American "Pay for Play" in Iraqi Press
I was trying to get some work done, and what arrives in my in-box but a link to this story in the "LA Times" about how US military is "secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops." It made me cringe, and after I recovered, I had to write.
If true, there are some gross ethical issues with this:
1. Paying for articles (this is called usually called ADVERTISING) and should be clearly marked as such. Clearly, the Iraqi read more...
A Rose by Any Other Name Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had an “epiphany” over the weekend. He thinks the enemy in Iraq shouldn’t be called “insurgents.” Read the article here. “This is a group of people who don’t merit the word ‘insurgency,’ I think,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference today. The Wikipedia defines an insurgency as: “…An organized rebellion that engages in deliberate actions to cause the downfall of a governmental authority, through destruction and armed actions… primarily focuses on armed activities of irregular forces read more...
Public Relations as Ombudsman, A Bold Idea
Most PR departments have several staff that tasked with communicating with various stakeholders: media, customers, employees, investors, etc. At Naked Conversations over the weekend, Shel blogged about what PR must do to recast the press release in light of blogging. Mike D., who is starting a cool new media aggregation product called Newsvine suggested that PR “act as a sort of ombudsman (wikipedia def.) to any issues customers might bring to the read more...
Getting the Word Out in a Disaster But is the message getting through and reaching its mark? As part of his "Bring New Orleans Back" initiative, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin held a town hall meeting in Houston yesterday in a bid to get residents to return to the flooded city. He plans another meeting in Memphis later this week. The meeting only drew about 500 people out of the 150,000 currently living in Houston, showing that Nagin has a unique challenge – effectively communicating to millions of people spread out over more than a dozen states. Nagin has read more...
Little Things Mean Alot Miners used keep a sparrow with them as they worked deep in the mines. If the sparrow died, they would evacate immediately. The sparrow's death was always a harbinger of worse things to come, usually death by from carbon monoxide poisoning. I am sure that Netherlands-based TV network Endemol wished that they hadn't ever heard of a certain house sparrow. It seems that they were putting up some 4 million dominoes in order to break a Guiness record and a common house sparrow got into the hall and knocked down some 23,000 of them. Pest control was called and the house sparrow was shot dead. You can read about it read more...