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| Monday, April 14, 2003 |
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Rick On! 
| | Since I moved to Santa Barbara I haven't kept up with Bay Area radio. (And ba.broadcast ain't what it used to be.) So I didn't now that Big Rick Stuart, who has long been one of the Real Voices on the air up there, has been blogging. This is very cool. |
| | I like how he fact-checks WNEW-FM's new "free form" Top 40 format, which looks like it's all form and no free. |
| | Amazing. WNEW was for many years the landmark thinking-edge rock station in New York. Now it's "Blink". There's no mystery to the demography in the format's bull's eye. I'm just wondering why they didn't do the logo in lipstick. |
Gagvertising
Dogma tagging
| | Simply put, the source of dogmas is our own laziness about addressing systemic issues in our organizations and in recording the reasons we do things within a company. We opt, for instance, for "collaboration" software to make people collaborate instead of teaching them to work together respectfully and constructively. We fail to appreciate how these tools change the requirements when hiring new employees, and often blame the employees when they fail to thrive in the stunted learning environments we¹ve created. If management wants to take credit for success, the institutionalization of critical thinking about our choices of information tools is absolutely essential to the role of a manager in the information age. |
| | Lot of stuff to respond to there. But no time. Maybe later. Tomorrow, probably. |
Incoming!
| | Britt Blaser has a killer idea. Literally. PRoogling for Dollars is a bozo-guided flack-seeking missle targeted for the dumbest, most annoying and most persistent convention of the PR trade: the press release. |
| | The idea is for Google to (I compress and paraphrase Britt's HTML here...): |
| | - categorize and track all press releases
append a "PR" identifier to each one- text-match press release prose with the prose in potentiually release-derived stories
- append a statistical measure to every news source with PR content, (like, "95% PR", or "75% PR" or "33% PR")
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| | Pretty slick, huh? Speaking as one of those journalists whose mailboxes are fattened by pointless press releases, I want this, bad. |
| | Britt also laments what he calls a decline in organizational candor. The most quotable line: |
| | Have you heard the old saw that a man's blood supply is insufficient to support his brain and penis simultaneously? Likewise, perhaps, there's just not enough energy in an organization to talk the talk and walk the walk. |
| | I mostly agree with what Britt goes on to say (and it's a lot, and a very good read); but I'm not sure it's worse now than it ever was. In fact, I think it's better. One measure: common as they are, the number of press releases chasing me in the world has declined since Cluetrain came out. Of course, that may be because I'm one of the four last people you'll want to send a press release if you've bothered to read the book; but still, it seems indicative. |
| | Plus there's the plain fact that you've got a quarter million or more stringers out there, calling bullshit on every specioius source that rears its flacky head. After awhile that has to have an effect. |
| | [Later...] Britt responds, adding much value to all the above. One sample: |
| | Our memory seems about 3 months long and shrinking. It's as if managers, politicians and evangelists believe their own PR and then, like a kid caught in a fib, feel forced to extend and embellish misleading statements to make them big enough to be believed. |
Your flag Furby won't get you into heaven any more...
| | Just got pointed to Flag-o-Rama, a funny parody of patriotic schwagger. I especially like Tires of Pride. |
| | Iraqi doubts about our willingness to take casualties showed a misreading of this nation's temper, as Minneapolis newspaper columnist James Lileks writes in his Web log. "They don't understand what's changed. In a sense this is not West vs. Arab, or U.S. vs. militant Islam; it's a dynamic culture vs. a static one." |
| | Now, a really dynamic culture might be less reactive and more creative, finding other coherent responses to the post-Sept. 11 world beyond the age-old practice of marching soldiers through the Fertile Crescent. And a dynamic culture could once again adjust its attitude if a wider war goes from imagined to imminent, or if a series of costly wars and occupations drags on into an indefinite future. |
| | For the moment, though, the use of force as needed to remake the Arab world to America's liking seems to be the implicit strategy of the United States under the leadership of George W. Bush. It is a doctrine that dare not speak its name, but it is a popular one nonetheless. |
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