The Sam Whitmore Sampler

PR Week's Blogging Competition

Hats off to PR Week for an ambitious competition; it has pitted 32 PR blogs against one another, asking readers to vote whether PR Blog A is better than PR Blog B. PR Week arranged it as a single-elimination tournament like the NCAA Final Four. The field started at 32; now it's down to 16. Next week it'll be down to eight and so forth until there's only one left. I'm curious which will win, and what the honor will bring.

I'm a bit unclear as to how the brackets were arranged and by which criteria the blog pairs should be judged. For example, Renee Blodgett's Down the Avenue already has defeated Bite PR's Bitemarks. I enjoy reading both blogs -- for very different reasons. Renee's is intensely personal and Bite's is industry-minded. Renee's blog has only one author; Bite's has many. Shouldn't voice be judged in an apples-to-apples way? Should it be judged at all?

I also prefer blogs whose content is predominantly original. Too many blogs piggyback on the hot story of the day/hour/moment. Yeah, I know links are important and one needs to join the conversation and all that. I suppose I'm a hypocrite for even mentioning the PR Week contest since many other bloggers have, too. Anyway, for what it's worth, here's my $.02: blogs that offer original thinking are, on the face of it, more valuable than one that wonders aloud whether Facebook can make money.

What's your opinion?

We Have a Winner

Congrats to Neila Matheny of Engage PR for winning the second in a series of SWMS contests. We hold them in our Facebook group, open to all SWMS news & research subscribers.

Neila successfully answered the following five questions, and won a ticket to see the UC Bears play Colorado State in late September. Christy and I will accompany Neila, along with a prominent Bay Area tech editor.

Wanna take a crack at the questions just for fun? Leave your answers in a comment.

To which western U.S. state did Mike Arrington's parents retire?

In which New England state did Jim Louderback attend college?

Which tech PR agency did Natali Del Conte once work for?

In the San Francisco radio market, on which AM frequency did the late, great CNET Radio transmit?

Name any of the three U.S. states that Sam Whitmore has not yet visited (you can make three guesses).

Remember Me?

I quit this blog a while back because I saw things moving to Facebook and Twitter, and now, FriendFeed, Identi.ca and God knows what else. Also, I was discouraged by the lack of comments... I felt like a proselytizer, posting into such a vacuum.

Just for grins I went to Feedburner this morning to see how few people remained subscribed to this blog feed. Incredibly, this blog has more RSS subscribers now -- 145 -- than it ever had when I was posting every day. I'm not sure I believe this figure. Do you believe Feedburner figures?

Anyway, I think I'll start posting here again, at least for a few weeks, and see what happens. Blogs seem to be seen as passe these days. Though not everyone thinks so. Fred Wilson doesn't.

Do me a favor? Check in and say hi, OK? Let me know who you are.

The Digital Future... is Comin' On, It's Comin' On...

A little homage to Gorillaz in the headline there...

Anyway, Christy did some web research yesterday and came up with an assortment of noteworthy links:

* NBC News and the New York Film Academy are collaborating to turn out "digital journalist" graduates who understand how to gather news with all the toys in their knapsack. Smart of the behemoth to outsource the development of their craft to people who understand the medium but not the messages.

* A USC professor whose students seek work in "digital media" built a tag cloud derived from job postings at JournalismJobs.com. Notice how small the word "multimedia" is, compared with "Flash" or "blog".

* Video clearinghouses such as Newscom are now offering TV-quality broadcast video for download, as well as the web-quality stuff. Reuters is the first supplier -- the first of many, no doubt.

"Stalker Research"

We were speaking with a subscriber of ours recently, discussing how PR folks can get an edge with busy reporters. "We do the usual stalker research," she said, referring to Bacon's profiles, Google, whether the reporters have their own blog, etc.

I got a kick out of the "stalking" part. Reporters have no idea just how much their work is scrutinized by PR people. In my experience, PR people never let on how much they know about you. They don't want you to know how important you are to them, lest you play hard to get -- or harder to get, as the case may be.

Clear Channel Goes Private

Well, it finally happened. Clear Channel went private. Take a good look at the company's latest 10-Q -- you may never see such detail again. Its most recent 10-K is even meatier.

Tech in Ubiquity

An SWMS subscriber recently advised us that the National Journal Group's Technology Daily will fold, effective at the end of January.

According to an e-mail that appears to come from the National Journal Group President Suzanne C. Clark, "we will be expanding our technology coverage across our publications in 2008, in recognition that technology issues infuse nearly every area we cover: health care, energy and the environment, national security, education, and even campaigns and elections."

While there might be some corporate derriere-covering spin in there, it's true that tech is everywhere: in cars, in the walls, in our bodies, in space... the future is dim for editorial that tracks "tech," broadly defined.

FCC and Media Ownership

On Dec. 18 the FCC allowed newspaper publishers serving America's 20 largest cities to also own TV stations in those cities -- as long as at least eight other TV stations also compete in that market.

Here's what Republican FCC chair Kevin J. Martin had to say. He spent more time criticizing his fellow FCC members than explaining the new law.

Here's what Democratic FCC member Michael J. Copps had to say. Copps cited George Orwell in his first sentence.

Saul Hansell

Saul Hansell is the guy who runs Bits, the New York Times tech blog. SWMS researched Bits this week and found that Hansell carries this blog around on his back, writing the majority of the posts, while ten other NYT reporters -- who also are supposed to be contributing -- do next to nothing. Yes, Saul is Bits "editor" so he should have a strong presence. But what are his colleagues doing that's so precious as to leave no time to help him?

Something we left unmentioned in SWMS was the nature of the comments on Bits. Eighty-nine people commented on Hansell's post on how PayPal pushed him around when he tried charging his kid's school lunches on MasterCard. Brad Stone drew 100 comments on Comcast's bullshit denials about the obvious torpedoing of BitTorrent.

Many in the tech media business love to focus on products, technologies and vendors. But as the industry's focus moves to social media, the biggest edit opportunity will lie in defending the consumer at the hands of brutish corporations. Imagine if Consumer Reports wrote only about tech and had a web presence equivalent to Facebook. Someday someone's going to build a business like this, and the world will be a better place for it.

Media Bullseye

Media Bullseye is a newly launched destination for media industry folks like me, and maybe you. Media Bullseye is the creation of Chip Griffin, the guy who runs the CustomScoop news alert service. Here's Chip's blog. Check out Media Bullseye's five-column newspaper layout -- how retro! I suspect Media Bullseye is a content play meant to drive CustomScoop trial subs. In any case, there's some good reading in there -- enjoy.