Ron Abell’s Complaint

Sometimes you get tagged with a persona you wish to avoid.

Ron Abell no doubt thought revitalizing the fictional James G. Blaine Society — a whimsical group protecting Oregon from Californians — was a good idea at the time. He didn’t invent the movement opposing the degradation of Oregon through the process of Californication, but he did become one of its faces in the 1960s, or so it seemed.

Among other platforms, the group advocated expelling non-native Oregon-born residents, or instituting a $5,000 immigration fee. The movement was named after one of the most famous 19th Century American politicians NEVER to have visited Oregon.

Blaine was a U.S. Representative, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, U.S. Senator from Maine, and two-time Secretary of State. He also was nominated for president in 1884, but was narrowly defeated by Democrat Grover Cleveland. 

In his own obituary, Ron Abell called resurrecting the Blaine Society a mistake, such were the passions, torments and laments of one of the truly entertaining and talented writers in Oregon during the past 50 years.

Ron held many journalistic jobs and accomplished much as a writer. He would probably argue about that. He took exception to many issues. I remember him expressing deep disappointment with President Obama’s performance when I last saw him at a lunch more than a year ago. 

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Focusing to Survive

It says a lot when a fierce competitor tips the hat to another. I am not talking tennis with Federer vs. Nadal. I am thinking about gladiator-type business competitors where the last guy standing is alive and the rest aren’t. New York Times vs. Washington Post-type competitors.

On Sunday, the Times tipped its hat to the Post, acknowledging the iconic DC daily is making the necessary and painful changes to survive in the changing newspaper world. Cutting staff from 1,000 to 640. Closing bureaus in three major markets. Moving online aggressively. Using web metrics to assess success.

Similar efforts are being played out in Portland, Oregon. At The Oregonian, Scott Bernard Nelson, Business Editor, has been a change agent at the paper and closely follows changing business models for newspapers across the county. At KATU-TV, executive producer John Tierney is working to bridge the gaps between broadcast and online news.

In the modern news landscape, changing and remaining profitable is difficult.

Even so, I was surprised to read what Marcus Brauchli, The Washington Post's executive editor, said about change at the Post. “The Washington Post doesn’t need to cover everything,” he said. “But what it does cover, it will cover well. I think the staff of any newsroom today surely understands that we are in a fast-changing industry, facing constant competitive pressure, significant economic challenges and great opportunities to rethink how we cover things.”

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Old Media Wins Election Audience Share

It’s as if someone bellies up to the bar next to you and says, “I’ll have an Old Style.” But this isn’t a request about a favorite beer, but how thirsty news consumers want their election news.

People who closely follow election news prefer to get voting results by “old media,” such as cable television, according to a story reported by National Public Radio. The NPR report was based on a survey of more than 1,500 persons by the Pew Research Center. It showed that more than one-third of Americans are leaning on cable channels for election news — just as many as in past years — while relying less on local television stations, newspapers and the national networks, NPR reported. 

Social media has been much heralded but relatively little used by average voters, according to Andrew Kohut, president, Pew Research Center. “And the new media kids on the block? The media may be fixated on them,” Kohut told NPR, “but the public is not.”

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Creating a Crisis with No Upside

Susan G. Komen for the Cure has built a reputation for enlisting volunteers and corporate partners to combat breast cancer. The charitable organization nicked that reputation this week in a baffling self-created crisis.

Komen announced early in the week it would stop funding breast cancer screenings by Planned Parenthood. At first, Komen said the cut-off resulted because of a new policy not to fund organizations under investigation. Later, top Komen officials said there was a shift in funding strategy. By week's end, after angry outcries from women's groups, doctors and influential senators in Congress, Komen backtracked on its decision.

In one short week, Komen guaranteed itself a place as a case study in communications textbooks of what not to do to avoid creating a crisis.

After Komen made its announcement, critics used social media to denounce the decision as bowing to political pressure by anti-abortion forces, which have conducted a campaign, aided by Congressional Republicans, to dry up public and private funding for Planned Parenthood. 

Planned Parenthood says abortions account for 5 percent of its health care activities, which include screening low-income women for breast and cervical cancer. Women's advocates note Planned Parenthood is often the only place where poor women can obtain any form of preventive health care.

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The Law of the Frontrunner

Campaign managers never believe their guy is getting fair coverage in the news media. And for news consumers, it’s hard to cut through all the noise of campaign coverage to judge who is ahead in garnering positive stories.

That is because election news coverage always seems like a horse race. Who’s ahead? Who’s behind? Campaign media managers need to take note; the perceived frontrunner usually gets more scrutiny and may feel a little uncomfortable under the lights.

Two weeks ago the tone of the Florida presidential primary news coverage was fairly similar, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

“During the week from January 16 through January 22 (the day after the South Carolina primary), the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination also received a similar volume of coverage-and far more than that of any other GOP contenders,” the report said.

That week, Romney’s coverage was judged 35 percent negative and 33 per cent positive. Reporting on Gingrich was viewed as 28 percent negative and 28 percent positive.

This near-parity represents a large increase from the week before (January 9-15) in the amount of attention the media was paying to Gingrich.

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Twitter in a Pinch

Joe Paterno's son dealt with the crush of media inquiries following the death of his legendary father over the weekend by sending a tweet. No media filters. No time delay. Just an efficient, effortless and graceful shout-out to the world.

Twitter has emerged as a go-to tool for the news media and crisis communicators. You can tweet from a smartphone or tablet. It's fast. It's direct. And it demands careful word choices to make your point in 140 characters.

Media outlets and individual reporters use Twitter to alert people to breaking news and provide updates. It might be an earthquake or a presidential debate. You can follow the tweets and know what's going on and what's being said in real time.

The same rapid response is essential in crisis communications. Say there is an accident with environmental impacts. Tweets can demonstrate a business is on top of the situation by communicating valuable, accurate information in real time to employees, neighbors, emergency responders and news reporters. Questions can be posed and answered when concerns are at a peak.

Twitter can work in tandem with other social media platforms such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube to provide more information, images and video. The immediacy of the information can allay fears and focus attention on remaining serious problems. Twitter can also team up with a website to direct viewers to sources of additional, in-depth information.

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Online Activism Comes of Age

Public affairs managers would drool if they could sign up 4.5 million people on a petition and convince a score of U.S. senators to support their cause in a single day. That's what Google did as part of a web-wide blackout this week to protest federal legislation intended to protect the intellectual property rights of motion picture producers, but which critics see as an assault on Internet freedom.

There were also 2.4 million tweets protesting the Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) and Protect IP (PIPA) legislation. More than 162 million people visited the totally blacked out Wikipedia English-language pages, with 8 million of those using its search tool to find out how to contact their congressional representatives.

As a result, the preliminary vote on PIPA has been postponed as Senate sponsors say they needed to go back to the drawing board. House Speaker John Boehner slowed down committee consideration of SOPA, citing a "lack of consensus."

Not a bad day's work for a form of media many public affairs professionals and lobbyists ignore or disdain.

The New York Times called this effusion of online activism "a political coming-of-age" for digital media.

Chris Dodd — a former U.S. senator, now head of the Motion Pictures Association of America and a chief proponent of both SOPA and PIPA — called it an "abuse of power" by Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla, BoingBoing and others. In his statement, Dodd said, "It's a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways of information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users…to further their corporate interests." So how is this different than movie theaters airing commercials about the pitfalls of piracy?

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Clicks of Consequence

We’re all overwhelmed by too much information in the new digital age. The cure for too much information is dieting, developing the discipline to restrict what we consume on a daily basis.

That’s the subject of a new book entitled The Information Diet, written by Clay Johnson, the founder of Blue State Digital. They are the folks behind the online strategy for the 2008 Obama campaign. Scott Simon of NPR interviewed Johnson last Saturday. (Click to listen.)

Johnson makes the case for more "conscious consumption" of news and information.

In playing out the diet theme, Jonson compares information overload to overeating. Johnson tells Simon: "Our bodies are wired to love salt, fat and sugar. ... Our minds are really wired to be affirmed and be told that we're right. ... Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they're right? Who wants to be informed when they can be affirmed? What we do is we tell our media that that's what we want to hear, and our media responds to that by telling us what it is that we want, and sometimes that isn't what's best for us."

Johnson recalls his experience working on Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

"I noticed that because of our media diet, we were consuming everything that was great about Howard Dean. Even after that scream incident in Iowa, we still thought we could win and that we would make it, and we went on to New Hampshire and South Carolina thinking that victory was just around the corner. That was when I began to see that we can get a little delusional in the world of politics.”

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A Close Look at the Role of Local Non-English Media

The Northwest is home to only a few non-English-language newspapers. National media studies say ethnically centered publications are growing in importance. For instance, Spanish-language media in Oregon and Washington deliver key audiences to advertisers.

What do we know in general about non-English media?

A recent study of a Toronto, Ontario-based foreign language publication analyzes the news content and role in the community of one major newspaper, Ming Pao, Toronto’s second-largest Chinese newspaper. The study was released just before Thanksgiving in 2011 by Ryerson University’s School of Journalism.

The study’s authors were curious what role the newspaper had in introducing readers to life in Toronto, a culturally diverse urban center. They examined the amount of local news coverage in Ming Pao, which is published seven days a week and has a daily readership of more than 50,000. Study findings show that:

• The amount of local reporting is dwarfed by news from China; and

• Ming Pao tends to be dominated by local crime news.

"…It [crime news] squeezes out other stories — about local politics, for instance — that are important in terms of informing people so they understand how the local political system works, why they should care and how they can become involved,” said Professor April Lindgren in an article posted on the university’s website.

“Media has a big role to play in creating a sense of place for readers – how people feel about a place, how they understand it and what goes on there,” said Lindgren. “When people come to Canada they have a sense of what their home country is like but they don’t really know what they are getting into in their adopted city.”   

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Talking Through Both Barrels

University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen Bloom has discovered that people shoot back when you talk through both barrels.

Bloom, a native of New Jersey, penned an article for Atlantic magazine that questioned why Iowans get first shot at nominating presidents. He said Iowans aren't representative of the entire nation after surrendering to non-union meatpacking plants, rampant gambling, out-of-control pollution and widespread meth use. It wasn't a flattering portrait.

Not surprisingly, many Iowans — including Bloom's boss, the president of the University of Iowa — took issue with his characterization. Rebuttals called Bloom's account snide and not factual. There have also been ethnic slurs and death threats.

Appearing on NPR, Bloom didn't express any surprise at the reaction to his article. Good thing. Don't turn on the oven unless you can stand the heat in the kitchen.

Bloom's analysis of Iowa comes across as one-sided and dismissive. "Iowa is a throwback to yesteryear and, at the same time, a cautionary tale of what lies around the corner," he wrote. If his goal was to ignite a firestorm, he succeeded. But if his objective was to spark a collective reflection by Iowans, he failed.

Managing a public issue requires the skill of a surgeon, not a butcher. Challenging viewpoints, especially of people who may be comfortable in their self-perceptions, isn't easy. Alienating your target audience doesn't help.

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