itjournalist.com

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Tags: obama, politics, democrat

Andrew has been talking about press backgrounders. You can put them together in five minutes with a Google search, he says.

Why shouldn’t journalists do part of the work themselves?

I work regularly with a bunch of PR agencies who know me, but I also have to talk to lots of companies that I’ve never met before. They’ll often want to see a bio before they put an executive on the phone.

I’ve taken to putting a short bio into emails when contacting companies with an interview request, explaining who I am, who I write for, and so on, so that people know I’m not a timewaster. But after reading Andy’s post, I decided to put up a professional backgrounder page on the blog, pretty much following the format he outlined (thanks Andy).

I also think I’ve cracked the challenge of telling companies what I’ve written recently. I use Publish2, the social networking site for journalists, which includes a clippings section where you can bookmark your own stories. There’s a newsfeed available for your own clippings, meaning that you can insert it fairly readily into a blog (and my feed is now on the left hand side of the blog).

My virtual assistant has access to that account, and she does a sweep each week to check which of the articles I’ve written are up online. then she emails the interviewees a link (which makes them more willing to speak with me next time), and then updates the Publish2 account with the article links.

It’s not perfect - I should probably get her to include the title of the publication in with the title of the article, and there’s no easy way of separating articles from different publications. Still, it’s a start,Al giorno d’oggi, furgone godete il roulette al poker online gratisкомпютри piu’ vicino e sul Internet. at least.

So now, when anyone asks me for a bio, I can just point them to this web site and they’ll have enough information to chew on. Unless, of course, they want to go into a bit more depth.

Naturally PR types will want to add in their own stuff. “Grumpy git. Often late for phone calls. Likes sound of own voice,” isn’t something I’d put on my own backgrounder, but others might.

Still, it gives them the bare bones stuff, if nothing else, and means that the next time someone wants to vet you for something, you can speed things along.

Tags: PR, backgrounder

If you always felt like you had a crime novel in you but needed major surgery to get it out, now’s the time to consider writing it. The Old Bailey just put another 100,000 transcripts online, meaning that trials from 1674 to 1913 are now available.

I had no idea that this tool existed. You can also read about the lives and deaths of people imprisoned at Tyburn in huge amounts of detail. Sounds like this gives you a real sense of London’s history (or at least it will do when the site recovers from the publicity):

I’ve always retained a love of London. I used to live right in the middle of Soho, after all, before moving to sleepy Saskatoon. When I can’t get back there, I like reading books like Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography, which is still one of my favourites. So a site like this is a real treasure.

Tags: London, Old Bailey, Research

Brrr.

Tags: Picture, bridge, snow

This is handy for those of us who often need to find out peoples’ addresses and telephone numbers in a hurry. Google has reintroduced WHOIS oneboxes (t only seems to work in Google.com right now, rather than, say, Google.ca or Google.co.uk,) so you’ll need to tell your browser to go to the .com domain if you’re outside the US).

I use WHOIS all the time to quickly find numbers for people that I need to track down (home numbers, often). “How the hell did you find me at home?”, one senior Intel guy said to me once, when I left a message on his home number to ask him for a radio interview. It was because of a personal web site he’d registered. It’s also sometimes good for finding the founders of companies who are still small, and often operating out of a suite address (translation: PO box).

What’s the big deal? You can do that (and lots more besides) in tools like dnsstuff, right? Right. But Google would find it very easy to hook WHOIS results up to the Google Maps API so that you could pinpoint someone’s office on a map in a single click.

I did that to an editor of mine once - I sent him an image of his apartment, gleaned from the WHOIS records on his domain name - and he thought I was some sort of uber hacker, or NSA spook. I wonder what he would have said if I’d done this to him?

I chose City Lights because it doesn’t matter if people know where it is, and because San Francisco has street views. But what about if this was someone’s residence, and they didn’t opt for private WHOIS? Unfortunately, tools like this are equally useful to whackos and stalkers as well as to journalists (yes, there’s a difference, generally). It doesn’t take much to join such services together manually, whether Google decides to use its API or not…

Running your business out of your house, huh? Love the colour of your front door. So, what does your neighbourhood look like? Is it affluent? Is that your car outside? The one with the readable number plate?

Tags: Google, stalking, WHOIS

Ted Talks makes for fantastic video. I watch far less TV these days because I spent a lot of my TV watching time viewing video from this site. I consume the video (along with other programmes like Democracy Now) through Miro, with which you can essentially replace TV using your Mac. One of the advantages of Miro over Joost is that you can take your TV with you, because it downloads rather than streams. Another advantage is that the content is far better than the programming available on Joost.

Alex Steffen’s talk on Ted is particularly good. He’s from Worldchanging, which is a great resource for people who want to do something positive about global problems.

Roundabouts that pump water? Landmine detecting flowers? Fantastic stuff.

Tags: Worldchanging, Ted Talks, Miro, video, Democracy Now

I’ve officially replaced Google as my search engine of choice when it comes to news. In my job, I get given news articles to write about companies that I have zero information or experience about. Some small company gets funding to launch a cellulosic ethanol plant, and I need to bone up quickly, and find people to speak to, and do it all in a few hours. I do the normal stuff - SEC filings, company searches, etc - and I could trawl Google for extra info, sure, but Silobreaker is better. It gives you visual maps showing relationships between key individual and institutional players relating to a subject, along with news stories, blog posts and documents relating to the topic or company in question. And it lays out the news in a way that I find easier to understand than Google News.

The key value is that the founders are doing their best to apply semantic web concepts to current events data that, (like pretty much all data on the web), isn’t encoded in a semantic way. From its ‘About us’ section:

More than a news aggregator, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t really seen much semantic web stuff happening in Google. And Silobreaker is a good example of how an underdog can outclass a huge incumbent in a specific area.

Tags: research, search, silobreaker, google

I’m a big fan of the EnglishRussia blog. It documents some of the most bizarre things in the world, most of which apparently happened in the former USSR. Example: firing drunken pigs high into the air, as a means of advancing the Soviet space programme. Here is the pig, pre-flight, on the beginning of his short, exciting journey from bottle to throttle.

For the full story, which has a frankly surprisingly happy ending for the pig, click here.

Tags: pig, soviet, space

They should make ivory poachers watch this from start to finish. The heffalump might have been trained to copy, or might be following hand signals. Still, it draws better than I can. What’s the betting that there’s a bunch of them out there on the Serengeti working out a way among themselves to solve the energy crisis?

One day, when I had a spare hour in the pub, I read Chris Anderson’s controversial post on press releases. He generated a storm of comment when he named and shamed a bunch of PR execs that kept sending him releases that clearly weren’t targeted. I understood the frustration of the PR people whose e-mail addresses he publicly listed. It was clearly not a very charitable move. On the other hand, I understood his frustration, at trying to deal with people managing distribution lists who wouldn’t listen to him when he asked them to change they way they contacted Wired.

I’ve been having a similar problem recently. In an effort to reclaim my bloated inbox, and categorise things more effectively, I set up the e-mail address releases@itjournalist.com. Whenever I got a press release through to my main e-mail address (which people have been sending releases to for 12 years), I sent a polite reply back. I’d ask the PR executive in question to try and get everyone in the company to change their press release distribution records to reflect the new address. Most of them mailed back, letting me know that they’d got the message and promising to change their records. In return, I then sent them the password for my features blog. These were clearly responsive, organised people that I could work with.
Then, I’d start getting releases from other people in the same company to the old address. Once again, I’d dutifully send off another e-mail, both to the new person and the one I’d originally mailed. “Please, please, change the mail address,” I’d say. Back would come the reply: “Whoops, sorry. Sure!”

With some companies, that was the end of it. But from a depressingly high percentage, those e-mails just kept coming from others in the organisation. I’d mail three, four, five times. When one executive from a very large agency mailed yet another release to the old address, I mailed back explaining that I really would appreciate having the address changed, and was there perhaps someone I could speak to that could do this centrally, once and for all? The response was an irritating silence. Thanks. What a great relationship.

I don’t want this to turn into the ubiquitous hack-versus-PR blog post. I’ve done those before, and they don’t get anyone anywhere. I’m certainly not going to name any names or print any e-mail addresses. But the number of times that this has happened with agencies that are collecting hefty fees each month from clients led me to think about the future of the press release. When I eventually mailed the managing directors of a couple of these companies, threatening to block all e-mails from that domain to my danny@ address, there was a logic behind it.

Before I mailed these firms, I would check to make sure that there wasn’t an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the e-mail, and would also surf to the PR company’s website to see if there was some way to update my distribution details there. Very few companies offered this. Sony Ericsson is one that does, and Atos Origin is another (and I’m naming names here because this is a good thing).

But for the most part I had to resort to personal appeals. I’ll bet a slap-up lunch (on some poor client’s ticket no doubt) that these companies won’t be able to produce a record of me specifically asking to be on their distribution lists. So, what we have is an e-mail distribution mechanism in which the recipient didn’t ask to be mailed, and in which it becomes extremely difficult and time-consuming to be either removed, or to have the e-mails routed to a more appropriate address.

Does this remind you of anything?

Spam is spam, whether it is being sent by a legitimate company or not. If you didn’t ask for it, and you can’t easily change the way that it is sent, it doesn’t matter whether people are telling you about their client’s latest contract win, or where to score free college degrees online.

Some of these companies are well-intentioned, I’m sure. Judging from the silence, and the continued spray-and-pray press release blasting to my old address, others simply don’t seem to give a damn. But we already know that there are good PR firms, bad ones, and others that are trying their hardest to be better.

What was interesting for me was the confirmation of something I already suspected — that many companies don’t have central press release distribution lists. They either seem to manage them on a client-by-client basis, or each executive has their own distribution list. This leads to a situation in which getting e-mail addresses changed with PR companies is like turning a supertanker around. It happens very slowly.

This is why I’ll say, as I’ve said before, that I think the conventional press release is dead, but still twitching. Managing press release distribution is notoriously difficult on both sides. Freelancers tend to do lots of different things, which makes it difficult for PR companies to know what lists they should be included on. Journalists often feel as though they are being mailed a torrent of banal pap that isn’t targeted at them. And the bottom line is that a lot of PR firms are never going to excel at managing email blasts.

What makes it worse is that it can be just as difficult getting on those lists in the rare event that I do request to be included, as it can to be taken off them. The only time I mailed and asked a PR company to send me details of its client’s latest developments was when that client didn’t have an RSS feed that I could subscribe to, and I really wanted to know what it was doing. It took me numerous attempts to be included on the list, and then I fell off again within weeks. So I simply gave up.

Add to this that most releases seem to be irrelevant to an awful lot of people, and it seems to me that press release distribution, which I suspect is a fundamental revenue generating proposition for many PR agencies, is becoming an increasingly pointless and irritating way of communicating with many journalists. I just wonder how long it will take the PR agencies’ clients to realise it?

While we’re on the subject, I’d also like to call out what I thought was a fascinating approach to more innovative marketing communication. Darren Barefoot, co-founder of Capulet Communications, put together a video marketing campaign for a client of his. He highlighted a handful of bloggers who he thought were suitable for the topic at hand. Then he recorded a separate, personal YouTube video for each of them, and sent them the link.

Apparently, his hit rate was quite high. The client firm told me that it saw traffic to its blog increased by around 2000% in seven months. Seems to me that that guy is really earning his fees.

That looks to me like an example of the disparity between old school PR that doesn’t seem to be innovating, and someone operating at the cutting edge using nothing more than a video camera, an afternoon, a piece of editing software and YouTube. It’s rough around the edges, done on the balcony at his place in Malta, from which he was running his business using Skype, email, and an Internet connection - and it worked in a way that more conventional spray and pray text-based releases couldn’t. Nice one, Darren.