I vividly remember my journalism professor tell us undergrads in the early ‘90s that news reporting was the business of alcoholics. Meaning: The profession tends to have a disproportionate number of those who imbibe adult beverages far too often. What reminded me of this was reading the local weekly (online) yesterday. The editor wrote a [...]
September 18, 2009
The sad aspect of downsized newsrooms means that news quality and breadth of coverage suffers. Along with this, as traditional news grapples with how to handle the social aspect of online media, the distortions of information occur to rampant degrees. Anonymous commenting appears to have become the sustaining mechanism of online advertising for many news [...]
July 24, 2009
Why the “watch what you say online” crowd is a festering anachronism I don’t know Sarah Soczka, but if I ever meet her, I’m going to buy her a beer. Sarah is the unwitting victim of the “watch what you say online” crowd, specifically one Jeff Bentoff, APR, of Bentoff, LLC from Wisconsin. Bentoff writes [...]
July 9, 2009
Question: Do you respond to anonymous attacks? Answer: Most likely, no. If the attacks gain legs later as news stories, then you can respond to the issue, but not the attacker. The rationale: The knee-jerk response from communicators is to communicate. This is often a counter-productive approach to take. When facing an attack, especially an [...]
June 25, 2009
This has been a long time coming. Although people have had in their pockets the means to transmit breaking news for at least a decade, increased social networking – particularly Twitter, Facebook and Youtube—has finally garnered enough traction to spread information to the masses. Three events just this year have set the stage for this. [...]
October 2, 2009