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Yesterday, Tribune Publishing, purveyor of news since 1847, changed its name to “tronc” (short for “Tribune Online Content.”) It’s now a “content curation and monetization company” — a company that makes money from content, what we used to call a media company. Today, I deconstruct the rest of its attempt to use techno-drivel to misdirect our attention from its problems. Crisis-tossed Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and dozens of other papers, has suffered through a sale to a billionaire, a bankruptcy, a corporate split, newsroom turmoil, massive layoffs, and an unsolicited takeover offer. Now, as “tronc,” the company wants to be considered alongside Silicon Valley startups. (If this trend catches on, will the Boston Globe company become “hubstuff” and the New York Times “gray_lady”?) The tronc press release is a classic, because it reveals that when a media company wants to reinvent itself as a technology company, it drapes its press release in the same techno-drivel that tech companies use. Instead of meaningless media and corporate bullshit, we get meaningless, shiny Silicon Valley bullshit. It’s a transformation (you can tell because the release mentions “transform” or “transformation” six times).In the commentary below, I’ve added bold to indicate passives, meaningless superlatives, and especially, new-age jargon. I add commentary in brackets and commonsense translations below each section....
The idea was cute. It always is. Ask members of the public to post there selfies with New York police officers, tag them with #myNYPD, and sing "Kumbayah" together. OK, that last part maybe not. The response was overwhelming -- overwhelmingly bad. Soon the hashtag was used as a bashtag....
Don’t waste words. That includes meaningless disclaimers at the bottom of your emails.
This week I dismantled a recruiting email with an astoundingly low meaning ratio of 6%. At the bottom of that email was the following disclaimer:
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
This message (including any attachments) is confidential and may be privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. If you have received it in error please contact the sender (by return E-Mail) immediately and delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of this message in whole or in part is strictly prohibited. Please note that, for organisational reasons, the personal E-Mail address of the sender is not available for matters subject to a deadline.
This is so dumb that I have to have a little fun with it. Here’s why...,
Is hiring a public relations firm even worth it in a world that changes so quickly? Has the whole game of a public relations firm become obsolete because of 800 TV channels, thousands of satellite radio channels, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Meerkat, Periscope, blogging, Blabbing and all of the other social media platforms? Can a firm even grab the attention of television, radio or newspaper producers long enough to pay attention to their pitch?
I’m writing this after giving three different firms a year each to produce results. They promised results, I expected results — neither result was delivered. And each relationship started the same way; we met at my home or out for lunch to get to know one another. I told them my story, they asked who I wanted to reach — they got excited, I signed a contract and then I pumped them with massive amounts of relevant content that they could pitch to producers....
The Fort Bend Sheriff's Office just sent a press release to news outlets all over Texas that revealed the credit card, checking account, Social Security, and driver's license numbers of hundreds of people. You see, the email contained a photo of these items that were kept in a lost and found room at the Santikos Palladium theaters in Richmond.
A few seconds later, the Sheriff's Office sent another email saying that, on second thought, maybe that wasn't such a great idea.
Pay close attention while we walk you through this: According to the original email, an off-duty Sheriff's detective was working security at the Palladium when he "discovered several boxes and bags containing numerous wallets, 171 driver's licenses, more than a dozen Social Security cards, several hundred credit and debit cards, and more than a dozen checkbooks."...
There are a few universal truths in online dating: most photos are carefully staged, most profiles are slightly puffed-up, and most people on them (and this is clearly fast-changing) are actually human.Until some unlucky Tinder users spotted Ava.
A company promoting the movie Ex Machina created a fake account, Ava, with a photo of the star of the movie. Ava is an AI in the film and presumably she wants to get down. Unsuspecting men and women swiped to make a match and Ava, in a cross between cheesy AI and Eliza, asked a few pertinent questions including “Have you ever been in love?” and “What makes you human?”
Normal users assumed they were talking to a human but they were actually talking to a bot. In the end, like the chatbots that now linger on near dead chat systems like AIM, Ava sent her suitors to an Instagram page where they found out that she was all a sham....
Invariably, each year brings its share of PR crises and scandals, and 2014 was no exception. This year had a robust number of meltdowns, PR debacles and downright embarrassing episodes among some of the globe’s most recognizable brands. Here’s a partial list of some of the year’s worst PR crises.
...Yes, that appears to be an attempt to bribe a journalist to mention clients in stories he is doing for us and other media clients.
"I've seen some pretty incredible PR pitches — including offers to have the PR agency write the story and put the reporter's byline on it — but this is one of the most brazen I've seen," said Jim Romenesko, a noted media critic. "A publicist who suggests paying a major news outlet for slipping a client's name into copy has no idea how journalists do their jobs — or how ethical 99 percent of them are."
Last week, Gawker uncovered a hapless tie-up between genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and Condé Nast Media—publisher of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, GQ, Self, Details, and other magazines—to produce "an exciting video series" on the "topics of food, food chains and sustainability."
Marion Nestle was offered $5,000 to participate for a single afternoon. Since then, I've learned that Condé Nast's Strategic Partnerships division dangled cash before several high-profile food politics writers, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince them to participate....
...It seems that luck is a simple affair – if you don’t get a parking ticket while having sex in your car, you’re one of the lucky ones amongst us. However, if you don’t self-report as ‘lucky’ in an online survey, it’s clearly your own fault: However, two in five people who say they are unlucky have never done anything superstitious to turn around their luck with 61 per cent of them saying they would happily walk under a ladder.
There may be a very good reason why people considered to be unlucky haven’t gone out of their way to ‘turn their luck around’, namely that that isn’t really a thing. But, far be it to point out such minor details, when the stakes of poor luck are so high: Unlucky people are also twice as likely to be single and will probably not have any children.
Naturally, the company who paid for this ‘research’ have their own vested axe to grind:
When it comes to recent Google Plus news, what we have from Google is a failure to communicate.
To recap, last Thursday Vic Gundrota, senior vice president for Google Plus, publicly announced his resignation by this rather touching Google Plus post And Then.
His boss, CEO Larry Page, responded with his own G+ post to Gundotra’s.
The cat was out of the bag the previous week with this post on the Secret app: “Vic Gundotra is interviewing.”
Of course the news exploded in the technology media and speculation continues to echo around the Internet. Including Google’s own survey asking if G+ would be missed as reported by Curtis Jacob?
What was missing was a proactive Google PR response....
General Motor’s Mary Barra admitted this week that, “something went wrong with our process…and terrible things happened.”
And while that is certainly true and laudable for the new CEO of the auto giant to admit her company mishandled some safety issues for 13 years, saying she is deeply sorry is not quite enough.
Yesterday, she held what GM described as a news conference but, according the the WXYZ-TV report below, only handful of print reporters were invited, slamming the car door on local Detroit stations and the national news networks.
There are times (particularly when dealing with good news situations) when companies can play favorites. But when you are in a hole like GM — you can’t afford to annoy major parts of the media....
It's the golden rule and the core of all communications etiquette: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything. On Tuesday, Kelly Blazek, who runs the Cleveland Job Bank, learned that lesson the hard way when her email smackdown of a young job seeker named Diana Mekota, who contacted her through LinkedIn, went viral.
"Love the sense of entitlement in your generation. And therefore I enjoy denying your invite," read Blazek's poison pen letter, in part. "You're welcome for your humility lesson of the year. Don't ever reach out to senior practitioners again and assume their carefully curated list of connections is available to you, just because you want to build your network."
Mekota posted the complete email on Reddit, Imgur, and Facebook, along with these comments: "Guess us twenty somethings should bow down to senior professional because clearly we have nothing to offer," and "Let's call this lady out." From there, it was like a torch thrown into a desert of parched tumbleweeds...
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The Republican frontrunner met with the editorial board on Monday morning. The full transcript follows at the link above: FREDERICK RYAN JR., WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHER: Mr. Trump, welcome to the Washington Post. Thank you for making time to meet with our editorial board. DONALD TRUMP: New building. Yes this is very nice. Good luck with it. RYAN: Thank you… We’ve heard you’re going to be announcing your foreign policy team shortly… Any you can share with us? TRUMP: Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names… Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joe Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group....
The diesel emissions nightmare at Volkswagen continues unabated as the German government orders the company to recall 2.4 million vehicles next year. To recap, the company has admitted to cheating on emissions tests on up to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide. The global CEO has resigned, the new North American head departed before even starting, its share value has dropped by over 30% and VW Group sales have plummeted.
Some estimates say this could cost the company in the region of 35 billion euros, and all but destroy the consumer market for diesel vehicles.
This scenario has all the makings of a classic PR crisis, but so far most would consider VW’s communications efforts a fail. Weeks into the scandal consumers who purchased one of the diesel vehicles still do not know what, if any action they should take. Dealers are left scrambling on the front lines without the facts or even a narrative on VW plans. For employees, suppliers and shareholders there is also confusion around how the corporate parent plans to navigate through the crisis. Lawyers smell blood and are circling both in North America and Europe....
Burger King took out a full-page, open-letter-style ad in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune this morning, calling for a truce with McDonald's and suggesting they join forces to create a "McWhopper" burger.
But McDonald's is having none of it.Burger King's idea was to "get the world talking" about the Peace One Day charity, which is lobbying for September 21 to become an official Peace Day. Fernando Machado, the fast-food chain's senior vice president for global brand management, said it wasn't just a PR stunt and that BK was hoping McDonald's would agree to sell the hybrid burger September 21....
DS Simon published the results, titled “The D S Simon Media Influencers Report,” which revealed that 90 percent of digital journalists say a PR pro has lied to them. Sixty-eight percent say that PR pros lie to them “sometimes,” and 20 percent say they’ve been lied to “often.
Good news, though—only three percent of digital journalists think that PR pros “always” lie to them. Bloggers, however, have a bit more cynical view, with seven percent saying that PR pros always lie to them...
U.K.-based trade body called for advertising agencies to strike against Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, citing “despicable” practices it says the Budweiser maker imposed on its members when pitching for work.In a recent pitch for work,
AB InBev asked agencies how low they would go on rates, how many free hours of work they’d offer and whether they’d wait for payment beyond the current 120-day period, the Marketing Agencies Association said Thursday in an e-mailed statement.
The world’s biggest brewer also asked agencies how much money they’d give back -- known as rebates -- beyond a minimum 5 percent the company already stipulates, to contribute to its corporate sustainability program, the MAA said. The organization called on agencies that work with AB InBev to strike starting April 7....
Twitter can be a fun place to exchange ideas, opinions, jokes, and news. But as quickly as you can press the Tweet button, you can create a PR disaster.Just take a look at some of these tweets from celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Martha Stewart and big name brands like The American Red Cross, KitchenAid, and Urban Outfitters.Some of these tweets are cringe-worthy, some downright offensive, but they are all among some of the most epic failures ever....
A lot of businesspeople wonder why a certain press release fell flat. Nine times out of 10, the answer is quite simple: It didn't highlight any news.
Once you're able to understand what's newsworthy, your press releases will start to generate results.
Focusing on the following six topics is a surprisingly common pitching mistake in the startup world. While some of the topics are trivial or just advertorial, others have a germ of an idea that could made newsworthy by a shift in focus in the press release....
Sept. 11 is a difficult time for brands to take on Twitter. While some industry observers applaud brands that try to inject themselves into social chatter, more often than not, tweets can end up as fiascoes in an otherwise well-meaning flurry of posts.
Already, many marketers' 9/11 efforts today have ended up as #brandfails. CVS Pharmacy posted a photo of Manhattan with two lights representing the Twin Towers and a logo in the bottom corner. The tweet was swiftly removed after people started complaining about the branded skyline, although several Twitter users managed to screengrab the tweet. The Vitamin Shoppe and Burlington Coat Factory posted similar tweets this morning and have, at press time, kept them live.
Then there are sex brands like Official Fleshlight and Brazzers weighing in on Sept. 11, which seems totally out of place. And a tweet from Birmingham, Ala., tie company Tied to the South requested a retweet for every death caused by the terrorist attack. The latter was quickly deleted. Build-A-Bear also removed a tweet this morning of a teddy bear in fatigues after getting some flack on Twitter....
Last week Uber General Manager Chris Nakutis (follow him on Twitter) spoke to a group of entrepreneurs about his experience launching the e-commerce platform Short Stack–and became the latest heavy-hitter to weigh in on the “do startups need PR” debate.
As you can tell from our headline, he answered in the negative.Nakutis said that PR was not a valuable tool in growing his business and that the return on investment was not immediate or well-defined despite the good press.
Here’s the key quote: new companies “can almost jump over the PR process.”...
The maker of ‘Watch Dogs’ sent an Australian news publication a safe with a copy of the game inside. When staffers got suspicious, they called the cops.
One of our readers alerted us to a surprising example of how NOT to recover — and the most interesting part is that the mistake was made by PR News, an outfit that publishes newsletters, blogs, guidebooks and other resources which they say hone PR practitioners skills in things like media relations and crisis management.
It seems PR News sent out a blast email this week trying to get businesses to buy some of their products. The email talked about how to “score big” in business and carried the subject line: “Don’t be like Wichita State.”
Apparently the theory was that the subject might catch the eye of folks following the NCAA basketball championships. What PR News failed to understand is that it would offend supporters of the Wichita State basketball team which had just lost in the tournament following a 35-0 start to the season....
One of the hottest new apps set to debut this week at SXSW, that annual intermingling of tenuous ideas and easy money, was LIVR, a social network exclusively for drunk people. Media and investors alike lined up to laud it....
"I've worked closely enough with media, and I've done enough of this sort of thing before, to know that the media would blindly jump at it. I was more surprised when people did reach out to me; I can count on one hand the number of outlets that bothered to call me up.
The media in a way allows this to happen to themselves... The media will just jump at a juicy story and not look deeper into it. I think it's because a lot of people working at these blogs and media outlets are overworked and underpaid. Especially around an event at SXSW, they need to crank out story after story. So it's kind of like this cheapening journalism. I don't know if they can even be called journalists anymore; it's more media as a mouthpiece for the companies that want to get a message out."...
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tronc - the self-proclaimed, high-tech, low touch reinvention of Tribune publishing is a silly name that tries to deflect from all of its problems according to Josh Bernoff. The news release is a classic PR fail for this sudden rebirth as a "content curation and monetization company”.