Thursday, February 17, 2005

The Media Guerilla's recurring nightmare I've been at LinuxWorld this week hammering out podcasts one after another. By the time I'm done with the show, I think I will have published a total of ten podcasts. For transparency's sake, not ALL of them were done at the show. To get my coverage off to a headstart, three of them were pre-recorded. One of those pre-recorded interviews was with Emic Networks vice president of product management and marketing Donna Jeker. Although it doesn't happen often, this was the second time in a week where my interviewee didn't have the answers to some obvious questions. I don't want to turn this transparency channel into a bitching and moaning session about poorly executed PR. While this again is an example of how a the practice of media transparency can be embarrassing to interviewees, the companies they work for, and their public relations representatives, there's an upside. Transparency should make all three of those parties much better at what they do because they know that there's more on the line than just the story itself. And why shouldn't that be the case. Everytime a journalist writes a story, their ass is totally on the line. Why shouldn't the demand for that excellence be pervasive throughout the entire food chain of a story. If this was the case, then the final outcomes (the stories) would consistently be better throughout all of journalism. So, transparency raises the bar for everyone, as well it should which is why I think examples like this are worthy of discussion. Again, the purpose of this channel isn't Public Relations 101. But if this it what it takes to raise the bar and make journalism better, then, then it needs to be done. As I said in my tranparency notes on the first case, I believe the responsibility for such gaffs are shared by both the interviewee and his or her press relations counsel. But not equally. Unfortuantely, Ms. Jeker was not prepared for some of my technical questions nor did she have specific pricing information regarding the product her company was announcing (the reason Emic originally pitched me on the story, and I took the bait). I'm not even sure what to say about not having pricing information. That mistake speaks for itself. But regarding the technical question problem, I believe from my observations of PR people in action is that one of their jobs is to prepare the interview for the type of questions they're going to get from a journalist and figuring that out isn't hard to do. Except for brand new reporters just coming onto the scene, it's not all that difficult to research a journalist's body of work to get an idea (in the case of tech journalism) of how technical the questions might get. So, the following clips are from the raw unedited audio of the interview. It's perhaps another example of Mike Manuel's recurring nightmare (time codes indicated where exactly in the MP3 file you can listen to that part of the conversation. The announcement was about a product for people who run open source-based J2EE application servers. [8:10 Me] When you say restarted, do the transactions restart themselves, or does the user have to physically recognize that the transaction needs to be restarted an take action. [8:25 Answer] That may depend on the exact scenario and maybe for the purposes of this conversation those details might be too fine grained. Is that a fair answer? [9:33 Me] We're describing the type of failure that happens for example when you're on a Web site and you've started an ecommerce transaction. What about with J2ee -- what your announcing today -- with J2ee, a lot of the transactions and workflow take place behind the scenes. When there's a failure there. How does the system respond. How does it get back to the point that a transaction must be restarted? How does it take the same action that let's say an end user might have to take if they're sitting in front of their browser and they realize they have to restart? [10:12 Answer] That question is actually not something I can answer right at this moment. Not because I don't want to but because I'm not a J2EE expert. If you're users would like that answer, I can get that for you and it can be posted at a later date. [16:59 Me:] [just after gettin a rundown on the pricing of previously announced (existing products) I ask about the one being announced] And for J2EE? [17:03 Answer] Basically we have some bundled pricing -- one for the LAMP cluster and one for the LAMJ cluster [DB's note, the latter is the one with J2EE as signified by the "J"] and that pricing I don't have memorized but its a combination of the products and an effective discount applied. [17:39 Answer] [DB's note: at this point in the interview, the interviewee makes a mistake that all potential interviewees and PR people should learn from: comparing apples and oranges in a way that paints the solution in a better light than a competing alternative.] We're providing Oracle RAC like capability at MySQL prices. [18:19 Me] [DB's note: At this point in the interviw, my thinking was, OK, if you want to go there, we can go there and I do.] With [Oracle's] 9iRAC or 10g, my understanding is that they use a shared everything approach ....is your solution the same sort of thing? My understanding is that the engineering that goes into that sort of approach is extraordinary and its sort of unusual to find that. [18:59 Answer] I probably don't want to get into the pros and cons of the different approaches... The dialog speaks for itself. If you're not prepared to back up a claim, then making the claim in the first place probably isn't a good idea. Any decent journalist will grab hold and the outcome will not be good. In this case, here is the resulting coverage from my story: "At the end of the interview, Jeker initiated a comparison of Emic's technology to that of Oracle's and made it seem as though you get the benefits of Oracle's clustering solutions for a fraction of the cost. Ultimately, yes, both solutions deliver a degree of fault tolerance, scalability, and manageability. But the approaches to providing those services and the degree to which the solutions can power massive, mission-critical applications are so different that I can't help but wonder if that's like saying that a Kia offers equal protection to that of a Hummer because both have airbags. While Emic's solutions may very well be worth the investment for what you get (as are many low-to-midrange clustering solutions), just remember you get what you pay for. I'm not sure making the comparison to Oracle is a good idea." Almost finally:  Sometimes, the interviewees get straight A's.  If you're looking for an example of this, check out my audio interview with AMD's vice president of commercial servers and workstations Ben Williams.  This is a shining example of how well-prepared an interviewee can and should be for an interview.   What was the role of William's PR counsel in getting him to that state of preparedness?  I have no idea.   Nor should I, right? Finally, I'm going to make this my last post on the effects of media transaparency from the PR/interviewee angle. This is an experiment for now and I think two real-world observations are enough to conclude that the impact of media transparancy goes well beyond the issue of media credibility. This was a surprise result of the ongoing experiment, but a result nonetheless and when Jay Rosen said I should write about how the experiment is going as it's taking place, it was precisely these sorts of unforseen results that he knew I'd encounter and that need to be noted. 11:23:43 AM    comment [] RadioEdit