Lessons in PR from Mark Sanford

posted by Alan Greenblatt

If there's one thing Mark Sanford's trip down South America way illustrates, it's the notion that public officials need to get out ahead of a story, rather than letting a story take on a life of its own.

It's PR 101 that if you have bad news to dispense, you should put it out there right away. You take your lumps, but you don't allow for a slow drip of bad news and you don't turn on a one-day story into a three-day story.

Obviously, this is a tricky case. Questions were raised about where the governor had gone to and the whole point of his mission was to get away and not let his staff (or his wife, or the lieutenant governor...) know how to reach him. That was, of course, a big mistake in judgment.

But having made that mistake, things got out of hand quickly. The staff didn't know what to say, so they kept putting out different answers. Then they settled on the Appalachian Trail. That turned out to be wrong, although it was Sanford's original intention. What's not clear to me is why, when Sanford called in yesterday, no one thought to ask him where he actually was.

So now things look pretty bad. Sanford took off without leaving anyone in charge, leaving him open to charges that he was irresponsible and has poor judgment, to say the least. And now it looks like his staff lied about where he was.

As we know, the media hate nothing more than being lied to. The coverup, in our eyes, is always worse than the crime.

What Sanford should have done, at the very least, was to buy a new cell phone and given that number to one trusted aide. And maybe his wife, too. He should have said, don't call me unless there's a true emergency.

That way, his aides could rightly have said that the governor is taking a much-needed vacation, but plans are in place for him to respond immediately to any crisis. And since the crisis turned out to be one of communications, this would have taken care of that problem.

Microjournalism: How Will Cities Respond?

posted by Zach Patton

From Grist comes this very interesting story about one reporter's experiment with new media:

When Adam Klawonn quit his job at a shrinking major metropolitan newspaper in 2006, he did what so many other journalists have: launched an online news operation that looked a lot like a newspaper’s web site, only with less stuff.

On The Zonie Report (“A New Kind of News for Arizona”), he set out to cover growth, immigration, the environment. The big issues. “The traditional papers were going local, and they were pulling back their bureaus,” said Klawonn, now 30. “It seemed like it was just wide open.”

And from the start, he seemed to be doing everything right—learning enough PHP to slap together a sharp-looking Web site; shooting videos and producing podcasts; painstakingly tagging articles into a dozen geographic categories; looting his bank account for a freelance budget; hiring a New York Times stringer for what turned out to be award-winning environmental reporting.

After two years, though, the Zonie Report was a commercial failure. Advertisers stayed away and readers weren't keen on buying mugs and t-shirts to support the site.

So Klawonn came up with a new idea:  Rather than focus on issues around Arizona or even around Phoenix, he decided to cover one very narrow topic: the new light-rail line in Phoenix.

So last year, Klawonn started sketching out the plan that, this week, landed him a $95,000 Knight News Challenge grant: a news service devoted entirely to Phoenix’s six-month-old light rail system. Its working title is Daily Phoenix.

Plan B is narrower. Much narrower. Old idea: regional trend stories about migrant labor. New idea: opt-in text alerts about train delays. Old content: “In Prescott, a water war escalates.” New content: the details of every crime within a five-block radius of each rail stop.

With his business partner, newly minted Arizona State MBA Aleksandra Chojnacka, Klawonn will offer businesses a chance to be included in twice-daily text messages to mobile subscribers. “It might be, ‘Two-for-one sandwiches!’” Klawonn said. “It might be, ‘Extended happy hour over here!’”

Who knows whether he'll be successful?

But I have to say, the idea of a news site focused so narrowly on one piece of transportation infrastructure (which, by the way, I wrote about last year) does seem to capture the bloggy, Twittery way people seem to like getting their information these days. I, myself, regularly read a blog solely devoted to the businesses along my regular bus route, the 42 line in D.C. So I get the appeal.

It does further blur the lines between blogging and journalism, though. And I wonder how the city of Phoenix will respond to press inquiries from Klawonn. Will he have the same access as a reporter for the Arizona Republic? I'd be surprised. 

It'll certainly be an interesting experiment to watch.

The Whole World Is Twittering

posted by Alan Greenblatt

The central role of Twitter in helping to organize the protests in Iran and getting news and pictures out of that country despite the ban on foreign media attending rallies has already garnered lots of attention.

The Washington Post had a story about Twitter's role today, noting that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay shutting down for maintenance until late at night, Iran time:

"One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter," a senior State Department official said in a conversation with reporters, on condition of anonymity. "They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to."

This is obviously "Twitter's war," the way the 1991 Gulf War belonged to CNN, establishing that network as the go-to source for breaking news. In an interesting interview with TEDBlog, NYU communications professor Clay Shirky talks about the importance of social media to this week's events:

I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

The participation, and passive readership, is so extraordinary that, suddenly, CNN now seems like "old media," Shirky suggests:

CNN has the same problem this decade that Time magazine had last decade. They simultaneously want to appeal to middle America and leading influencers. Reaching multiple audiences is increasingly difficult. The people who are hungry for info on events of global significance are used to instinctively switching on CNN. But they are realizng that that reflex doesn't serve them very well anymore, and that can't be good for CNN.

Patti Blagojevich to Further Strain the Definition of "Celebrity"

posted by Zach Patton

So, remember all that fuss about how former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich wanted to appear on the reality competition show "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!"? And how he couldn't, because the show was shooting in Costa Rica and a federal judge ruled that Blagojevich was barred from leaving the U.S.?

Well, it now looks like Blago's sending in the next best thing as his replacement: his wife Patti:

In another bizarre chapter of Illinois political history, the wife of onetime governor Rod Blagojevich is likely to finalize a deal this week to appear in a reality TV show.

"It appears she's going to do it," said Sheldon Sorosky, attorney for Rod Blagojevich.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Patti will join the likes of actors Stephen Baldwin and Spencer Pratt, wrestler Torrie Wilson, model Janice Dickinson, onetime American Idol contestant Sanjaya Malakar, retired NBA player John Salley and actress Heidi Montag on the show.

If Silda Spitzer shows up on the next season of "The Apprenctice," I'm quitting TV.

Journalism Implosion Watch

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Only one of last week's Pulitzer winners had already been laid off. Here's this week's early winner for the cheap irony award in the great journalism layoff sweepstakes, courtesy of the Washington Post:

That Was Then
Fourteen months ago, reporter Todd Smith was covering a city council meeting in [Kirkwood] Missouri when a gunman charged in and started firing, killing five people. Smith was shot in the right hand.

"I definitely felt my life was in danger. I called my boss and said I wouldn't be able to write about it because I've been shot in the hand," says Smith, who required two operations to repair the damage.

Last week the Suburban Journals, a unit of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, laid him off along with other staffers. "I was shocked," says Smith, 37. "It was a lot to take a bullet for a newspaper." The paper did not return calls.

By the way, the latest newspaper circulation figures -- showing rapid and accelerating decline -- suggest that the industry's strategy of giving people less in the paper and hoping they'll pay 75 cents for a daily précis of what's on the Web site is not paying off.

Hawaiians Irked Over 'SNL' Skit

posted by Zach Patton

Last weekend's "Saturday Night Live" included a skit set in a Hawaiian resort. In it, SNL host Dwayne "No Longer Nicknamed 'The Rock' " Johnson and cast member Fred Armisen depicted workers at the resort who rain on tourists' vacations by complaining about their state.

From the AP:

When a woman gushes about being in Hawaii for her honeymoon, telling the entertainers "it must be fun working here," they respond sarcastically.

"Yeah, it's great. They make us wear grass skirts," Armisen says. "We make $7 an hour. It's a dream job."

Johnson tells one visitor: "It's a fun fact about Hawaii. Our biggest export is coffee. And our biggest import is fat white tourists!"

He later deliberately knocks over the drinks of a customer who points to the flower lei around his neck and makes a lame joke about getting "lei-ed."

Hawaii officials are none too pleased.

Hawaii Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona said he's worried the skit might hurt the state's biggest industry and plans to send a letter in protest to Lorne Michaels, the NBC program's executive producer.

The skit "went too far in its negative depiction of Hawaii's native people and tourism industry," Aiona said. He added he wouldn't let "such distortions go unchecked" when the economy is doing so poorly.

SNL stirred some more state-level controversy earlier this season, with a depiction of New York Gov. David Paterson, who is blind, as a bumbling, clumsy guy who kept walking in front of the camera.

Government Uncovered

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Yesterday's Washington Post was filled with stories about the decline of the newspaper business, with two stories touching directly on state and local government coverage.

Howard Kurtz, the paper's media reporter, offered the general roundup, focusing on the shuttering of the Rocky Mountain News and the likely demise of the San Francisco Chronicle. He quotes Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper about the impact of the former:

"Even when they were uncovering corruption in the city, even when they were embarrassing us or causing us discomfort, they were making the city better," he says. "It's a huge loss."

David Simon, a creator of The Wire and former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, decries the loss of reporters and institutional knowledge at his old paper, part of the bankrupt Tribune chain. Simon says that in his day, he carried around the number of the chief judge of the Maryland District Court, who would warn recalcitrant police officials that they'd be held in contempt if they didn't quickly surrender reports that were open to the public.

Simon says that the city's police are now rarely challenged to present even basic information, such as the names of officers involved in shootings.

The commissioner was allowed to stand on half-truths. Why? Because the Baltimore Sun's cadre of police reporters -- the crime beat used to carry four and five different bylines -- has been thinned to the point where no one was checking Bealefeld's statements or those of his surrogates.

Marc Fisher, a metro columnist for the paper, travels down to Richmond to check on the state of the press corps at the capitol. He also finds fewer reporters on the beat and plenty of stories getting less coverage.

Fisher makes the point that people who follow the legislature for a living have access to more information than ever. A Post editor claims that it offers more coverage of Richmond and Annapolis than in the pre-Internet era, but mostly on blogs.

Critics say that shift serves only the elite that's intently interested in state news, not the broader audience. "The insiders are still getting a full report on the blogs, but the rest of us see only what we want to see instead of the news we need to see," says Bob Gibson, executive director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia and a former politics reporter for the Daily Progress in Charlottesville.

Governing's Rob Gurwitt wrote a feature about the impact of declining capital coverage in our January issue.

Will You Be Living in a 'No-Newspaper' City in Less Than Two Years?

posted by Zach Patton

We've all been hearing an awful lot lately about newspapers facing bankruptcy and cutting the size of their staffs.

(As Jon Stewart put it recently, "What's black and white and completely over?")

But here's an even more sobering thought. In the very near future -- like the next 18 months -- newspapers and media groups across the country could likely default on their debt and close up shop, leaving "several cities" without a daily newspaper, according to a recent report from Fitch Ratings.

"Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010," the Chicago-based credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.

Of course this is bad news for good governance: A decline in daily newspapers means fewer eyes will be watching city hall.

Some of the void will be filled by blogs and hyper-local news websites. Rob Gurwitt actually wrote about that shift in the December 2006 issue of Governing  (although the landscape has undoubtedly changed drastically in the two years since Rob's story). But although blogs have started gaining some of the cache and respect that had been associated with local newspapers, they still largely lack the resources to follow stories in the same way.

"Stop the presses" never sounded so ominous.

The ABC's of Communication

posted by Ellen Perlman

Yesterday I received an email with this subject line:

MI Report: How Access to New Drugs has Slowed the Growth in America's Disability Rates

It didn't make sense. Why is Michigan doing a report on how new drugs have slowed the growth in America's disability rates? Turns out, it's not.

MI stands for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

Acronyms are trouble. We learned in J-School (that would be journalism school) that you never present an acronym in a story before first spelling it out fully. So people actually know what you're talking about. Even then, continuing to use it throughout the story can be annoying.

Public officials throw around a lot of acronyms. In documents, in presentations and in conversation. Technology officials even more. They don't realize they may be shooting themselves, or at least their message, in the foot. I write about this in my November Tech Talk column. Coming out soon.

The most important point to remember: When out of the compound, speak the universal language, not a bunch of letters that only people within the walls of your org understand.

Oh, and if you'd like a copy of the MI report on drugs and disability rates, it's coming out October 28th. I'm sure it will be on the Manhattan Institute's Web site. But not on Michigan's.

Spinning the Web

posted by Mark Stencel

What does it take to run a modern government P.R. and media relations operation?

Ric Cantrell, chief deputy of the Utah state Senate, offered his take last month during a panel I moderated at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual meeting in New Orleans. Ric spoke in detail about how emerging technologies are changing the way lawmakers in his state communicate with each other, with politically engaged citizens and, more than anything, with the media. From an always-on Web cam in Senate President John Valentine's office to frequent Twitter "tweets" and mobile text messages sent during the legislative session, new tools are quickly replacing the traditional ways of reaching out.

Nothing told that story better than this somewhat blurry camera phone image. It's a white board in Ric's office, which shows a checklist that guided him and his staff when setting up news conferences:

You can click on the image above to enlarge it, but here's the full list, reprinted in order:

PRESS CONF

• PODIUM SETUP
• E-MAIL (EXTERNAL)
• E-MAIL (INTERNAL)
• TEXT MESSAGE x2
• LIVE STREAM
• BLOG ANNOUNCE
• PODCAST
• BLOG UPDATE
• FOLLOW UP W/REPORTER
• PRESS RELEASE?

That's right: The venerable old news release is just a maybe -- and only after the event has already been blogged, text messaged, streamed and podcast.

Whether huge numbers of citizens or reporters are yet logging on for all of this online information is beside the point. Making legislative events and information available in so many formats is a step toward more accessible, on-demand government.