Thumbs Down: Marek Fuchs of TheStreet.com for giving a presentation last week at the University of North Carolina for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ fall conference in which he basically said public relations people are controlling the coverage of business, and comparing the financial media to the sports media. (Read more…)
A few weeks ago, I pointed out how customer service problems at Comcast had resulted in the company being on the receiving end of some very negative press attention. To my surprise, the cable giant was actually able to defuse some bad press this week. (Read more…)
Like millions of other Americans I tuned into the series finale of “The Sopranos” on Sunday night. It was not a huge deal for me because I’ve only seen the past two seasons of the show, something that would have never occurred without video-on-demand or a digital video recorder. Still, I was intrigued to see what happened and knew that if I ignored the show I would be left out of the water cooler conversation on Monday. (Read more…)
Time is a funny thing.
Five years ago this week, I embargoed a story to The Wall Street Journal about the merger of my website, DotcomScoop.com, “a wireless news group and Web site devoted to news and gossip about Internet companies,” and NetSlaves, “a six-person shop that focuses on discussions and feature stories about the perils of employment at Web companies,” according to the article. (Read more…)
Did you hear the news? Friday is Public Relations Appreciation Day — in Tucson, Arizona.
Mayor Bob Walkup made the declaration earlier this week to help celebrate a conference being held in The Old Pueblo by The Public Relations Society of America’s Western District. (Read more…)
Twenty teachers in Hoboken, New Jersey could be out of jobs if the city’s Board of Education doesn’t find a way to pay their salaries out of a $56.3 million annual budget. At least one of those teachers could be spared the unemployment line if the Board wised up, took the $75,000 allocated for public relations spending and put it back into the general budget. (Read more…)
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan dominated the headlines for a brief window last week and racked up book sales.
On its release, McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” promptly rocketed to #1 on Amazon.com’s Bestsellers list. The first advance press for the book didn’t hit until the previous evening, when Politico leaked details of the tome. (Read more…)
It was a foregone conclusion that Willie Randolph would be fired from him job as manager of The New York Mets. However, the manner in which the team handled the firing proved once again that organizations that operate out of the business mainstream are kidding themselves if they think their poor decisions don’t have ramifications. (Read more…)
Everywhere I looked on Monday, there was Cuil.
Pronounced “cool,” the search provider made its public debut this week and got enough ink to make an octopus jealous. I read stories about Cuil in/on The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Forbes, a blog on The Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch.com and CNET News.com, among others. Most of the initial press concentrated on Cuil’s claim that it indexes more pages than other search engines and that its founders, a wife-and-husband team, are former employees of Google, the clear current leader in the search space. (Read more…)
The 2008 Summer Olympic Games kick off on Friday in China and most Americans I’ve spoken to couldn’t care less. Even those who I know love the Olympics say they’ll probably watch less coverage this year because of the time difference and their increasingly stressful lives. (Read more…)
