The Flack

Has there ever been a time when we've seen so many media and marketing industry confabs? They range from six-person tweet-ups to the much buzzed-about annual gathering pictured here ------->

The organizers of these events sure know how to entice attendees with all the right buzzwords, e.g., "new media," "social media," "PR 2.0," "Web 3.0," "community," "digital impact," "ad: tech," "search," "summit," "metrics," "meet-ups," "tweet-ups," and the latest, "140 conference," a less-than-cryptic allusion to one's max number of Twitter characters.

You'd think that given the state of the economy the number of these gatherings would wither on the vine. After all, budgets for professional development tend to be the first to go when client revenues tighten. Yet, these conferences abound. Here's a testimonial for the events hosted by one such content/event company:

"MediaPost continues to host valuable industry events. With a down economy, it seems like events like these would be hard pressed to generate the attendance necessary to make them valuable. As it turns out, that has hardly been true. The OMMA events are well attended by the right people in our space to facilitate open conversations around how we can continue to grow online media..."

To me, the proliferation can be attributed to several dynamics:

• The need for ad-driven content companies to derive revenue from sources other than advertising
• The desperate desire for media, marketing and PR professionals to ramp onto the social media revolution -- for fear of irrelevance, and
  
• No shortage in supply of self-styled social media pundits who seem to make a living through their punditry.
  

Here are some useful resources should you have the time, budget and motivation for self-enlightenment:

• Gary's Guide
• MediaPost Events Calendar
• MediaBistro Events
• Digital Hollywood
• WOMMA Recommended Events
• Mashable's Social Media Events Guide
• Somewhat Frank
  

Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention several gatherings where this PR pro and blogger plans to speak:

• PR for Start-Ups (tonight, April 30)
• PRSA Digital Impact Conference, A-List Bloggers (May 1)
• Social Communications: The Case Studies (May 12)
• 2009 Media Relations Summit, Microblogging Session (May 18)
• 2009 Media Relations Summit, New York Times session (May 19)
• PRSA Teleseminar, Social Media & PR (June 9)
  

I hope to see you on the circuit.

Labels: calendar, events, marketing, media, professional development, social media, TED, tweet-ups, Web 2.0

Some years ago, we were called on by the Mexican Ministry of Tourism to help put in proper perspective the damage caused by the massive earthquake that hit that country. As you might imagine, tourism is big business in Mexico, making up 9.4 % of its GNP - mostly from American visitors.

To preserve this vital industry, we dispatched video crews to Mexico City to capture the (isolated) damage, and more importantly, the areas that were left unscathed. Armed with that footage, we arranged for the Mexican Minister of Tourism to talk with every national TV news organization and any major market local news programs that would listen.

Today, Mexican Tourism officials must be feeling more than just headaches, fever and sore throats. Now only has the CDC advised against travel to Mexico, but so have the UK, France and Germany. Some cruise lines have cancelled all their Mexican ports-of-call.

But have the symptoms really set in for tourism officials? A visit to Mexico Tourism's main English-language website makes no mention of this epidemic that's consuming their industry. None, Nada. Even the Mexican government's crisis communications seems a bit spotty:

"The Mexican government has given out information on the outbreak and its victims only in bits and pieces, refusing to provide details on who the dead are and where and when they died. For the second consecutive day, the government was on the defensive against criticism that it acted too slowly to contain the virus and to alert the public to the dangers.

"'We never had this type of epidemic, this type of virus in the world," an increasingly exasperated Cordova said at a news conference Monday. "We don't know how many days this will go on, because it's the first time in the world this virus has appeared.'"

Having also worked with the Hong Kong Tourism Board to put in perspective the SARS epidemic and its aftermath, I have to say that the contrast between the two approaches is stark. HKTB regularly and pro-actively communicated with its key constituents all developments -- from precautionary measures to news emanating from the WHO.

While consistent and credible communications can't stop the spread of a viral infection, it certainly helped accelerate the healing process once the disease started to dissipate.

Talking about tourism, I'm keeping a watchful eye on Disney, and how aggressive a stance it is taking in response to the unconfirmed rumors of a single suspicious case of the flu from a Mexican tourist visiting Orlando:

"Disney told Eyewitness News late Tuesday morning that they have not received any confirmation about a swine flu case involving a guest."

With attendance at Disney theme parks already soft, a viral rumor of swine flu at Disneyworld (which I first noticed on Twitter), could be quite damaging -- whether it's true or untrue.

Labels: crisis communications, Disney, hong Kong tourism, mexico tourism, PR, SARS, swine flu

For those PR peeps who continue to use the mainstream media to advance their clients' communications goals (i.e., most of you), the choice of which media outlets to court for interviews can play a key role in determining the editorial tenor of the coverage.

It was thus no accident this week when Dick Cheney turned up with the sympatico Sean Hannity of Fox-TV to spread his warped POV or Lindsay Lohan turned to an empathetic Ellen to lament her new-found singledom.

So let's say the world is your media oyster (e.g., @Biz and @Ev or Susan Boyle), just where do you take your message and to what end? In other words, how will these choices cement your long-term business, policy or reputational goals? Unfortunately, many PR types still believe that more equals better. They see their primary role as one of accommodating/managing the incessant influx of interview inquiries - a glorified scheduler of sorts.

The smarter PR set -- at least among those working the media filter -- give careful consideration to where their clients can elicit the greatest receptivity to their POVs. Take Michelle Obama. Here's a newsmaker of the highest order who can pretty much pick and choose wherever she wishes to be profiled.

Her PR handlers, no doubt faced with myriad media options, have opted for lifestyle books like Vogue, More, People, Essence and O. As importantly, Mrs. Obama has taken the reins of these interviews on her terms. For a recent magazine cover shoot, one editor told The New York Times:

"'We were like, ‘Excuse me, we tell you what to wear,’" said Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor-in-chief of More, who said Mrs. Obama refused to wear anything other than her own clothes for their October cover. “'She wanted none of that. She was creating the cover. She was creating the image. There’s definitely a will of steel there.'”

That piece in today's Times elaborates further on Mrs. Obama's media strategy:

"Indeed, the new first lady is methodically shaping her public image, and in ways that extend far beyond fashion.

She has given coveted interviews primarily to women’s magazines and news outlets that have allowed her to highlight her domestic side: her focus on motherhood and her efforts to settle her family in the White House; her interest in gardening and healthy living; her affinity for mixing off-the-rack and designer goods; and her efforts to open up the White House to ordinary Americans."

There are those, however, who would like the Princeton-educated Mrs. Obama to talk policy. Perhaps the memory of Mrs. Clinton's ill-fated foray into the healthcare quagmire is still too fresh? Whatever the reason, for now Mrs. Obama will stick to her diet of more (controlled) "back-of-the-book" type interviews:

"'I wouldn’t say we’re trying to soften her,' Mr. [David] Axelrod said. 'But is there an effort to get people to know her? Yes. We want people to know her. There were caricatures of her during part of the campaign. Those interviews are valuable,' he said of Mrs. Obama’s conversations with celebrity and women’s magazines, 'because they tend to focus on her as a person and that’s important for people to know.'"

So when will we see that inevitable hard-hitting piece that castigates the First Lady for crossing the line? Perhaps never (or at least not until she builds up enough media capital to thwart such an attack).

"Mrs. Obama has declined to sit for wide-ranging interviews with several newspapers, including this one, preferring to focus on particular themes. (She gave The New York Times an exclusive interview about the White House vegetable garden, for instance.)"

Smart.

Labels: Barack Obama, journalism, media strategy, Michelle Obama, newsmakers, PR, Publicity, White House Press Office, women's magazines

Throughout the day, my Twitter feed hums with insightful and sometimes inane news and views from a group of carefully parsed individuals who usually have something worthwhile to share.

My taste in tweets tends to the techno, media and marketing crowd, with the occasional politico, CEO, movie star and savvy aunt peppered in. (I've resisted the Twitter strategy to auto-follow all who follow me -- mostly out of fear of the superfluous flowing across my desktop.)

By choosing to follow such a forward-thinking mix of tech, media and marketing pundits, I gain a decent grasp of where these increasingly intertwined professions are headed. Yet, there's a downside: the loss of some perspective of how much the client-agency paradigm has NOT changed.

Today's Washington Post has a piece about the retention of a PR/PA firm for bread and butter public relations -- a piece that surprisingly didn't rise to the level of scandal that so many others have of late. It seems the Washington DC District police have hired Glover Park Group to help smooth the lines of communication between its office and the public:

"Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said once-tight-lipped police agencies, not wanting to scare the public with too much crime information, now understand the power of that information to connect them with residents. 'There was a time in policing when you were really careful and reluctant to give too much information to the public. That's really turned on its head,' Wexler said."

The details of Glover Park's program remain unclear, but it appears that better, more transparent media relations ranks right up there:

[Police Chief] "Lanier said the department's news strategy is too reactive, mostly sharing information in response to inquiries from the media and the public. 'I don't want the only face of [D.C. police] to be the chief announcing arrests. I want them to see the other officers. I want them to see everybody so they know what we're doing and they see that we care.'"

The news was not totally without its naysayers:

"Although praising Lanier's skills, D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who chairs the council oversight committee on police, said the partnership comes across to him as a spin effort. 'And the best way to spin crime is to reduce it.'"

If that's all the negative here, I'd say it's a win given the public pounding PR peeps perennially take. Though I have to wonder if the temperate media reception is related to the fact that Glover Park is "volunteering" its services to the DC police department.

Labels: er, Glover Park Group, government communications, PR, spin, Twitter, Washington DC Police, Washington Post

In the wake of yesterday's news that The New York Times had captured five Pulitzer Prizes, bringing its total to 101 -- more than any other news organization -- executive editor Bill Keller offered the following:

"It comes in a year when a lot of newspapers are on the ropes, it is a reminder of what newspapers can do that others can’t," Keller said just hours after the Pulitzer winners were announced. "Taking more than a year on a deep investigation, it helps to have lawyers who can file FOIAs and go to court when you need to."

He's right, you know. In spite of (or because of) my ten+ year professional relationship with The Times, I remain firmly wedded to the belief that quality journalism counts - perhaps now more than ever.

Imagine this micro-fragmented media world without financially and journalistically grounded news organizations that can devote resources to ferret out truth and injustice? Keller added:

"A lot of great freelancers do great work and I am a fan of citizen journalism," he said. "But there is some stuff that only an experienced professional news staff can do."

As one of those citizen journalists, I value the extraordinary capacity of bloggers and micro-bloggers to collectively cast their net to capture and report news from virtually anywhere, often in real-time. Yet the depth of that coverage, let alone its veracity, still leaves much to be desired except perhaps for a growing cadre of the most established blogs, e.g., TechCrunch, HuffingtonPost, Mashable, Boing Boing...

The NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown spoke with Robert Rosenthal of the Center for Investigative Reporting for a segment titled "Investigative Reporting Hard Hit by Media Cutbacks":

"Well, I think what's happening all across the United States in every newsroom is basically newsrooms are shrinking, and some have been eviscerated. The number of journalists, you know, this year -- I think last year 8,000 journalists lost their jobs. And what that means is that on every level there's less information, less government being covered, from the community to the state to the region. And part of what's happening is the investigative reporting is something that's being shoved aside in newsrooms that really sort of have to feed the beast. And it's -- I think the negative impact on all of us is drastic."

I was thus encouraged to learn that Sen. Kerry has called hearings early next month to examine the plight of newspapers in this country, on the same day that one plausible pundit predicted that a year-and-a-half from now, 80 percent of newspapers will be history. I sure hope he's wrong.

Next month, I plan to continue this meme by exploring the influence (and shortcomings) of blogging's role in the media ecosystem for a (May 1) panel at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference. Joining me will be BusinessWeek's Stephen Baker, Curbed's Lockhart Steele, Mashable's Adam Ostrow, Inhabitat's Jill Fehrenbacher, and HuffPost's Danny Shea. I hope you'll be able to join us.

Labels: Bill Keller, blogging, huffpost, John Kerry, journalism, mashable, New York Times, pulitzer prize, Twitter

My wife had had enough. Our #1 and #2 sons will be home from college soon and we needed more space for their stuff. For years, she's had her eye on the dozen or so boxes that contained "my life's work" (as I put it). Today my pleads for preservation went unheeded. "Too bad" was her reply.

So began my veritable voyage through a couple of decades worth of game-changing press clippings (when press clips could change games), media strategy memos, photos, TV airchecks (3/4 and 1/2"), autographed books, client accolade letters, awards, and assorted chatchkas.

Into the dumper went all the paper, pics and videotapes chronicling years of painstaking PR work for these clients and others:

• Mort Zuckerman's takeover of the New York Daily News
• The fabulous Miller sisters, the wedding of Prince Pavlos of Greece to Marie-Chantal Miller
• The 100th anniversary of the Sulzberger-Ochs family ownership of The New York Times
• The 150th anniversary of The Associated Press
• Miss America's 75th, Atlantic Records' 40th, The Israel Philharmonic's 50th anniversaries
  
• The 2000 Presidential debates
• The colorization of The New York Times
  
• The building and dedication of the National World War II Memorial
• The launch of College Sports TV (CSTV)
• The launch of the redesigned U.S. currency - $20, $50 and $100 bills
  
• Protecting and preserving Teresa Earnhardt's husband's privacy and legacy
• Intel's Andy Grove meets the editors from Condé Nast and Hearst
• Support for the L.A. DA's jury consultant during O.J. Simpson criminal trial
  
• NY Community Trust and United Way of NYC's September 11th Fund
• Reebok's Dan 'n Dave campaign; the Human Rights Award
• Broadway opening of David Merrick's "42nd Street"
  
• Quincy Jones' "We are the Future" humanitarian concert
  
• HotJobs' IPO and its Super Bowl spots
• Cola wars, burger wars, toothpaste wars...

I'm feeling kinda melancholy right now. I suppose there's some satisfaction knowing that much of this history resides somewhere in the digital domain waiting to be discovered through search. And then again, maybe not.

Labels: Burson-Marsteller, Cohn and Wolfe, digital, Edelman, Hill and Knowlton, media, PR, Robert Zarem

The explosion in the number of syndicated content producers (i.e., bloggers) has created havoc in the regulatory environment, and specifically at the FTC, which oversees truth in advertising. So much so that the Commission is now weighing new regulations that would restrict what bloggers say about the products and services they receive as (quid pro quo) inducements from WOM marketers.

"The guides needed to be updated to address not only the changes in technology, but the consequences of new marketing practices," said Richard Cleland, assistant director for the FTC's division of advertising practices. " Word-of-mouth marketing is not exempt from the laws of truthful advertising."

Who'll forget all those "influential" bloggers who received spiffy new Nikon digital SLRs to tool with and talk about. (Come to think of it, I can't recall any of them spilling a negative word about their gifts from the early adopter gadget Gods.) Could this be what the FTC fuss is all about?

"Regulating these developing media too soon may have a chilling effect on blogs and other forms of viral marketing, as bloggers and other viral marketers will be discouraged from publishing content for fear of being held liable for any potentially misleading claim," Richard O'Brien, vice president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, said in an advisory to the FTC.

These surely are murky waters. The FTC's intent is admirable: to protect consumers from "pay-for-play" product endorsers, e.g.,

"If a blogger received a free sample of skin lotion and then incorrectly claimed the product cured eczema, the FTC could sue the company for making false or unsubstantiated statements. The blogger could be sued for making false representations."

On the other hand, since when is the blogosphere (an admittedly fertile ground for insidious come-ons from online marketers) considered an advertising (versus editorial) channel? We should keep an eye on this developing story.

Thanks to Converseon's Rob Key, a WOMMA member, for keying me in to this.

Update (4/20/09) - Chris Brogan: "I support the future of sponsored posts."

Labels: Bloggers, FTC, pay-per-post, regulations, WOMMA, word-of-mouth

Social media guy Dave Armano, fresh off the news of his impending move to the "social media capital" of the United States -- Austin, TX -- today Flickr'ed some imagery (at left) to illustrate Brian Morrissey's astute post "Blending paid and earned media in the stream."

Morrissey's post, which took its cue from a Fred Wilson post and a Business Week/Facebook interview, re-cast the relationship between paid and earned media and their respective abilities to enter the social media (buzz) stream:

"...Earned media is an old PR term. It's typically the stuff a company does that gets people talking about it. in the past, that's been through the mainstream media. Nowadays, we're all media. What's interesting is, despite what many of the social media gurus will say, companies need to do more than just be awesome to get part of the stream. Yes, that's important, but advertisers will still need to buy their way in through paid media..."

Wilson had this to say about the new earned media paradigm:

"Earned media is media you don't buy but earn the hard way. PR is an example of earned media. Word of mouth is another. Earned media has been around forever. But it has now gotten a lot easier, thanks to the Internet and social media, to earn media for your brand, product, or self.

I have earned a fair bit of media over the past five years. Google Analytics tells me that 120,000 people have visited this blog in the past 30 days...That's a fair bit of media and I earn it every day by posting something thoughtful or thought provoking on this blog or twitter or tumblr or somewhere else on the web. If I stopped doing that, the media would slowly flow away from me to all of the rest of you who are earning media every day."

This is not an unimportant conversation. What ingredients are needed to propel the client's content into the buzzstream? Existing marketing models measure media impressions, but where does engagement with a brand or POV figure in the mix? Morrissey:

"...That means the type of ads that will work in the stream are different...Honda bought its way into the stream with a virtual gift option on Facebook. About 750,000 Facebook users chose to interact with that and created an additional 2 million impressions for the brand. Is that earned media or paid media? Maybe both."

"Both" is nothing new. In the old model, (the best) Super Bowl advertising spurs a hybrid of paid and earned media. Now with social media added to the mix, the paradigm has changed. Here are ten examples of companies that successfully paid and earned their way into the buzzstream.

On April 27, I will sit on a Baruch College panel that hopes to touch upon some of that elusive elixir for going social. I hope you can make it.

Update (4/14)

• Fred Wilson kicks off Ad Age's Digital Conference with more.
• Pete Blackshaw weighs in via Ad Age.
• Marc Ross opines via Advocacy 2.0
  

Labels: Baruch College, Brian Morrissey, Dave Armano, earned media, FaceBook, Fred Wilson, paid media, PR, social media

This post concerns lobbyists, or that beleaguered segment of the PR profession that prefers the moniker "public affairs specialists."

The "public" on which this group has its sights set tends to be government legislators and regulators at the local, state and federal levels. The Obama administration has sought to tighten the rules pertaining to lobbying (i.e., shades of shady Jack Abramoff).

I personally believe that special interests have the right to have their points-of-view weighed during the regulatory and legislative processes. The question is: how can this be done in a publicly transparent and equitable manner?

Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and Change Congress (for which this PR person has toiled) seek to expose and eliminate these backroom, money-driven deals that attempt to sway an elected or appointed official's position on an issue. Still lobbying remains a "booming" business in Washington:

"Even though some people deplore lobbying, it’s still a growth profession," said Bill Allison, a senior fellow with the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based watchdog group. Law, lobbying and consulting firms have announced the hiring of at least 15 of 61 House and Senate members who left politics or were defeated in 2008.

I was therefore surprised, in this changed climate, to see such a brazen attempt by lobbyists working for the United Federation of Teachers to influence a New York City Council hearing. The New York Post headline from Thursday summed it up:

"UFT'S ARROGANT 'PUPPET' STATE:

TEACHER LOBBYISTS RUN AMOK"

At a hearing this week, the teacher's union lobbyists handed out to every local lawmaker cue cards with specific questions they'd like raised -- that included the name of the school official to whom they should be directed:

"In an act of unbridled arrogance, lobbyists for the United Federation of Teachers took control of Monday's council hearing on charter schools by distributing printed questions on index cards for legislators to ask of school officials."

As the Post reported, the tactic even took long-time lobbyists by surprise:

"What's outrageous, really, is the manipulation of the whole government process, and obviously Christine is very upset for good reason," said one longtime lobbyist, describing the incident as an embarrassment for council Speaker Christine Quinn (pictured). "It makes the council look terrible."

Apparently, the tactic worked:

The questions for the Department of Education were sharp and confrontational. The questions for the union were softballs. UFT officials sat in the front row of the ornate council hearing room to insure their script was being followed.

We haven't heard the end of this.

Labels: City Council, lobbyists, New York City, New York Post, PR, public affairs, UFT

My friend and occasional collaborator Mark Fortier pinged me about his client David Meerman Scott's newest initiative Gobbledygook Grader from HubSpot.

It's an online tool that hopes to solve the other issue around which Holtz and Scoble locked horns this week: poorly written pitches (as if misguided pitches were not bad enough).

In his post, Meerman Scott writes:

"I have just completed an analysis of all 711,123 press releases distributed by North American companies in 2008 through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire. The project looked at 325 gobbledygook phrases from a variety of sources, with the detailed analysis on the number of uses for each phrase done using Dow Jones Insight."

It does for PR content what MatchPoint does for proper media targeting. Enter your press release into the box, and the engine "evaluates your written content (press release, brochure copy, etc.) and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words. You'll receive a grade together with a full report."

Hey, David, glad to see my favorite PR cliche "leverage" made the list, but wondered how "maximize" did not. I guess we'll have to make do with "optimize."

Labels: david meerman-scott, gobbledygook grader, journalism, MatchPoint, media relations, PR, public relations

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on "The Colbert Report" (posted April 4, 2009)



Twitter's other founder Evan Williams at the Ted conference (Feb 27, 2009)



"Flutter" founder, Matt Ibsen (April 3, 2009)

The messaging service we didn't know we needed until we had it" is how Twitter co-founder Biz Stone described the explosive micro-blogging platform last week to Comedy Central's cantankerously comical commentator Stephen Colbert.

Separately, WOMMA creator Andy Sernovitz pinged me with news that Dell's former VP of Communities and Conversations Bob Pearson has joined the Blog Council as its president.

"Social media represents a disruptive set of technologies and techniques that will transform a company’s business practices, improve conversational capabilities with customers and empower employees to learn and share their knowledge in real time," said Pearson in the release.

Share knowledge in real time. Hmmm. I get the "real-time" bit, and definitely appreciate the knowledge-sharing aspect of blogs and even microblogs. It's when we go from "posts" to "tweets" to "flaps" that, for me, something gets lost in translation. (But I also remember when journalistic purists criticized USA Today's shorter format. They called it "MacPaper."

Yesterday, my old blogging buddy Kami Huyse (@kamichat), who dragged me into the Twitterverse nearly two years ago, tweeted a link to a video (above) on an alleged new "Twitter-like" platform called Flutter. It's USP? Flutter takes Twitter's 140-character limit to nanoblog status by allowing just 26-character posts, or "flaps" (like the "wings of a Hummingbird").

Now I should tell you that the video in question, and the "nanoblog" itself, are fakes. The vid features two supposed Stanford University alums and an array of other stereotypical Web 2.0-wannabes wistfully waxing on their new Twitter-killing platform. The folks at Slate created this parody, perhaps to put a lid on the hyperbole that surrounds Twitter. (Could this be the beginning of a backlash for Twitter's media ubiquity?)

Nonetheless, the Flutter video has gone viral, and many still don't realize it's a ruse. For me, it's scarily prescient given the trend-to-shortness we've seeing with our channels of communications. I still appreciate the utility of blogs and microblogs, especially for us PR peeps. In fact, when asked about celebrities' use of Twitter, Biz said of Demi and Ashton:

"...not only are they connecting with fans...they're controlling their messaging, the tabloids aren't, so they can now say that this is what I'm up to and you can report on that if you want to."

Any shorter than that, I'll really begin to wonder what's become of substantive discourse.

Labels: Biz Stone, blog council, Evan Williams, flutter, Slate, Twitter

The inimitable Jeff Bercovici, a survivor of the recent Portfolio (and Condé Nast) trim-down, today tells us about the impending piece from Michael Wolff (at right) in which the Vanity Fair contributor and Newser.com founder promises to share his fatalistic fling through New York's gossip grind, and with the New York Post in particular.

The titillating tale likely germinated with Wolff's much-ballyhooed "authorized" biography of News Corp chieftain Rupert Murdoch, and ultimately led to the demise of his marriage and his determined desire to publicly defend his honor.

Apparently, Wolff had an affair with a young, much younger woman who toiled at Newser.com for $12/hour and also worked as "an intern" (her words) at Vanity Fair.

So how is any of this relevant to a blog written for and about the PR biz, you ask? It seems the youthful object of Mr. Wolff's affections also penned her perspective on the affair in Britain's The Spectator. She's a decent writer who offers up some astute (and helpful) observations of how online dish-mongers differ from their ink-stained predecessors:

"The new sanctimony is, too, the result of internet journalism. Gossip mongering on the internet could be as competitive now as when New York was a city full of aggressive and prying newspapers (cf. Sweet Smell of Success with the evil columnist J.J. Hunsecker — it’s always been a favourite of mine). But the internet is probably worse. Its cliquishness makes it more high-school-like than journalism-like. And high school is more hurtful than journalism. The cruelties of the internet are due, surely, to its fishbowl properties — everybody who is writing gossip on the internet knows everybody whom they are writing about; indeed, everybody seems to be writing about each other. Or going out with someone who is doing the writing. In its article about me, Gawker referred to a former boyfriend of mine who went out with a former Gawker editor."

Given Mr. Wolff's propensity for not mincing words, I'm looking forward to his first-person account of the hit his honor has taken by the gossip guppies swimming in New York's media fishbowl.

Labels: Conde Nast, Gawker, gossip, Jeff Bercovici, Michael Wolff, Newser, Portfolio, PR, Publicity, Vanity Fair, Victoria Floethe

Geez Louise. I had thought (and hoped) that this relatively minor, yet most consequential chapter in our nation's history had closed. I was wrong.

Last week, HBO announced it will begin production on a Dennis Quaid/Julianne Moore/Charlie Sheen-starrer called "Special Relationship," a movie ostensibly about the relationship between British PM Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

But wait. There's more. Apparently, one enterprising PR person decided that this could serve as a reasonably strong news hook to publicize her client, the manufacturer of the cigar brand allegedly used in that infamous global incident. The email pitch to Newsweek's political blog, The Gaggle, went like this:

Hey Katie!

Just wanted to make sure you had this on your radar-what about doing a segment featuring the exact line of cigars Bill Clinton used with Monica Lewinsky in light of the HBO movie that is set to go into production titled "Special Relationship" about Bill's special "friendships" starring Dennis Quaid?

The Gurkha Cigars spokesperson is available to speak about Gurkha's role in the presidential story and we can have you all shoot footage of the exact line of cigars that was used to make-um presidential history? Can we make this work?

Richard, Kevin -- Are you paying attention? Now I'm not one to cast aspersions on the PR practices of other professionals. (Or maybe I am.) In either case, the odorous pitch caught this blogger's (and Newsweek's) attention, sufficiently so to report on it.

I wonder whether Bill Clinton's taste in cigars, or rather, his unorthodox use thereof, elevates the brand in any way? I'm guessing it doesn't. On the other hand, I bet this is the first (and only) time the cigar brand's name will be invoked by a Newsweek reporter.

As for me, "Flight of the Conchords," "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and re-runs of "Entourage" satisfy my HBO fix just fine.

Labels: Bad Pitch Blog, Bill Clinton, cigar, Gurkha, HBO, Monica Lewinsky, PR, public relations, Special Relationship