Thursday, September 22, 2005


Here's a smart blog dealing with divorce and family law issues, published by Alison Kramer, the PR director at a Raleigh law firm. Alison was at the PR seminar in Chapel Hill -- maybe next year she'll be running her own session.


6:27:18 PM   permalink   comment []

Enjoyed the PR conference, even if our session was oddly truncated...and the ride home from Chapel Hill via Old Greensboro Rd, which runs through beautiful hilly country and is fun to drive, past the turnoffs for the exquisitely named Silk Hope and Snow Camp to Alamance Church Road...


6:22:59 PM   permalink   comment []

Jay Rosen on the NYT's pay-for-columnist-content scheme: "The value proposition there is muddled...do we value Nicholas D. Kristof's column more if he's an 'exclusive?'

"We don’t. In fact, it's probably the reverse. If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must have. If 'everyone' isn't, less of a must. 'Exclusive online access' attacks the perception of ubiquity that is part and parcel of a great columnist's power. In his prime Walter Lippmann was called 'the name that opened every door.' Nick Kristof's brand of human rights journalism, which depends on the mobilization of outrage, is simply less potent if it can't reach widely around the world."

We are fortunate that Jay will be joining us in Greensboro for the Converge conferences.


11:51:26 AM   permalink   comment []

Dave points to a podcasting conference at Duke next week. He says, "Just heard about it. Oy." Me, too. Hope some of those folks will come up the road for Converge.


11:36:37 AM   permalink   comment []

More on local newspaper coverage of business news and reader interest therein: An alert surfer sends this link to a survey conducted by the Readership Institute at Northwestern. The survey question was, "Where will improvements motivate people to spend more time with the newspaper and read more sections more often?"

The results:

1. Community announcements, obituaries, stories about ordinary people
2. Health, home, food, fashion & travel
3. Government/politics, war/international
4. Natural disasters/accidents
5. Movies, TV, weather
6. Business, economics, personal finance
7. Science, technology, environment
8. Police/crime, courts/ legal
9. Sports
10. Education
11. Parenting, relationships, religion
12. Arts
13. Automotive
14. Popular music
15. Jobs & career

(emphasis mine)

Here's the thing: I didn't raise this in the first place as a focus-group issue, although I respect the fact that people who run newspapers have to think in those terms to some degree. My interest is in news, and business news is important and has an impact beyond the business world; turns out, readers want to see it, too.


10:41:03 AM   permalink   comment []

Which is cooler, Greensboro or Winston-Salem?

I don't know. I'm not cool, and my idea of night life generally involves putting the kids to bed, beating the dog, and sipping an adult beverage in the comfort of my own home.

I do think the W-S booster is way wrong about restaurants not really counting for much, that's one of GSO's great strengths and a real measure of cool, or at least quality of life. It sounds like GSO's live-music scene is about to improve, too.


9:07:59 AM   permalink   comment []

Wall Street Journal: "Debates about the boundaries of science and religion that marked the famous Scopes trial in 1925 are likely to unfold next week at a Harrisburg, Pa., federal courthouse in the first legal test of an anti-evolution doctrine known as 'intelligent design.'"


8:57:08 AM   permalink   comment []

If you aren't reading the comments at local blogs, you are missing a lot of good stuff.


8:51:44 AM   permalink   comment []

Behind the NYT paywall, David Brooks says he liked John Edwards' post-Katrina speech a lot more than he liked the one by John Kerry (you can see the Edwards speech here).

Brooks: "Edwards took some hard shots at Bush, some of them deserved, but having left Washington after the election, Edwards is not so obsessed with power struggles. In his talk he roamed outward and spoke about the complexities of actual life...He concluded with a series of policy recommendations fit for the post-welfare-reform world.

"No conservative would agree with all of them, but nobody could fail to find them interesting."

I also thought the Edwards speech was powerful and deserves a wide hearing.

Brooks says Kerry is obsessed with Bush, bad bad Bush, and keeps recycling the same litany of evils time and again. Money quote from the column: "Porn movies have less repetition than this."

(I heard Rush Limbaugh say much the same thing about the Dems in general yesterday, that they seemed to plan on running against Bush in '08. Well, duh. A lot of Republicans are still running against Bill Clinton, it's kind of how things work, isn't it?)

The Brooks kicker is about the future voice of the Democrats, angry or positive, centrist or "partisan." One thing I like about Edwards is that he's positive.

Funny thing...Brooks uses as an example of Kerry's Bush-mania the retelling of the Mission Accomplished fiasco aboard the aircraft carrier...which episode is recounted in today's other hidden op-ed, by Bob Herbert, who says the polls are falling and America is waking up to the realization that this  administration is "in danger of being judged by history as one of the worst of all time."


8:38:29 AM   permalink   comment []

Headed to Chapel Hill around lunchtime to speak at this media relations seminar.

My session for the PR pros is called "Congratulations, You've Lost Control: How Blogging Changes Corporate Communications for the Better."

So much has happened so fast that it's hard to believe that this topic was bleeding-edge less than two years ago.


8:15:04 AM   permalink   comment []