Author: Jim Horton

This is an interesting article.  The e-mail newsletter is not dead.  In fact, it is thriving as a medium.  There are constraints, however, that every PR practitioner knows.  It is not the newsletter format itself but the content that counts and keeps readers coming back.  Marketers have a bad habit of taking a medium like the newsletter and destroying it with sales-driven material.  Instead of informing the reader, the marketer is hammering on him to buy, buy, buy.  Effective newsletters bring needed information to targeted audiences.  As the author of the article notes, readers don’t have time to digest the effluvia of the internet.  They want someone to do it for them, and that is the traditional role of an editor.  They vest their trust in a proxy who knows their concerns and strives to address them.  So, the newsletter is dead.  Long live the newsletter as long as users employ common sense in how to use it.

The IRS is having a hard time defending itself before the public — and well it should.  The claim that a hard drive with two years of e-mails had somehow been destroyed is beyond credibility.  As commentators and technical experts have pointed out in recent weeks, it could only have been enormous incompetence or outright criminality behind the destruction.  The IRS of all agencies in the US government understands the need to save records.  Hence, the agency has provided opponents with a huge advantage in public debate over whether the IRS intentionally targeted conservative groups for tax audits.  The Obama administration has tried to distance itself from the controversy but it too has been sucked into it to some extent.  Republican investigators want to know if the White House directed the IRS to pursue its course.  So far, there is little evidence that it did, but then, evidence is missing.  It is likely that the IRS investigation will eventually sputter out when there is no longer any political advantage to pursuing it.  The IRS, however, will take much longer to remove suspicion among Americans that it was used for political advantage.

Here is an experiment underway to see if a newspaper can be revived.  Here is one where the new owner tried and failed.  it is too early to say the Washington Post will succeed but if it doesn’t, it might end up like the Orange County Register.  There are no guarantees in modern media.  Survivors in traditional media are likely to be few and national brands without circulation boundaries.  But, even The New York Times continues to struggle.  One can only hope that Bezos at the Post can see a way through to a viable path and the newspaper doesn’t become a long-term drain on his pocketbook.  If he is successful in building an economic model, it is not likely to be one for the rest of the industry.  This is a situation in which each newspaper will need to find its own way — or disappear.  PR practitioners are riding into the unknown along with the rest of the media.  There is only one thing for certain.  Our business like the media business is changed forever.

One of the hardest communications tasks is to support a product that didn’t make it the first time in the marketplace — for example, this one. Once considered the salvation of Barnes & Noble, the company is now spinning off Nook into its own business and letting fate take its course.  Chances are Nook won’t be around in a few years as other reading devices and tablets outstrip it in functionality and market power.  Imagine yourself as the PR manager for Nook.  What do you do?  What do you say?  The usual technology publicity is not going to be sufficient to gain awareness and buzz needed to ignite sales.  Given the dire circumstances, there is freedom of action.  One has a license to try anything without much hope that it will work, but if it should, it could prove the salvation of the product and the company.  The PR practitioner and marketer who take on an assignment like this are motivated by lost causes and a chance to hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth with two out.  Just keeping the product alive will be success and gaining market share would be stunning.

How humiliating is it for a respected university to make a typo on an official document like this?  In PR, we harp on the necessity for accuracy — proper grammar, spelling, facts and order of presentation.  We make mistakes, but we try to catch them quickly and move on.  It appears that Northwestern will need to do the same and reissue diplomas.  One wonders how many pairs of eyes looked at the text before it was printed.  The university can be faulted if it was only one person.  I suspect it won’t happen again.  Next time they will use a spelling checker.

The old saw in PR that one should never attack another who uses ink by the barrel doesn’t always hold true. There are times when it makes sense to respond to the media forcefully, especially when one can do it in style, such as this instance.   Wal-Mart’s director of corporate communications marked up a highly critical column from a New York Times reporter and posted it on the company’s blog.  The response was restrained and emphasized facts that the reporter either didn’t know or ignored, but would have known if he had only asked the company.  The result is that the reporter looks dumb and the column tendentious.  The further result is that other media picked up on the blog and ran with the corrections.  This is only a partial victory for Wal-Mart.  Chances are the reporter won’t send a column in advance again rather than risk mockery.  Wal-Mart has also burned a potential outlet for its news, but the reporter would never have been other than biased against the company so it was a small loss.  On occasions, attacking the media makes sense, but it should be done with care as it was here.

What is a board supposed to do when its CEO is suspected of moral turpitude?  Fire the CEO, of course.  The reputation of a company exists beyond the character of any one of its individuals.  Terminating employment, however, can result in ugly outcomes — like this one.  The CEO called the action a “power grab” and is suing the board.  The situation has become messy and the company is suffering as a result — in other words, the exact opposite outcome of the board’s intent to protect the company.  Doing one’s duty is a losing strategy.  Not doing one’s duty risks shareholder lawsuits and worse.  One can feel sympathy for the directors.  I’m sure they didn’t sign up for problems like this.  Board members normally discuss growth and business challenges, not the misbehavior of their CEOs.  It is a distasteful part of the job and negative perceptions rub off on the directors as well.  “O, you are a board member of X.  What IS happening there?”

In the early days of modern publicity, flacks would visit editors, slip them a few bucks and the editors would run a story in the newspaper about a product.  It was pay for play.  PR got away from that for two reasons.  The principal one lay with the media itself, which did not want to be associated with any process that compromised objectivity.  The second was that PR understood better the power of third-party credibility.  That is why this practice goes back to the roots of the industry and isn’t PR or publicity as we know it today.  Paying bloggers to flack for you is as underhanded as shoving cash to a reporter.  Companies that condone the practice come from a marketing background that emphasizes control, guaranteed results, consistency of message.  They don’t want to take a chance that a blogger might not write about the product or that the blogger might say negative things.  They are advertisers in another form.  True PR and publicity rely on persuasion and news judgment.  PR asks and answers what the importance of a product, company or individual is and then seeks to persuade others to see it that way as well.  It is a messy business, full of ups and downs and frequent failure, but when successful, the power of credibility is far greater than advertising.  So, here is a wish that such companies see the light and stop offering to pay off bloggers.  Bloggers should be — and are — offended that they are considered shills.

The Washington Redskins are appealing the loss of trademark for their name, but the larger question is what now?  What if they lose the appeal?  The team’s image has long been bound to the name and a picture in profile of an Indian brave.  To Native Americans, both are derogatory and the federal trademark board agreed with them .  This raises a reputational and positioning challenge for the team’s owners.  They can elect to move ahead while losing control of their brand, or they can change the name of the team, an expensive endeavor.  If they do move ahead, they have a long-term PR challenge to make the name respectable again, if that is possible.  It is unlikely that American Indians will eventually consider the name “Redskins” as a compliment.  College teams have already changed their names to accommodate the sensitivity of Native Americans.  So there is precedent for a new name.  The question is whether the Redskin’s owners see it that way.

It was once thought that a country would always pay its debts.  It would do so because it did not want to get shut out of international credit markets.  We know now that isn’t true, and some debtor countries resist what they call “extortion” by creditors who want to get repaid.  The perpetrator is claiming to be the victim.  A sovereign state that plays to constituents but snubs the world’s financial markets will lose credibility.  This is a case in which political spin will work against it.  Argentina will find the cost of its debt has risen along with the risk of repayment..  It might not reach junk levels, but repayment of principal and interest will strain the treasury.  Is it worth it?  A politician who seeks short-term solutions might think so, but it turns the country into a pariah.  Like it or not, countries cannot exist on their own.  Even North Korea is dependent on the world for essentials such as food.  It is risky business to toy with sovereign credibility.