There have been plenty of discussions regarding the old school journalists losing ground to bloggers and sources on the information highway. There are numerous reasons why this is happening, but I wonder if outlets like the DOK could regain some ground by doing actual investigative reporting like the major publications.

What the DOK is doing now simply won't cut it, when folks can get their information from message boards and other online sources. There have been many times I'll learn something on OKCTalk (AP-verified), only to find the information listed as breaking news several days to a week later on DOK. Instead of doing stories on speculating how OU will do in X game (leave that to the sports message boards), they should start doing some investigative reporting and give the subscribers a reason to stay.

It's just a dynamic shift, for good and bad. Here are some commentaries about the state of public relations/advertising. One is from a PR person and the other is by John C. Dvorak, who writes for PCMag.com (http://www.pcmag.com/), since PC Magazine ceased being a print publication. It is mainly talking about the demise of the magazine print medium but much of it applies to print media in general since much of what it has traditionally been used for is PR and advertising and the shift of advertising revenues is directly affecting the media industry.


ExtremeTech.com - Communications of an A.D.D. Generation (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2337704,00.asp)
January 5, 2009 -By Ronn Torossian

Ronn Torossian runs a PR company, but this commentary he forwarded to me is not about a product, nor about any of his clients. I thought it interesting enough to run as one of the weekly Monday columns that I normally write.

In this busy era, we're all running at top speed, and it's worth slowing down a bit and think about exactly what we're running towards. Moving fast is well and good, but having a purpose is better. So the next time you want to instantly respond to that IM, Tweet or email, pause for just a moment. You and your response will become better for it. -- Loyd Case

Communications of an A.D.D. Generation
Yesterday, from 5 PM until 8 AM the following morning, I couldn't reach one of my closest family members; someone I communicate with multiple times a day via email, SMS, and less often, by phone. Contemplating a breaking and entering to her home after five of each, emails, texts and unanswered phone messages, and after a sleepless, worried night, she called and woke me with a simple explanation—"I didn't feel well and turned off my phone at 5 PM to rest"—simple and instant. Yet in today's age of communications within an Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.) generation—untypical and scary.

Growing up in the Bronx in the mid-1980's, there was a corner public phone bank adjacent to the park where all of the local kids took turns manning the phones as our parents would call and demand us home for dinner, or our friends would call to see who was there and what was up. These calls were often our only communication for hours at a time. Today, walk into restaurants, meetings, movie theaters or otherwise, and people are typing away, blackberries in hand, or chatting on their cell phones, too often oblivious to the person in front of them with whom they can communicate without the technology.

Owning a PR agency, I am perhaps more cognizant of, and surely guilty of the instant communication bug. I often explain and even offer semi apologies to potential clients and new friends. I carry my blackberry and, like an addiction, must check it every few minutes; not to do so can mean missed media opportunities, or worse, a newswire quote which reads "couldn't be reached for comment," which occurred recently when I didn't call a reporter back within an hour. The journalist also expected instant gratification, and when I finally did call back, it had already appeared on more than 80 Web sites. Is this indeed life today?

Wait a While
People update their Facebook or MySpace statuses countless times a day instead of sitting face to face with actual friends. We create identities online and befriend people who in reality we may not actually want to sit with, chat up, or share anything with. Is this authentic or flawed communications?

Similarly, as much of today's news originates from the blogosphere, much of what we see on blogs today is biased rant. The bloggers who make headlines are the ones who fancy themselves as progressive journalists, unbound from the conventions of traditional journalism, such as checked facts and arms-length objectivity. This has become acceptable only because of this A.D.D. communication generation. This communications generation now jumps so fast, fearful of being scooped or being behind the times; they accept the blogs, often devoid of facts, but indeed instant.

Along with those marketing-savvy bloggers come what is usually a small host of commentators who use pseudonyms, anonymous posts and the like without accountability in the comments section of these blogs. Some of these "followers" are not followers at all, but actually the hosts themselves, or shills planted by the host to say the things that, coming from the host, would damage his or her credibility. Yes, indeed it's instant; but accurate or ideal? No! However, that's not required for an A.D.D. generation.

In this Attention-Deficient world, it is much harder to validate or check identifies. The guilt is shared, whether it is the New York Times which last week ran a "Letter to the Editor" falsely blasting Carolyn Kennedy by someone thought to be the Mayor of Paris, or the teenager who killed herself because her teenage rivals' mom mocked her endlessly pretending to be a cute teenage boy. While today's instant communications of email, SMS, Facebook and the like is instant, I believe it's not authentic. It's raw but it's not real, on so many levels. It could be a husband texting a wife a quick answer to a simple question, or a client annoyed at an agency that doesn't instantly reply to an email.

In the earlier days of professional communications, or PR, mail forced people to plan ahead with care. It required thought, strategy and planning, something which today often is not available. Today it is hard to plan even a day, or an hour in advance, for if you don't reply instantly there can be mass panic. Instant gratification has become a double-edged sword; what we do believing to be cutting edge, can also dull the sharpest blades.

One of my earliest bosses taught me to use the draft box for email when I was upset. "Wait an hour or a day before you send that message." I try to use that advice as much as I can. Perhaps one of the lessons of the current recession is to be wary of the uber-quick; there will be many false messiahs in times such as this. Just as one cannot "get rich quick." Perhaps we should all try and slow down and be wary of anyone who requires instant communications. While instant communication can seem great, we must too be wary of only relying on instant rather than building longer, real bonds. Face-to-face, or extensive real phone calls are much more real and valuable than blog commentating and Facebook profiles.

Of course, had I heeded that message, or considered for that someone else might be heeding it, I may have slept last night. For tonight, I will only check my Blackberry two times during dinner instead of every five minutes—and dinner will hopefully last longer than ten minutes.

Ronn Torossian is CEO of NYC-based 5W Public Relations, one of the 25 largest independent PR firms in the US.



ExtremeTech.com - Summarizing the Death Throes of 2008 (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2337919,00.asp)
January 6, 2009 -By John C. Dvorak

This article was originally published on PCMag.com.

You can be certain that everyone will blame the economy for the horrible end-of-year retail sales of tech products. But perhaps they should blame tech itself for doing so little to excite the public. Even Steve Jobs is bailing out of the Macworld keynote; as far as I can tell, he's got nothing exciting to show.

Tech is the tail that wags the economic dog, in case you haven't noticed. When something big is going on in tech—such as dotcom mania in the late 1990s—then everything heats up. Right now there's virtually nothing going on in tech except minutiae. Let's examine the problem.

First of all, the newest technologies have not been well promoted. Promotion has always been the key to tech. For example, name the top ten new technologies that were developed last year. Better yet, just name five. Nothing?

Why can't you name them? It's probably because they weren't reported except in EE Times and a few scattered Web sites. Whose fault is that? Well, in the olden days, you could probably blame the media for not doing its job, but those days are over. The media has been decimated, and informational sources are now so incredibly scattered that it's impossible for the media to do its job without help from industry.

And industry has dropped the ball. It's not helping anyone.

The media is trying to keep up. The PCMag.com home page is cluttered with information and reviews. But out of the smoke screen of information you still cannot tell me the five most interesting technologies that developed or emerged last year.

What's missing is the buzz that used to be generated, mainly utilizing a complex mechanism that no longer exists due to neglect—the computer magazine.

People keep asking me to comment on the demise of the print edition of PC Magazine. Okay, I will. But note that PC Magazine is not the first or only example of the disappearance of the computer magazine. InfoWorld had already done it, and Computerworld is a laughable shell of itself.

And while everyone claims that "you can get information online nowadays," the fact is that the online experience is totally different. The writing is different, and the kind of information that can be displayed effectively is different. Both can easily exist side by side. But magazines cannot survive when advertisers have decided en masse that online is a better place to advertise, completely abandoning print.

When you combine this with the push to take what was a unique American industry and pretty much hand it over to Asia, because it's cheaper to do things over there, then pretty soon everything is done there. While this in itself isn't a bad thing, Asians as a whole have no interest in print magazine advertising. Culturally speaking, they aren't about selling more sizzle than steak. And while this is commendable on some cerebral levels, it creates a humdrum if not out-and-out depressing environment.

These changes removed a great public relations mechanism—the magazine—for promoting business in general. It cannot be recovered.

I don't see it as a coincidence that once the advertising support for computer magazines dried up, the fortunes of AMD, Intel, Seagate, even Dell and Microsoft began to wane—as did their stock prices. The horrible reputation of Vista can be directly attributed to this phenomenon. Once magazines lost their realistic and calming influence, reputations were at the mercy of the online mob, much of which, egged on by Apple, hated Microsoft.

In many ways things are just as exciting as they ever were, but you'd never know it, would you? Information is scattered every which way. When Chris Andersen developed the Internet Age notion of the long tail, he touched on this dissociation but failed to mention that this tail is no longer attached to a big fat animal. It's just a tail. And what's a tail without the animal? Dead.

Just like all these companies.