Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

On Sunday, New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer explored how the Sunday network interview show producers and politicians “collaborate in a seductive ritual” to book the most powerful guests. But there’s a great sameness on the guest list: Sen. John McCain’s done 60 Sunday shows just since 2010.

Steinhauer says he’s a “dream guest” in part because he “compares members of his own party to deranged fowl” (wacko birds), at least at liberal networks:

When it comes to a dream guest, program hosts say, Mr. McCain checks almost every box: a senior Republican senator who can speak authoritatively and contemporaneously on many issues, flies secretly to Syria, compares members of his own party to deranged fowl and yet is a reliable opponent of most Obama administration policies.

“What makes a good guest is someone who makes news,” said Mr. Wallace, the Fox host. “To make news, you have to be at the center of the news and willing to talk about it in a noncanned way, someone who always come to the shows ready to play.”

A look inside the operations of a major online publication—The Atlantic—and the evolving standards of how content is assigned, sourced, and paid for.

The post consists of an e-mail exchange between Thayer and an Atlantic editor, where Thayer is asked if he would repurpose a previously published piece for the Atlantic’s website. He is not offered any money, but is told he will gain exposure since Atlantic’s site enjoys 13 million readers per month.

For those familiar with the online world of publication, this exchange is hardly surprising or unusual. If you scan the posts at Who Pays Writers, you’ll see that $0 or maybe $50–$100 is common for very well-known sites. In fact, the more traffic a website gets, the more it can avoid payment by offering the carrot of exposure—which is indeed valuable and needed for some writers, but not all.

Thayer, in response to the offer of pay through exposure, says:

"Frankly, I will refrain from being insulted and am perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them. Let me know if you have perhaps mispoken [sic]."...

The massive shift toward digital media continues for new and traditional press outlets. Here’s how you can explain the change to your clients, including why it helps them.

...A few weeks ago, Newsweek became the latest magazine to announce it would cease publication of its print edition in favor of a digital-only format by year’s end. This isn’t the first announcement of its kind in 2012: SmartMoney Magazine killed its print publication in the summer, and rumors have swirled that the U.K.’s The Guardian is considering a switch to a digital-only edition.

This trend will likely continue in the coming years as, according to the Pew Research Center’s statistics on print vs. online media, more than half of Americans receive their news from digital sources, and the number of people relying on social media exclusively for their news has doubled in the past two years.

So how do public relations pros communicate this ever-changing landscape and its importance to clients?...

Newsweek cancels print edition and Clark Kent quits the Daily Planet. What's going on with the world of print?

...Add it to the announcement last week that rocked the print industry, Newsweek ending it’s print circulation, and it forms a bleak picture for print.

Why do I compare the Daily Planet’s loss to Newsweek’s digital shift?

Easy. Monkey see, monkey do.

My journalism drive came from what I saw. And what 12-year-old me saw was a top-shelf newspaper reporter who saved the world. And that inspiration is gone.

Newsweek, in print for 80 years, has been a constant in the ever-changing newsstand. And now it’s all in bits and bytes....

[My thought is that for every magazine or newspaper that fails a new and more relevant news innovation will take its place ~ Jeff]

When a helicopter crashed in a densely populated part of London around 8am today, next to one of the busiest trainlines in Europe and a large bus station, the news was always going to be broken, within seconds, by members of the public on Twitter, armed with camera phones.

Twitter user Craig Jenner was one of the first to put a picture on Twitter which was shared far and wide.

What happened next is indicative of the way the media are increasingly playing catch-up on such stories, moving from reporting to aggregating (or curating, if you must) - images, eye-witness accounts and videos. Journalists were asking to use the picture with a credit and were trying to get Jenner on the phone...

Newsweek is ending its print edition. You'd think they'd express concern for their readers. You'd be wrong.

Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty made a big announcement earlier this morning.

After 80 years as a weekly print magazine, they wrote, Newsweek plans to end its print edition in December and continue on only in a digital format.

But I noticed one GIANT omission in their statement. The entire statement is below. See if you can spot the omission....

[There's also another Key point missing from their statement which I mentioned in a comment to Brad Phillips' post. See if you can spot it too. ~ Jeff]

Do newspapers have a shot at stepping ahead of their broadcast rivals as web video evolves?

Our political conventions remind us that this is not the summer of love. But it may be the season we’ll remember as the summer of video.

Certainly, video’s — news video’s — growth has been noteworthy for awhile. But now there’s a bursting of new news video forms, a hothouse of experimentation that is both refreshing and intriguing. The blossoming has implications far and wide, not just for “news,” but for tech companies like Facebook and television brands from Ellen to Piers to The View. Within it, we see the capability of non-TV companies to leapfrog the TV people.

Just Monday, both The Wall Street Journal (“The Wall Street Journal wants its reporters filing microvideo updates for its new WorldStream”) and The New York Times made video announcements. A couple of weeks ago, the ambitious Huffington Post Live launched, hiring the almost unbelievable number of 104 staffers. In these three forays, and in the thinking in and around them, we see the boundaries of old media being slowly broken. We’re on the edge, finally, of new ways to both create and present news — and how to talk about the news....

[Trend for PR to follow closely - JD]