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What The Timing Of Palin’s Resignation Says.

July 5, 2009 by Andrew Graham

It’s ironic to use the weekend press to get a read on the reasons for Sarah Palin’s resignation late last week since the former governor is apparently trying to sue media outlets for their reportage, but given her unwillingness to answer questions, it’s one of the few bits of information we have to go with.

Favorable announcements never happen during the afternoon before a long weekend, the window for so-called news-dumps, and one interpretation for the timing of Palin’s announcement is an attempt to minimize negative coverage. Andrew Halco of AlaskaDispatch.com writes:

According to several reporters I spoke to today, the release announcing the press conference this morning was sent out at 9am [Alaska time]. The press conference was to be held at 11am, fifty miles outside of Anchorage at the governor’s home, thereby not giving the media any advance notice.

Though the release that announced the press conference is omitted from the News & Announcements section of the Alaska Governor’s Office, which is highly unusual, another local journalist, speaking to a CNN anchor yesterday, indicated that the announcement was vague, even by Palin’s standards. (If you have that release, please e-mail me at andrewgraham.nyc at gmail.)

So, the interpretation most observers are running with is that her resignation indicates there’s some sort of crisis brewing that we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future. Why else would this self-described lipstick-wearing pit bull give up and resign her gubernatorial post, they’re asking.

Reading between the lines, however, reveals something different. Palin’s announcement made the front page of the four most-circulated Saturday papers in the country on the most patriotic day of the year. (Click through to see images of those front pages.) For someone who has a tough time with the press, this is remarkable – even though the tone of the coverage wasn’t particularly favorable, it reflected an actual news event, something Palin hasn’t been able to do since last September.

It would be tough to adequately position herself for a 2012 bid while serving as governor 4,000 miles away from her base of supporters, and Palin isn’t a particularly rich person to begin with. It makes sense that she’d resign, then, and use the July Fourth holiday to attach her name to its patriotism, say some people who still think Palin has realistic presidential ambitions.

Why, then, didn’t her news conference make reference to the Fourth of July for the timing of the announcement? Why wasn’t her address particularly patriotic, and how come her team’s press outreach was seemingly designed not to draw reporters to the event, but to keep them away?

Though it’s neat to speculate that Palin’s team has finally discovered how to use the news media more effectively, I don’t think that’s the case at all. If the timing of the announcement were by design, they wouldn’t have left voters trying to read between lines.

Posted in Media | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

On Writing For Free.

June 29, 2009 by Andrew Graham

I read some commentary last week about the market for written content and why everyone on the planet hates the idea of writers writing for free, except those who think that’s perfectly fine to do. Emily Gould writes for free to give back to the internet; Simon Dumenco at AdAge blames Arianna Huffington; I think someone at Gawker, predictably, compared it to slavery.

Et cetera, et cetera.

All these observations connect the editorial process directly to the writer’s financial return. Write your copy, send it off to an editor someplace, maybe revise what you’ve done, and then bank your check.

But they all miss the perspective of the writer who originates content for companies and nonprofits that aren’t traditional media organizations or blogs. The writer who rarely gets the byline. The writer who vacillates between editorial, marketing, news-release, and internal copy.

This is how I pay the bills. I write for free because, ironically, I have clear financial incentive to do so.

I originate content for big (and sometimes not-big) companies, and I’ll gladly exchange a writing fee for a byline because a byline is precisely what I usually don’t have a lot of. Most of my original content gets dressed up by the viscera of corporate marketing or legal departments and then spat out as op-eds, case studies, news releases, opinion pieces, byline-free pieces of editorial content, or other things that don’t reflect my byline but which a lot of people read.

That doesn’t make the content any less gratifying to create. Problem is, I need to have a byline somewhere before I can legitimately secure the new, interesting work that keeps my attention. And I have an ethical problem with claiming authorship of something that doesn’t include my byline, even when that claim would be completely legitimate.

I foresee a future where this type of content creation is more usual than it seems to be today. I sincerely hope no one wants to call it journalism – or journalism 2.0, or corporate reporting, or whatever irritating derivative of such observers might be tempted to adopt – but I do expect the emergence of whatever-that’s-called to share some traits with traditional reportage: cite sources diligently, don’t make shit up, attribute where it makes sense to, be transparent with your affiliation, aim to capture the truth as it presents itself.

Et cetera, et cetera.

Those who can’t imagine ceding their own byline in order to write for a living aren’t as dedicated to the craft as they ought to be. Getting credit for every single word you write would be pretty satisfying, but it isn’t the only way to monetize the intellectual cravings that make writers aspire to write in the first place.

Posted in Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Windows Mobile 6.5 To Launch ‘In The Fall.’

June 25, 2009 by Andrew Graham

I don’t post much here about mobile technology, but it’s not because I’m uninterested in the developments there. I do have a half-hour on the 6 Train to kill in the mornings.

The folks at Microsoft were nice enough to let me attend Microsoft Preview on Tuesday night, where they had some new toys on display for bloggers and journalists to use. A bunch of new products, from a minimalist-designed mouse to new Xbox games, filled a loft room at the Metropolitan Pavilion. Paint The Town Red has a write-up too.

I’m most interested in what Microsoft is doing with Windows Mobile 6.5, launching this fall, because, according to a Microsoft publicist, the platform will finally incorporate geo-location technology. The most useful iPhone apps I’ve used, like Foursquare, Coovents, Twitteriffic, OpenTable, and others, all base their functionality in part on being able to locate the user. It’ll be nice when Windows-based phones finally have these capabilities.

In particular, the next iteration of the HTC Touch Diamond has an awe-inspiring design and a ridiculous five mega-pixel auto-focus camera that clearly trumps what’s on the iPhone. Aside from a touch-screen that demands some getting-used-to, it seems like a great phone, given Windows Mobile will have more application capabilities when it comes out.

Here’s a picture of the thing:

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A News Analysis of Sarkozy’s Historic June 22 Speech.

June 25, 2009 by Andrew Graham

Here is how three competing international newspapers covered the first address a French president has given to his legislature in more than a century:

Sarkozy Says Burqas Are Unwelcome in France

President Nicolas Sarkozy took sides in a growing debate on the burqa, a head-to-toe garment that is worn by some Muslim women and that conceals their faces, saying it isn’t a religious symbol but “a sign of enslavement and debasement” of women.

“The burqa is not welcome on French territory,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.” …

Sarkozy Backs Drive to Eliminate the Burqa

President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed Parliament on Monday, laying out a vision of France that included a withering critique of burqas as an unacceptable symbol of “enslavement.”

Speaking at the Palace of Versailles, Mr. Sarkozy confronted one of the most hotly debated social issues in France, saying there was no room in the republic for burqas, the garments that some Muslim women wear to cloak their bodies and faces. …

Sarkozy vows to put jobs first

Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, yesterday ruled out austerity measures to sort out France’s rapidly deteriorating public finances as he outlined plans to put saving jobs ahead of economic reform and fiscal restraint.

In a historic address to a joint session of parliament at the Palace of Versailles – the first such occasion for more than 130 years – Mr Sarkozy underscored his determination to increase borrowing to soften the blow from the economic crisis, proposing a new public bond to pay for unspecified “priority” investments. …

Notice that the first two stories lead with Sarkozy’s remarks about burqas, a culturally charged angle that wasn’t at all the centerpiece of his address. These stories appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, respectively.

The third story, a more-accurate rendering of Sarkozy’s address, appeared in The Financial Times and referenced his remarks about burqas in the last paragraph, where it probably belongs on the inverted-pyramid structure of news stories. The Times didn’t get to the historic element of the speech until its fifth paragraph; the Journal got there in its third.

(Sarkozy last year changed France’s constitution to allow him to address parliament once a year; previously, such addresses weren’t allowed in order to “protect the independence of lawmakers,” as the Times noted. This is what made the speech historic.)

Noting that the Times and the Journal, two newspapers that are taking increasingly obvious steps to compete with the other, extracted the same unremarkable angle from Sarkozy’s speech says something telling, I just don’t know exactly what.

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June 15, 2009 by Andrew Graham

“Why don’t we use our own clean energy to create good-paying jobs here instead of sending billions overseas?”

This is a simple but increasingly effective message in favor of clean tech investments and, by extension, President Obama’s high level of spending. Though down from last summer’s record highs, oil prices continue to be too volatile. Repower America, an advocacy group, provided to me and other bloggers this ad ahead of its national debut later on today; the Alliance For Climate Protection funded the spot.

Posted in Energy | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Successful Microblogging Requires More Than Twitter.

June 8, 2009 by Andrew Graham

Over on Tumblr, Squashed has some observations on the short-form updates that industry observers call microblogging. This stems from a Twitter post from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), that was picked up verbatim by blogs and mainstream press:

Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said ‘time to delivr on healthcare’ When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL.

Clearly, Grassley isn’t too skilled of a copy writer. If he were, he’d find a way to fit what he wanted to state into Twitter’s 140-character limit, and he’d recognize that if you’re a lawmaker, having the gibberish above attributed to you makes you sound like a fool. Instead, he used Internet shorthand, and came off sounding like a petulant child when directly quoted.

Twitter certainly does have legitimate use for any person or organization with a message to advocate, but it needs to work in tandem with other platforms to ensure its use isn’t counterproductive. Grassley should have a Tumblr and a (useful) Facebook page to syndicate a consistent message to audiences on those various communities. Counting his Twitter followers and Facebook fans don’t even come close to capturing all of social media’s potential value.

If you’re a lawmaker, using Tumblr to publish original thoughts and then broadcasting that post on Twitter and Facebook, for example, makes a lot more sense then posting on Twitter from your mobile phone whenever a quip might come to mind. Grassley needs to get rid of these excited utterances, because they’re more harmful than useful to his personal brand.

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The Corporate Newsroom Amid A Web Of Excited Utterance.

May 27, 2009 by Andrew Graham

The stereotypical corporate newsroom, long an online place for companies to shill favorable content about themselves, needs a facelift. Though exciting developments at the intersection of social media and communications are already driving change, these new technologies have enjoyed widespread adoption from individuals, not companies.

Fortunately, that’s beginning to change.

Though they vary slightly from company to company, a typical corporate newsroom includes news releases, case studies, photography, events, press contacts, and other corporate goings-on. Aside from a handful of notable exceptions, their content is stagnant, being updated infrequently and existing on a closed platform that doesn’t encourage user feedback.

However, today’s popular platforms are built expressly to be the opposite of these static sites. Blogs have comments sections; Twitter users can rebroadcast or respond to their connections’ messages almost effortlessly. It’s easy for these platforms to turn into a honeycomb of echo-chamber, but most users are effectively building unique content on top of existing content. Written another way: Bloggers who are rehashing content from other blogs, for example, add in their two cents, and this combination of new and recycled content still serves a legitimate purpose.

There is a term for what the social media sphere is quickly becoming. A couple of months ago, at a panel discussion about how journalists are using social media, former Huffington Post editor Rachel Sklar compared Twitter posts to excited utterances, the legal doctrine that states what a person says when startled or in shock is quite likely to be a true, if uncalculated, remark. That window of truth, that absence of message strategy and spin, she said, is why people like Twitter.

And the existence of these excited utterances is what makes social media engagement a real murky issue for a lot of corporates.

Today’s semantic web – or, more accurately, the conversations it enables between innovator, company, customer, partner, competitor, and lawmaker – seems to spit out excited utterances by the tons.

This opens up opportunities for companies while at the same time creating new challenges for them to address. On one hand, transparency and accessibility can distance an organization from its competition in a very good way. On another, too much transparency and accessibility can create crises and destroy market share. Finding the balance between the two is critical.

Companies right now are grappling to understand how to use the social web to participate, and in some cases lead, dialogue without digressing to the seemingly insignificant excited utterances that can immediately become big headaches. Most organizations aren’t, or shouldn’t be, afraid to cede some level of control and lead a discussion about the issues that lie at their core—and an organization that feels threatened by social media today is, in effect, grasping at shadows.

Because traditional media is dwindling in size, organizations can step up and fill the void left by downsized reporters and editors. They have more control than they realize. A corporate newsroom needs to be just that: a newsroom—not a section of an organization’s web site that gets new content every now and again, but a functioning newsroom that filters information to not only the press, but to customers, competitors, lawmakers, and other audiences.

With the right strategy, knowledge of the tools available and, most importantly, a willingness to promote and host a true dialogue, this change is easier to pull off than many companies think.

Originally posted on my firm’s web site.

Posted in Media | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Tonight: ‘Is The Federal Reserve System Broken?’

May 26, 2009 by Andrew Graham

There have been adequate (and deserved) rumblings about how to fix one of the country’s three primary financial-market regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Criticism shot at another regulator, the Federal Reserve, is not receiving as much mainstream attention—at least, I didn’t think that it is.

Tonight, on the Fordham Law School campus in Manhattan, the Smith Family Foundation will host a discussion about the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, and, presumably, how they could be improved. Attendance is free with RSVP. Stephen Axilrod, who had a 30-year career at The Fed and left as director of its main monetary policy arm to write a book, is on what looks to be an excellent panel.

I had been considering the prospects of ending the Fed entirely as a fringe political call to action that radical spectators, not actual influencers, are supporting. But just the instance of the Smith Foundation, a think tank that I’ve never known to give credibility to particularly radical causes, hosting the panel says that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is snowballing mainstream support for applying drastic change to the Federal Reserve. How can policy better audit the Fed? Should lawmakers (somehow) impose taxes on it? Or should it be ended entirely?

As a friend put it, these debates have in the past have seen the “audience get all screamy,” so I anticipate these questions will come up in a partisan Q&A. These don’t reflect my positions at all, but they’ll be fun interesting to hear.

(From what I can tell, the argument for ending the Fed goes something like this: The Fed is unconstitutional because its supply comes from a group of private banks, but only Congress has the authority to coin money. Furthermore, it’s just a bad idea, economically: Dollars haven’t been backed by gold or any other commodity since 1971, and the Fed creates a perpetually increasing debt cycle it calls “inflation” by printing more and more dollars.

There’s even a web site, which could use some work.)

If you’re going and want to compare notes afterwards, e-mail me.

Posted in Economics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Yeah, Semantics, But:

May 22, 2009 by Andrew Graham

Phrases I don’t like:

  • Social Media: Ever since newspapers had space for op-eds and letters to the editor, media has had a social component. Today, the feedback loop is instantaneous and editorial gatekeepers no longer exist, but the social element has always been present.
  • Citizen Journalist: This is an awful phrase. Journalists *are* citizens, and efforts to separate the two lead to some pretty silly conversations about objectivity.
  • Press Release: Fine, then; what constitutes the press? Reporters and editors. Bloggers. Citizen journalists (whoops!)? What about Twitter and Facebook users? See? Ridiculous.
  • Guru: What you say: “I’m a social media guru!” What I hear: “I have a book coming out that you should buy!!”

    • Instead, say:

  • New Media: Historically speaking, the technologies that enable that instantaneous feedback loop and destroyed those editorial gatekeepers are very new. So: “Twitter is a new-media platform”; “We need a strategy for new media”; etc.
  • Non-Paid Reporter: It’s easier to differentiate between who gets paid to commit acts of journalism and who does it for some other reason besides money. Although there are still people (like me) who aren’t an exact fit for either group.
  • News Release: Get 100 people in a room, and you’ll have 100 different definitions of what “the press” is, and most of them will be quite arbitrary. Release news in a news release; if it’s not news, don’t release it at all.
  • Strategist: This word is a lot less flowery and ambiguous, and you don’t sound like you’re trying to sell me a used car or a timeshare in Boca. Yeah, I’ll take your card.

    • Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

    Why I Hate Derivatives.

    May 9, 2009 by Andrew Graham

    After leaving this comment* on a post at Waters, the financial-technology trade magazine, in response to he question, “Technology—Hero or Villain?,” I realized my seething hatred of derivatives is probably worth discussing.

    Technologies that properly manage risk, create liquidity, track market data, or exploit market inefficiencies in other ways serve very useful (critical, even) purposes, especially during this particular recession.

    But a technology is only as good as its handlers are responsible—and recall that recent history has seen institutions also use financial technology to create some pretty scary instruments, seemingly out of thin air, when the consumer market wouldn’t satisfy the demand on Wall Street. I’m not quite sure what to call this type of technology, but I don’t expect anyone’s going around writing press releases about it. To me, these systems play The Joker in the industry’s Gotham.

    (Apologies in advance for that worn-out Batman reference.)

    I don’t hate derivatives because a bunch of Wall Streeters got rich off trading them, and I don’t hate derivatives because they’re uniquely hard to account for and to tax—even though they are. My contempt for them is far more basic: Since they’re no more than really complicated contracts, there’s no effective way to integrate them into the financial system without opening it up to unchecked risk.

    The market for “risk transfer” (many allege this is what derivatives are for) shouldn’t dwarf the markets that the risk is originated in. Written another way, a strong derivatives market needlessly obstructs the sectors that are actually useful, like manufacturing, energy, and housing, as well as the entire consumer market.

    There’s a bit of truth to the contention that the danger derivatives pose is amplified by the fact that many are OTC-traded, where buyers are simply crossing their fingers and hoping that they bought what they thought they were buying and their counterparty is still solvent-enough to honor the contract when it comes due. This assumes that buyer doesn’t offload that derivative into, well, another derivative—which is what I suspect made the derivatives market into the equivalent of a big, dumb dog that won’t stop eating.

    And I realize that “derivative” instruments like insurance policies and futures are economically productive. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about derivatives that are engineered specifically to create high levels of leverage. Here is a good post on the differences between the two.

    Searching for a solution is where my trust-the-government-implicitly authoritarian leanings (at least, with this administration) surface. Rather than nudge this market’s participants away from these ticking bombs, the government should do all it can to destroy the reasons derivatives-trading is attractive. Tax them heavily. Enlist financial engineers at the federal level to establish a pricing index on these instruments that reflect what the government says their risk profiles are. Publish rankings of what institutions are doing in the derivatives market; if it doesn’t know for sure, then speculate.

    * Oddly, the moderator hasn’t approved the comment yet. Waters, what gives? Added later: Waters has posted the comment.

    Posted in Economics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

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