As one who used to earn a living by writing copy to guide executives through their quarterly earnings calls to investors and the media, this new study summarized in The Economist is equal parts revealing and horrifying:

David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes.

Since not all executives write their own remarks for those calls, it would be fair to question the study’s viability. Except that the researchers know that, and so they only examined the Q&A portion of the calls, which takes so much time to script that it’s not worth bothering to try.

The article does correctly observe that PR practitioners are bound to get their game-theory on and avoid precisely the things the research says indicate deception. In that vein, here’s a cheeky handy list of things to do when drafting earnings scripts for the 3Q10 period:

To be serious for a moment, the payoff for everyone else is that, as claimed by the authors, “linguistic features statistically improve the out-of-sample performance for a traditional accounting-based model that uses discretionary accruals. These performance results suggest that it is worthwhile for researchers to consider linguistic cues when attempting to measure the quality of reported financial statements.”

So they’re saying the models are reliable data-points for traders and other investors on the Street?

A working version of the full paper appears after the jump; it’s great background for IR types.

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“I read lots of food blogs, for instance, but is there a food buyer or a general manager writing a blog somewhere? Publishing-industry blogs that are about the business rather than the books? Other great industry blogs?”

– Ezra Klein, Washington Post

Anyone who works in the field of public relations or communications, as I do, should be thrilled to read this.

It isn’t new to observe that if a company or an executive publishes a quality blog, then some people will find it. What is new, though, is that if a company or an executive publishes a quality blog, then journalists like Ezra Klein really want to be told about it.

Last week I linked to Ezra Klein’s post that called for journalists to start publishing transcripts of their important interviews online. It’s a request I’m still entirely on-board with.

Later that day, I left this comment on his blog:

I work in the PR/media field and frequently act as an intermediary between reporter and source, making sure everyone has the appropriate background information before a formal interview to ensure nobody’s time ends up being wasted.

I like having information fully transparent, and anyone who feels the same way can probably get on board with the notion that important interviews ought to be fully transcribed somewhere online and public. In fact, I frequently urge clients — corporate executives, law firm partners, etc. — to establish their own blogs so they can do just that. Reporters, understandably, have deadlines and many other pressures to grapple with, but transcribing and posting an important interview between one of my clients and a Times reporter, for instance, would probably be a decent use of *my* time, and if it can benefit other writers or bloggers, then all the better.

I’m not so sure, though, that most journalists would like it if the subjects of their interviews began to do that. Any thoughts?

I’m still on the fence about the matter. How would journalists react if their sources began recording interviews and publishing the full transcripts on their own blog, or on their company’s blog?

When I’m committing public relations, I want to help journalists get what they need as quickly as possible, whether it’s a quote, statistic, or an interview with someone. I also want to give clients the capability to fully articulate their positions, and oftentimes news articles don’t offer the space for fully nuanced opinions. But at the same time, I don’t want to overstep that delicate journalist-source boundary, which is, it seems, quite variable, depending on the professional tastes of both parties.

I’d love to hear from other media-types on the question. Journalists and PR people, chime in if you want to.

Last week, a query appeared on Help A Reporter Out, a free newsletter that connects reporters with sources, that asked how BP should be handling its role in the Gulf oil spill from a PR perspective.

Though this kind of corporate flackery occasionally offends my journalistic sensibilities, I put myself in the place of BP’s media representation and answered some of the writer’s questions with the copy below. (Later, the writer would elegantly label my response as “either incoherent or self-serving babble” in the column that ultimately ran, which, honestly, resulted in a few lawlz.)

Of course there is no such thing as a typical crisis. But last week’s oil spill, from the perspective of BP, is particularly unique.

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Edelman, a public-relations agency, has filled a new position it’s dubbing Chief Content Officer with a current journalist. Richard Sambrook, director of global news at the BBC, will join the firm in May, it announced earlier this week.

This isn’t a run-of-the-mill personnel announcement. Agency namesake Richard Edelman explained:

Companies are going to have a harder time penetrating that authority media because reporters are getting less space. Therefore companies are going to have to do a more extensive job of putting out their story through their own websites and other channels. And in order to do that I needed someone who understood high-quality content, [but] not to replace the mediated view.

The appointment supports the contention that companies can authoritatively participate, as news publishers, in the reportage of their own industries and interests.

I’m pleased to hear the news, principally because I’ve been on that train before in predicting it. For quite awhile, actually. And here, too.

Media consultant Alan D. Mutter has a worthwhile read on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, about why writers and journalists should stop giving away their content for next-to-nothing. Mutter, perhaps ironically, then gives away a servicey template (right) that freelance writers can use to calculate fees.

On the broader issue of sourcing content, he writes:

Quality journalism takes training, time and tenacity. Although it’s easy to fill space with words, pictures and videos that are produced quickly and on the cheap, down-and-dirty “journalism” is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories.

The more empty calories you consume, the unhealthier you get. It won’t be good for our democracy – let alone our self-esteem as journalists – if we attempt to nourish vital local, state and national conversations with the journalistic equivalent of Ding Dongs and McNuggets.

Of course, he’s absolutely right to stick up for journalists who are exploited by publishers that want good content without having to pay for it.

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