephoning the locked cockpit to ask why they weren’t descending.

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The Difference a Year Makes

BABY boomers are counted as lucky for having lived through a time of unprecedented prosperity. But Harry MacAvoy, 52, believes that within his generation, there was one year to be born that was luckier than the rest, 1957.

“We completely missed the upheaval of the 60s, the Vietnam protests on campus, the draft,” said Mr. MacAvoy, who is research director for Republican legislators in the New York State Assembly and happens to have been born in, yes, 1957. “But we were old enough to remember the moon landing, the opening of Disney World and we got to college at the height of anything goes.”

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Why Google Doesn’t Like Its Phone Bill

In a company blog post last month, Google said some rural phone companies partner with “sex chat lines and ‘free’ conference calling centers to drive high volumes of traffic” in what is called “traffic pumping” in the telecom industry.

“People are on the phone for hours — Grandma wouldn’t be on all day,” said Richard Whitt, the Washington telecom and media counsel for Google, in a recent interview.

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Escalations

This problematic legacy explains, in part, why another young Democratic president now finds himself at a crossroads similar to the one Kennedy was preparing to negotiate in 1963. Barack Obama’s dilemma in Afghanistan has its roots in the conundrum that Democrats faced during the last two presidential campaigns: how to oppose the war in Iraq without being fatally caricatured, yet again, as feckless heirs to the McGovernite left. Their solution was to stress their fervor for a different war. Sure, they wanted to withdraw from Iraq, but they wanted to shift more troops and treasure to Afghanistan, where the true aggressors of Sept. 11 were still evading capture. Who could call that weak? It was a sensible policy that also made for irresistible politics.

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Keats Speaks

Lost though I was in admiration of the elfin good looks of Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, and the poise of Abbie Cornish, who plays Brawne, I managed to retain enough presence of mind during this scene to admire their dialogue too, which sounded like authentic Georgian English. This is how they might actually have talked, I thought: playful, delicate, precise. How did Campion, who wrote the deft and artful screenplay herself, come up with it?

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Bookstores and Beyond

EVEN really careful planners, the ones who started saving and budgeting for college before they got to high school, are likely to gnash their teeth each semester when they head to the bookstore to buy their textbooks, only to discover that “Molecular Biology of the Cell” costs $215; “Calculus: Early Transcendental Functions,” $218; and “Business Driven Technology,” $202.

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It's Official. Mark the Time. Flacks Jump the Twitter Shark.

Hey, I've got an idea:  Let's come up with another way to annoy and p--- off reporters we are trying to woo. 

No, really.  This is the information you actually need:  Keep your eyes and ears open for the next communications channel.  Find it.  Plug into it with your reputations and brand, enjoy high bandwidth, trusted conversations  for a certain amount of time, then pack it up and move on when you see ____________ arrive at the party.  Please note:  I am sorely tempted, oh so s0rely tempted to fill in the blank above with several different names I know.  However, it simply isn't our style to inflect unnecessary tsuris.  Not good for the karma don't you know. 

Okay.  Everybody out of the pool.

Name the movie. Win a cookie.

It has been absolutely fascinating...

... to watch Citizen Journalism grow up, or, do something like grow up.  Today we received a screed from Brian Lam of     Gizmodo who takes a Lady MacBeth turn on the stage to let us know he feels dirty about how he's covered the health of Steve Jobs.  Oh my.  Poor boy.  When combined with Michael Arrington's mid-winter breakdown over being played by rookie public relations drones finally makes me respect what I learned at the world's oldest school of journalism.  There, in that rareified air, we learned to cover car wrecks, school lunch menus, industrial accidents, suicides, meetings at city hall, the harvest and the local little league.  Like it?  Great.  Hate it?  Then move on.

Please don't mistake what I've written with a lack of sympathy for Mr. Lam because I reached that same river, Quite Some Time Ago, and decided not to cross it.  In fact, I couldn't help but smile when Mr. Lam apologizes to his parents in his screed because, when I decided to take a different path, I said, "My mother didn't raise me to do this."  --Mr. Lam:  With all due respect, sir, either get used to it or get off the bus.  

This seems like a really bad idea.

In today's NYTimes, I read a story about NBC, ABC and CBS have pull most of their news operations out of Iraq.  Here's a quote from the story:

Joseph Angotti, a former vice president of NBC News, said he could not recall any other time when all three major broadcast networks lacked correspondents in an active war zone that involved United States forces.

Wow.  The United States has 130,000 soldiers in Iraq (Which means how many more "contractors"?) and the three networks can't find the story there.  Yes, I do understand that the three network news organizations do not have the same responsibilities, influence, scope, budget, power, whatyouwill as they used to have.  (I have been paying attention during the past twenty years, I assure you.)  Nevertheless, it strike me as 1. fascinating and 2. disappointing that our war in Iraq can't sustain the interest of these news organizations. 

Here's another quote from the story: 

In the early months of the war, television images out of Iraq were abundant. “But clearly, viewers’ appetite for stories from Iraq waned when it turned from all-out battle into something equally important but more difficult to describe and cover,” Ms. Arraf said. She recalled hearing one of her TV editors say, “I don’t want to see the same old pictures of soldiers kicking down doors.”

“You can imagine how much more tedious it would be to watch soldiers running meetings on irrigation,” she said.

So, I was a journalist for about sixty seconds, but I understanding a few things about journalism and one of these is the idea of competitiveness.  A competitive journalist would allow himself to be spoonfed the minutes from the irrigation meeting and you, dear reader, don't believe that the irrigation meeting is the best story in Iraq today either.

Here's the real danger:  Imagine what a public relations organization can do to shape the news when reporters aren't around to actively cover the story.  Reporters sources narrow down to those who can afford to stay in touch with the reporter, since the reporter can't stay in touch with the sources.  The military then has a tremendous advantage over the "man in the street" in Baghdad. The military can paper news organizations with photographs, statements, updates, responses.  I assure you, the people in the military responsible for managing the media in Iraq haven't had such a triumph since they came up with the idea of embedding reporters during the initial invasion. 

Here's the link to the story.

What you should have read in the NYTimes today.

Frank Rich:  Who Wants to Kick A Millionaire?

Congress can’t get the answers either. Its oversight panel declared in a first report this month that the Treasury is doling out billions “without seeking to monitor the use of funds provided to specific financial institutions.” The Treasury prefers instead to look at “general metrics” indicating the program’s overall effect on the economy. Well, we know what the “general metrics” tell us already: the effect so far is nil. Perhaps if we were let in on the specifics, we’d start to understand why.

Between Obama and the Press

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I met Gibbs for lunch at a cafe near his home in Alexandria. He is 37 but has an ageless face — at once boyish and well worn — that could put him anywhere from 25 to 50. Gibbs gained considerable weight during the campaign that he is trying to shed, and he has a habit — maybe unconscious — of running his hands up and down his paunch while he speaks. (“The chronicle of his weight is a story unto itself,” Obama told me.)

Gibbs scrolled back a few days on his BlackBerry to show me a helpful reminder that the current White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, sent him. “Remember to unlist your phone number,” it said. “Your wife will thank you.” (His wife, Mary Catherine, had already thought of that.)

Podium alums share a bipartisan kinship, signified by the ceremonial flak jacket that hangs in the closet of the press secretary’s West Wing office. It was placed there originally by Gerald Ford’s podium man, Ron Nessen. Outgoing press secretaries write notes of advice for their successors and leave them in one pocket. Every previous note remains there, neatly arranged and tied together in a ribbon. “You can’t see the jacket,” Perino told me when I visited her office a few days before Thanksgiving. It’s reserved for club members, apparently.

The Buzzwords of 2008

Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in “A bucket of fail.” Common forms include epic fail, meaning a huge overall tendency toward failure or a great example of failure, and FAIL! as an interjection or derogation. Often an antonym of win, seen online in forms like “Full of win!” which means, “It’s good!”

You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network

When you ask someone for help, request specific advice or information rather than leads for jobs, and both of you will feel more comfortable. It is risky for people to give someone they’ve just met a job lead or an introduction because it can put their reputations on the line, Ms. Baber said.

Particle Man

In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.

Rabbi David Lieber, Scholar and University President, Dies at 83

A renowned biblical scholar, Rabbi Lieber had for more than 20 years contemplated the compilation of a volume of commentary on the Torah that would provide a modern interpretation for Conservative Jews. Finally, in 2002, with essays by 41 prominent rabbis and scholars, “Etz Hayim” (Hebrew for “Tree of Life”) was issued by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million members of the movement in North America.

Until the 1,560-page “Etz Hayim” was introduced, the commentary of Joseph Hertz, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth in the 1930s, was the basis for Conservative Torah interpretation. Rabbi Hertz’s work countenanced no doubt that the Torah was the literal word of God. And that is the immutable view of Orthodox Jews, many of whom raised objections to “Etz Hayim.”

There was even discomfort among Conservative Jews, including Rabbi Susan Grossman, an “Etz Hayim” co-editor. After the book was released, Rabbi Grossman told The New York Times that the “basic historicity” of the Torah “is valid and verifiable.”

You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book

Sometimes things get lost in books. The novelist Diana Abu-Jaber recalled putting a favorite photograph of a friend’s greyhound inside her copy of M. F. K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf” — and then promptly leaving the book on a plane. (“I hope it comforts someone who’s afraid of flying,” she wrote in an e-mail message.) Similarly, the musician Dan Zanes once used a book to store a prized possession given him by his mother — a rare photograph of J. D. Salinger, taken by Mrs. Zanes’s mentor, the German photographer Lotte Jacobi. “I’m sure it’s safe, but I have no idea where it’s safe,” Zanes said. “Not in any book that I currently own, that’s for sure.”

Need a Ride? Check Your iPhone

“You put the iPhone on the dashboard, and it records the entire trip and sends the route to our network,” he said. The system stores the route, adding it to its menu of paths and pick-up points and offering them automatically to interested riders.

A Generation With More Than Hand-Eye Coordination

“As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” he writes. “They care strongly about justice and the problems faced by their society and are typically engaged in some kind of civic activity at school, at work or in their communities.”

Welcome, Michael Arrington. Really.

That snapping sound you heard late this morning came from the direction of the TechCrunch blog, the flagship of Michael Arrington's media empire and platform for his pontifications.  It was a loud, sharp crack and I recognized it instantly.  Nothing quite sounds like the splintering of plastic veneer as the ego beneath it inflates beyond bounds. 

Missed it?  Here it is. 

Or you can let me summarize it for you:  Michael Arrington is tired, durn tired of being pushed around by public relations people.  This isn't the first time he's fired off a screed in the direction of the practioners in my profession but it is the first time I've taken the time to note it here.  I'm doing so because I think other might benefit from the lesson. 

It can't come as a surprise to anyone that the rise of "citizen journalism" has endgendered a new generation of para-professionals new to the rules of engagement, such as they are, that exist between journalist and publicist.  So, dear reader, if you want to practice journalism and come across a public relations person, be forewarned and please note the following: 

• Publicists work for those who are paying them.
• Trust is earned, or not.
• You are but one element in a much bigger picture.

And if one of my colleagues, out of desperation or sheer stupidity, decides to double-cross you on an embargo or an exclusive or, heaven forfend, warps facts to make a case, I offer you my apologies in advance.  And while I have you on the line, `may I offer you some advice?  If you're out for dinner with someone you're trying to impress and you drip a little consommé onto your lap, and your jacket will cover the spot, do not, under any circumstances, stand up and announce in a loud voice -- that everyone can hear -- that you have a stain on the front of your pants.  Okay? 

Floyd Norris: Brilliant!

Floyd Norris is a business columnist for the NY Times and has a well-deserved reputation for being the sharpest pencil in the box.  In my professional life I've only had one encounter with him and, I'll tell you the truth, it's a heart-stopping moment for a public relations professional when he hears Floyd Norris is holding for you on line two.  In my case, I was working for 3Com at the time and we were in the process of spinning off Palm and had issued a tracking stock for the new company.  The tracking stock did Very Well, while the 3Com stock Wasn't Doing So Well.  In fact, the situation was that the valuation of the tracking stock compared to the performance of the 3Com stock indicated that 3Com was being valued less than the cash we had in the bank.  --And I hope that never happens to you. 

Our strategy was to hold our collective breaths and hope no one noticed and that worked out pretty well until one afternoon when I got the call from Floyd Norris.  The truth of the matter is that it was one of the easiest press inquiries I ever handled.  Mr. Norris asked me if he had done his math correctly and I affirmed he had.  Mr. Norris asked me what I thought about the situation and I told him that, on the record, we couldn't comment about the fairness of how the public values our stock.  Off the record, I told him I thought the situation was rather silly and he completely agreed with me and his column streeted on Saturday and the column said the situation was silly and that was that. 

In today's paper, Mr. Norris explains the Entire Economic Mess for us.  He explains it in simple terms that even I can understand.  I Highly Recommend that you read it. 

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And the winner is....

I received my copy of Fortune today, it's "America's Most Admired Companies" issue.  Once upon a time, my client's place on this list was an Important Metric for the public relations program.  I had an opportunity to work with Leslie Gaines-Ross, then of Burson, now of Weber, on a program to elevate the client up the list.  She is blindingly bright and achingly practical and helped accomplished the goal. 

Accenture takes  the top spot for information technology services.  Cisco is the top dog for Network Communications.  IBM is the leader in computing, and Intuit is in first place for computer software.  The first of the firsts is General Electric and Starbucks is number two.   The line-up in the computers category is interesting:  1/ IBM 2/ Apple 3/ Xerox 4/ Canon 5/ HP.   Are those five companies in the same business?  --I'm not really sure that IBM is losing sleep about the iPhone and Canon probably isn't fretting about IBM's sub-micron capabilities. 

Fortune delivers this bundle of joy to us in print and on the web with the help of CNN which produced some interesting-looking video to accompany the web story.  Don't you know that some ink-stained wretch in the Time-Life building has been waiting years to write this headline:  A latte buzz.  Puh-lease.  Far too obvious. 

Congratulations to all the companies, though.  Really. 

The Future Arrived This Afternoon...

... in my mailbox.  Release 2.0 is born.  Congratulations to the father. 

Update: I just finished reading the first issues of Release 2.0.  Kudos!  Onward!

Radio Geek AM

Just in case you haven't heard about it, today I'm pointing you to IT Conversations.  Phil Windley, has built a very respectable library of podcasts on computer / software topics.  The podcasts are a mix of original production and speeches from the Technology Conference Circuit.  I admire Mr. Windley's work for the following reasons:

1. Timeliness.  The podcasts help me keep up-to-date with what the luminaries are thinking right now.
2. Unmediated.  Instead of reading the media about what someone said, I can hear it directly.
3. Trendmap.  IT Conversations helps me spot emerging leaders.  Mr. Windley casts a wide net and this exposes me to people I haven't heard of before. 
4. Voice.  I enjoy listening to the person speak.  Tone of voice, inflection, ... all this adds a tremendous amount of information to the content. 
5. Ease-of-use.  Mr. Windley has done an admirable job of making the content  easy to use and is formated to for podcasting or directly consuming over a browser. 

Just to pick up on a word I used earlier, what's interesting about IT Conversations is that, through diligence and dedication, Mr. Windley has created a library of content that probably has a dozen podcasts that you will want to listen to Right Now. 

One very notable trend that has helped Mr. Windley is the "opening" of the conference circuit.  Back in the day, the important conferences were exclusive events that reporters could attend but, due to restraints imposed by the conference organizers, had difficultly reporting on.  Sometimes, the entire event happened in an "off the record" bubble.  But that was the old model.  The day of those conferences has come and gone.  The new trend -- camps / mash-ups / O'Reilly -- is a more open model that  sometimes doesn't even charge for admission.  As a consequence, Mr. Windley can  set up his recording rig almost anywhere he wants and capture the moment. 

Highly recommended.   

Gratuitous Weekend Post...

What happens when "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language" puts a color picture of Penelope Cruz on it's cover?

 

Today's clue:  If you don't have a subscription to the New York Review Of Books, you need / ought to get one now. 

The Washington Post, 11/25/03: 'NewsHour' Cancels Media Critic Interview

Talk Critical of CEOs Termed 'Unbalanced'
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page C08

When "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" invited author Michael Wolff on the program, his reputation as a scathing media critic was hardly a secret. Wolff, a columnist for New York magazine, was peddling his new book, "Autumn of the Moguls," which describes said moguls in personal and rather unflattering terms.

But the PBS program abruptly killed the taped interview Friday, a week after it was recorded.

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The NYTimes, 11/17/03: Building a Web Media Empire on a Daily Dose of Fresh Links

...

Mr. Denton's blogging venture runs on a shoestring. He employs three writers, one for each blog, who "are not paid much." And he depends almost solely on good buzz for marketing. His tiny advertising budget consists of spending several hundred dollars to buy ads tied to certain keywords on Google's search engine, like "Anna Wintour," so that when users search for the names of media figures, the results include links to Mr. Denton's blogs.

...

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The NYTimes, 10/6/03: The Media Critic Who Would Be a Mogul

The Media Critic Who Would Be a Mogul
By DAVID CARR

Published: October 6, 2003

[snip]

"He is both oracular and reckless," said Simon Dumenco, who edits Mr. Wolff at New York magazine. "He is not afraid to do a little damage, including some damage on himself. By the time it became clear that his column was a hit, it was too late for the people he covered to kill him."

[snip]

"Michael eats moguls for breakfast and then takes them to lunch," Mr. Hirshey said.

[snip]

"The interesting thing about the guys who run the media business is that they are a sort of special example of people with vivid needs," Mr. Wolff said. "It is almost a confession of weakness to go into the media business. You don't go into the business because you don't want to be noticed and because you don't want to be at the center of attention."

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