As a professional blogger I am inundated with press releases every day.  Every morning when I wake up, my inbox is overflowing with them, and I have come to realize after looking at thousands of them that hardly any one knows how to write an effective one.  So, I am going to offer a couple helpful hints that will keep your release from going directly to the trash folder.

Don’t Lead With A Story

As I don’t want to embarrass any company by name, let me just say, if your first two paragraphs are a set-up of some type of situation that needs a solution, I’ve stopped reading.  It’s fine to give examples of possible use scenarios for your product, but do it towards the bottom so I can choose whether or not to read it.  You aren’t writing the great American novel, you don’t need to lure the reader in, just tell me what the name of the product is, what it does and who is manufacturing it.

An example of a bad intro would be:

Coming home to a cold house is never a desirable experience.  You’ve already trudged your way through the snow and wind to make it home from work, and you want to be greeted by the warm embrace of your home …

I’ve already deleted you.

An example of a good intro would be:

The new Nitro Furnace 4400 by Warm Homes, Inc. will make sure that your home stays toasty warm on even the coldest winter nights due to its combination of Progressive Fuel Technology and Turbo Burn Modulation that runs through the Flux Capacitor …

Thank you.  I know what the release is about, I know who its from and I have a basic idea of why it’s different.

Don’t Be Flowery

I have no time to dig for gold (also known as facts) in the dirt (also known as your desire to use a metric ton of adjectives).

An example of bad way to convey the specifications of your product:

The robust Deluxe-In-Your-Face CMOS sensor will give the photographer the advantage of being able to shoot luxurious panoramic shots in a full-HD of 14.1 megapixels.  With photos of this size, space could be a concern, but thanks to the generous storage capacity of the dual slot SD card system, you have the pleasure of being able to store up to 32 GBs of photos via two 16 GB memory cards.

An example of a good way to convey the specifications of your product:

• Deluxe-In-Your-Face CMOS sensor
• Full-HD at up to 14.1 megapixels
• Dual SD card slots, up to 16 GBs per slot

I’m not kidding, bullet point the information or I may lose interest in writing it up even if I made it past the intro.  I don’t have time to dig for the goods.  You can, however, be flowery if you at least have the information sorted out in an easy to reference manner.

Give Me Facts

If you are releasing more than one product, don’t give me “prices range from $X to $X”.  I’m not playing a guessing game here, people.  ”Model X will cost $X, Model Y will cost $X and Model Z will cost $X.”  Is that so hard?  Sure I could figure out Models X and Z, but you want me to guess at Model Y?  No, I don’t think so.

And the thing that happened today that prompted me to write this post … where will it be sold?  You’re a brand new product, with no track record, so I can’t guess.  I could say “various stores”, but then I will get asked 500 questions from readers if this means online, brick and mortar stores, home shopping channels … I’m not going to promote your product if you can’t tell me, and by proxy my readers, where in the world they can buy it.

Make Your Quotes Sound Like More Than Another Ad

In general I don’t like using press release quotes, but will do so from time to time.

An example of a bad quote in a press release:

“We here at Furnace Express couldn’t be more excited about the Nitro Furnace 4400.  After 73 years in business, the Nitro Furnace is the culmination of our vast experience and forward thinking that will carry us on to another 73 years,” said Alan Cheesehead, president of Furnace Express.

I would never use this quote … ever.

An example of a good quote in a press release:

“I really feel that the Nitro Furnace 4400 is something my grandfather would be proud of.  The Cheesehead family has worked for over three generations with a goal of making the best furnace we could, and I feel we’re now one step closer,” said Alan Cheesehead, president of Furnace Express.

Why would I use this quote?  It’s more personal, it cut down the number of mentions of the product name and company name.  It sounds more natural, and more along the lines of how someone actually talks.

Ask Yourself Questions

When you’ve finished your press release, re-read it.  Does it answer the five W’s of journalism?  ”What, Where, When, Who and How”?  What is it … where will it be … when will it be there … who made it/who needs it … and how will this impact the market?

This isn’t rocket science, folks … it’s a press release.

No, this isn’t the first time I’ve run this post. Why did I choose to republish it? Because so many people out there need to read it. And after some of the press releases I read today, I know a few people it should be sent to directly.

Lets just get this out of the way, yes, Superman renounces his U.S. citizenship in Action Comics #900. It has been all over the media for the past several days, but it sure would be nice if it wasn’t quite so obvious that the majority of those writing this up as news had so obviously not read the story.

Since this past week’s comic books hit shops, the media has been running the below panel over and over with no surrounding context.  They have written about how this is indicative of the left infiltrating the media, how it is another example of trying to advance the United Nations agenda and on and on and on.

Unlike other blogs about this one panel, lets actually tell you what happens in the story.  Superman is summoned to Camp David and speaks with the presidents National Security Advisor who wants to know what Superman was thinking.  Superman quickly notes the snipers in the woods with Kryptonite bullets in their guns and is less than pleased that they think he might cause trouble to the point that such a measure is needed.

Despite the threat from the woods, Superman tells the story of how he  headed to a protest in Iran and hovered in Azadi Square for 24 hours, not speaking, not doing anything, just hovering.  Some people throw things at him, others throw things at his feet in a sign of respect.  At the end of the 24 hours he leaves as silently as he arrived.  The ranks of the protesters had grwon from 120,000 to 1,000,000 while he was there, but he still felt it did no good as Iran’s president made no moves to change anything.  At that point the damage is done and international incident has begun because Iran believes he came there at the behest of the United States President.

The national Security Advisor asks if it was a wise move, and Superman says it wasn’t but that he now sees … cue the above panel.  He goes on to say the world is too small, too connected now.  ”I’m an alien, Mr. Wright.  Born on another world.  I can’t help but see the bigger picture.  I’ve been thinking too small.  I realize that now.”  As he leaves he tells Wright about seeing a policeman in Iran point a rifle at a protester and how the citizen reacted by handing him a flower, and how that was incredibly brave.

It’s a short story clocking in at a mere nine pages.  It’s written by David S. Goyer who has written such movies as Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, so it’s written by someone who knows the type of story to create. There is no guarantee that this decision will have any lasting impact on the character, and may just be a one-shot, “what if …” type of tale, we’ll have to see.

Beyond the obvious fact that next to no one that wrote this event up actually read the story, I was shocked by at least one author thinking it was appropriate to take a shot at the intellect of the readers. Cal Thomas at Fox News said, “Construed? Would comic book readers have heard of such a word?” Yes sir, we have heard of “construed”, have you heard of “incompetent reporting”?  Since you failed to contextualize the statement Superman made, I’m guessing you’re quite familiar with it.

Want another example of how people writing about this story had no clue what they were talking about?  I give you Hollie McKay, also of Fox News:

… he says in a cell in the issue.

Cell … okay, first off, could you have possibly meant “cel”, as in an animation cel?  Or, you could have, I don’t know, called it a “panel” as the boxes on a comic book page are called that.  Yes, according to Dictionary.com, cell can be defined as “any of various small compartments or bounded areas forming part of a whole,” however, there is a term in the industry for it, you could have at least taken a moment to look it up.

BoingBoing may have been the worst for putting this story into context as they only posted the one panel and, “Superman announced today in Action Comics #900 that he is renouncing his US citizenship.” There was a hyperlink to the ComicAlliance story on the event, but really, you post just the one panel?  Nah, that’s not just going to inflame some people.

Context, folks.  Context.

What really gets me is how everyone seems to be hung up on his mentioning he was going to the United Nations to renounce his citizenship.  Posts and comments alike were talking about how he would now be a “U.N. Stooge.”  Call me crazy if you must, but if you were a hero recognized as an American and you wanted to tell all of the countries of the world at once that your actions should never be “construed” as the policy of said country, wouldn’t that be the most convenient place to do so?  Yes, I realize a lot of people have a mistrust of the U.N., and that’s all fine and well, but again, you want to get the most bang for your buck in a situation such as this, that is where you go.  Superman never said, “I’m going to now take orders from the General Assembly of the United Nations.”

What saddened me even more than the poor journalism was a lot of the comments I saw flying.  The stereotype of comic book readers as maladjusted loners who live in dank basements still seems to be alive and well.

• Grown men and women don’t need “graphic novels”. If “we” stop reading them, they go away, as I said, because kids generally don’t read them at all any longer. Grow up men, stop acting like teens, let this monstrosity die a nice natural death. – The Blaze
• You must waste a lot your time in your mothers basement reading them … - The Blaze
• I think you are probably a little too old for this and should get out of your mother’s basement once in a while. – Fox News

Oh yes, the good old “basement” insult.  Pepper it with some maturity comments and you’ve got a classic.  Sure you don’t want to throw in some pimple and weight barbs while you’re at it?

I think what surprised me the most about this whole thing is … when did Superman gain U.S. citizenship? Yes, his alter ego of Clark Kent has it, but when did “Superman” receive it?  He is an alien that crash landed in Kansas, the persona of Superman is by definition an illegal alien … literally.  The world inside the comics knows he is from Krypton, I am not aware that Superman has ever taken the citizenship test.  Perhaps I missed the thrill packed issue “Superman Takes His Citizenship Test”, and it’s just panel after panel of him waiting for his number to be called.

Lastly, I have to wonder why this was even a story.  Isn’t there enough going on in the world that the actions of a comic book character shouldn’t even register on our radars at this point?  You know, I heard a rumor recently that Shaggy and Scooby may have actually been high all these years, anyone want to run a story on that?

Earthquakes, floods, unsafe nuclear reactors, massive tornado outbreaks and a host of other issues, and the media spends this week focused on a fictional character renouncing citizenship he never had and two people getting married in another country.

I love the media.

As someone who works as a professional blogger, I hear endlessly about how print media is blaming all of its woes on “new media.”  Well, I’ve got a news flash for you, if you just stop whining and work at it, you can save yourselves.

Earlier this week, Peter Kafka at Media Memo reported that magazine publisher Condé Nast sold 6,614 copies of the Dec. issue of GQ via iTunes, and some 12,000 copies of the Jan. issue.  At $2.99 each, that comes out to $55655.86, minus the 30 percent Apple keeps from app sales means they grossed $389595.10.  Of course this doesn’t count in conversion from print, paying writers and so on, but it does show that an experiment can work, and there is money to be made on the iPod Touch and iPhone for print media.

Of course it isn’t just Apple products where print media is pulling itself up by the proverbial boot straps.  I recently interviewed Paul Greenberg, Executive Vice President & General Manager of TVGuide.com, for TechnoBuffalo.  You would think of all the publications from the old days of ‘print as king’ that should have died off, TV Guide should be fairly high on that list due to the nature of on-screen guides from your cable company and satellite providers.  Instead the company is thriving in the digital age with a Web site that is drawing in users in droves.  Here are just some of its statistics:

• Four years ago the site averaged four million unique visitors a month, it is now at 21 million a month with 45 percent year-over-year growth
• Each user averages a session time of 18 minutes, 36 page views per visit and five visits per month
• 50 percent are under the age of 35 (25 percent four years ago), and 29 percent have an annual household income of over $100K
• iPhone app has over 400K installs

If you aren’t familiar with Web statistics, 18 minute user sessions is a huge number.  Most sites are happy in the single digits, but TVGuide.com is not just pulling them in through search engine optimization, they are keeping them there once they arrive.  This is a huge selling point for advertisers that want to by ad inventory on the site.

So here you have two stalwarts of the old guard print media that have quietly been working on ways to keep up with technology, and making it work for them.  On the flip side you have Rupert Murdoch of News Corp whining and moaning incessantly about the evils of new media.  His solution to all of this is to pull his company’s content from the Web as much as possible.  He is trying to get other publishers to agree with him to cut off Google from being able to index their stories because they feel they are nothing more than thieves.  In addition to casting out these scoundrels, they also want to begin charging for their content.

Of course what they don’t understand is that by cutting off indexing of their sites, it won’t matter if they charge for their stories, no one will be able to find them.

Just as the music industry has tried to blame all of its woes on piracy, the majority of print media is trying to find a scapegoat for their own short comings.  At the FTC’s How Will Journalism Survive The Internet Age? conference back in Dec., Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post spent the majority of her 25 minute speaking session attacking these ideas according to paidContent.

Apparently, some in the old media have decided that it is, in fact, an either/or game and that the best way to save, if not journalism, at least themselves, is by pointing fingers and calling names.  In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back.

And that brings us back to the start.  There are at least two companies that have stopped their finger pointing (not that they ever did any actual finger pointing to the best of my knowledge) and done things to get their customers back.  One has gone a paid route, the other has remained free, so it is evidence that both methods do work, but it is still evidence that print media can survive in the digital age as opposed to hunting it down like Frankenstein’s monster, torches in hand.

One of the things Mr. Greenberg from TVGuide.com said to me repeatedly, and it really stuck with me, was that the site was successful because it was “immersive.”  When you visit their site, the wealth of information you find relating to any television property is impressive by any measure.  He also said one of the keys to the TV networks surviving the onslaught of online media was that “they have to evolve quickly.”  Well, yes, they do, and so do their print counterparts.

It is a law of nature that if a species doesn’t evolve to new surroundings, it dies off.  Print media has to evolve, and it has to do it as soon as possible.  If they are busy using their fingers to point to the evil new media as opposed to typing out code on keyboards, guess what’s going to happen to them.

I am not sure I have ever been as insulted as I was  last night.

At 5:48 p.m. last night I received the following e-mail:  (emphasis theirs)

Hi Sean, I am with [redacted site name].  I have a question regarding your [redacted article link] article.  I’m sure you get requests for this all the time, but we would love to be considered for placement in the article as we are a community of independent artists and offer many mp3 downloads, free and legal.  I believe we are an excellent resourse and are a very relevant site to the article.  I know, since the article was already completed a while back, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go back and change something, so we would love to compensate you for your troubles.  And to make sure you know our site is legit, by all means, check it our for yourself.  Here is our main [redacted link] page, which is sub-categorized by genre.  Please let me know if this might be possible.  Thank you for your consideration.

Yes folks, someone offered me a bribe to get placement in a list I did about 18 months ago.

I replied with:

For future reference, no legitimate journalist would ever accept compensation for such an act.  You need to learn how to approach writers before you do yourself any more damage.

Believe me, I had more to say, and most of it wouldn’t have been re-printable if I hadn’t edited myself.

The idea that I would ever accept ‘compensation’ from a third-party for inclusion into a piece of my work disgusts me to my very core.  As I have said many times before, I never attended any form of journalism school, but I think just about any one with half a brain cell knows that you do not make an offer such as this.  And hopefully every journalist would know not to accept it.

I have no delusions about being a serious journalist, but I at least attempt to be an ethical one.  This is part of the reason the whole FTC disclosure guidelines thing annoyed me so much as I am already ethical without being threatened into it.

All that being said, I cannot believe someone would actually attempt this.  Who in their right mind just out and out offers what amounts to a bribe to a journalist?  Perhaps they are new, hence why I have opted to conceal their name and site address, but you would think common sense might kick in and say, “Hey, maybe this isn’t a good idea.”  Whatever the case may be, offering ‘compensation’ to a journalist of any type is reprehensible.

Some have said tech journalists being given gadgets to review is a form of bribe, and to those people I would ask, “How do you expect us to review the product if we have never seen or used it?”  Do you want us to write reviews strictly from the biased press releases and professionally shot photography?  Isn’t a move reviewer getting to see a movie early and free the same?  ”Well, I watched the trailer and this movie looks amazing, go see it.”

However, I digress, don’t try bribing me, it won’t end well for you.

And, just a note to anyone else who ever ponders doing this: If you try to bribe me to be added to an article, I will publish your name and mock you publicly.  This serves as the one and only warning anyone will ever receive on this matter.

Why is it writers have become obsessed with the word “killer”?

“Such-and-such gadget is a this-and-that gadget killer.”

This is a refrain I have seen endlessly since I joined the tech blogging world back in July of 2007, and it is getting tiresome.  David Coursey over at PC World is just the latest offender with his piece entitled “B&N’s Nook Is A Kindle Killer: 5 Reasons Why“.

Mr. Coursey isn’t to blame, it has become an accepted trend, but that doesn’t mean it is one that should continue.  It has actually become a joke amongst professional bloggers that every new gadget or app released is either a “killer”, somehow “pwns” an existing tool and so on.  Whatever happened to words like “supplant”?  ”Replaces”?  ”Threatens”?  How about a headline along the lines of “B&N’s Nook Threatens Kindle’s E-Reader Dominance: 5 Reasons Why”.

Guess the word “killer” just sounds more serious, but whatever.

As for the nook, will it overtake the Kindle?  Well … it could.  This isn’t too big of a surprise as the Kindle was the first big name in the space, and it had become synonymous with e-readers, so that is always hard to knock out of that top spot.  (Think how “Googling” has replaced the word “searching” and you get the idea)

The nook has several legs up on the Kindle in the way of Wi-Fi, access to over 500,000 free e-books from Google, a color browser for shopping and so on.

One of the interesting aspects to me is the LendMe feature which allows one B&N users (be it on th nook, iPhone, computer, phone etc) can lend a book to another account holder on any device for 14 days free of charge.  While I’m not sure this is a feature I would ever actually use, it is a small way of capturing the experience of reading actual books.

You can read more details on the Barnes & Noble nook on StarterTech, but I have to say I was never tempted to buy a Kindle, but I am very, very tempted by the nook.  I like the look of the device, I like the advances in the user friendliness of the device (replaceable battery!), access to free books and so on.  Will I buy one for sure?  I’m still not sure, but I’m giving it some serious thought.

However, you will never hear me refer to it as “a Kindle killer” …

Day 3 of “The Blogopshere vs. the FTC” brings us the full set of guidelines, and wow are they head spinning.

I really don’t want to blog daily on this whole Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guideline debacle, but it just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

First off, I finally got a link to the full 81-page document (PDF link) from Steven Hodson, and although I have only read through 51 pages thus far, this is going to be mandatory reading for every independent blogger if you want to make sure to keep yourself from getting in trouble with the FTC.  That being said, be prepared for the extreme ambiguity of the document on many fronts.

So far I have still yet to find anywhere that describes in detail how disclosures are supposed to be written.  It mentions numerous times that you must disclose if you receive a product for free and then give it a positive review (there is some implication that disclosure is not required on negative reviews), but nowhere does it say how are exactly where it is to be placed.

The document also discusses new rules for celebrity endorsements and how they are supposed to disclose their relationship with anything they speak positively of.  The problem with this is that at no time do they define what a celebrity is.  On tonight’s episode of CobWEBs, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and I discussed this, and technically you could call iJustine a celebrity, but that is only to a handful of people on the Internet.  Heck, there was even a time when I was working for Wizard magazine that I was being asked for my autograph on a regular basis, would that have qualified me as a celebrity?  I was a celebrity to those people, but not to the other 99.999999999% of the population of the country, but would I have qualified for the FTC celebrity rules?  Who knows, their answers are so vague.

Then to muddy the waters even further, Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC (and someone Rizzn has been trying to get an interview with for 3 months with no luck) spoke with FastCompany, and made some of the most mind boggling statements ever.

Heather B. Armstrong, author of parenting blog Dooce: “Eleven thousand dollars is a little crazy for a post. Maybe I’m being naïve, but I think a lot of people who are in violation [of not disclosing] just don’t know that they’re supposed to.”

Richard Cleland: “That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law…

Excuse me?  When did the FTC start writing laws?  They are a regulatory body, they are not capable of making “laws”.  Perhaps he was misquoted, but if the FTC really sees this as “law”, we’re in bigger trouble than any of us first thought.

Brian Lam, editorial director of Gizmodo: “Some colleagues of mine just reminded me of how many freelance pro journalists take junkets. In the end, I’m glad these rules are being introduced, but it’s kind of stupid to attach unethical behavior to a particular publishing medium. Look at how shitty TV journalism can be, by and large.”

RC: “It’s not the medium, it’s the message. We want to establish a self-imposed ethical standard so people are aware of the conflicts of interest…

“We want to establish a self-imposed…” um … which part of this sentence makes any sense?  How does person #2 establish SELF-IMPOSED anything on person #1?

This is what we are dealing with folks: vagueness, ambiguity and a regulatory body that seems to have no clue what its actual job is.  If you aren’t scared yet, you aren’t thinking.

Sorry folks, but this Federal Trade Commission dust up is going to be front and center at this blog for some time to come.

In all of the hoopla yesterday, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, Steven Hodson and myself ran into many instances of being questioned over our vehement hatred of the new guidelines, and also more examples of just how messed up this whole thing is.

“Print media is already under these rules.”

No, they aren’t.

This was the most tired argument I have seen, and it simply isn’t true.  If this was true, I want you to point out to me where movie reviewers disclose that they got into a movie for free or got sent a DVD copy of the movie for free.  We all know it happens, but have you ever seen them disclose it?  Same goes for book, movie and DVD reviews.

Now, under these new FTC rules, if I decide to review anything, and if it was sent to me for free, then I have to write a disclosure every single time I do it.  Tell me how these are the same rules traditional media has been under.

“Facebook and Twitter fall under these rules also.”

Yep, all that fun you have on social media sites?  Well, prepare yourself to always disclose your relationship for any product you speak positively of.

Caroline McCarthy of CNET spoke with a Richard Cleland, associate director for the FTC’s advertising division, and here is the scenario he set up to explain the Facebook scenario:

Here’s a sample scenario: a celebrity or other prominent figure with loads of friends on Facebook receives free hotel says [sic] from Hotel Chain X in exchange for running Hotel Chain X ads on his or her blog. If that person then signs up as a Facebook fan of Hotel Chain X–which, remember, could mean that the person’s name can show up for his or her Facebook friends alongside Hotel Chain X display ads on the social network–he or she could be held liable by the FTC.

“It would be the same thing if you were going to pay the celebrity a thousand dollars to go register as a fan,” Cleland said. “In that case, there wouldn’t be any question about it.”

And as for new media darling Twitter?

As for Twitter, the FTC isn’t letting you get a pass with the excuse that 140 characters–Twitter’s famous text limit–is simply too short. “There are ways to abbreviate a disclosure that fit within 140 characters,” Cleland said. “You may have to say a little bit of something else, but if you can’t make the disclosure, you can’t make the ad.”

So, think you will be exempt from this if you aren’t a blogger.  Too bad.  If you have any sort of relationship with a product, and you make a comment anywhere on the Web about it, you better be prepared to disclose your relationship.

“This is all about going after sploggers.”

No, it isn’t.

In a discussion between Steven Hodson and Matt Cutts of Google on The Noisy Channel, they brought up the discussion of how this will cut out bad marketing:

Steven: “No degree of FTC intervention is going to make any difference to splogs or other such garbage…”

Matt: At a respected search conference last year, I sat in the audience and watched a presenter recommend “sock puppet” marketing by coming up with fake personas to promote products. With this new guidance from the FTC (plus similar recent guidance in the UK/EU against sock puppet marketing), that sort of bad advice will be much less likely to appear at search conferences. That’s one easy counter-example.

No, Matt, it isn’t.  You are talking about advice given at a conference, big deal.  The Sock Puppet marketers will simply start hiring people from Africa and India off of GetAFreelancer or other such sites and have them do that sort of marketing far from the reach of the USA, UK or EU.

And that is one of my biggest complaints about this whole thing is that the unethical people it is supposedly targeting will just find new ways of working around it, while those of us who follow ethical blogging and online presence will be saddled with these idiotic new rules, libing under fear of some little slip up costing us a potential $11,000 fine.  Oh yeah, that makes things so much better.

“This will stop all those fake review sites.”

Are you kidding me?

Lets say that an “unethical” blogger is currently working out of the USA with their web site on servers that reside in the USA.  They want to get away from these new rules so they move their site to servers in another country, they put privacy protection on their domain name and then they sit back.

The FTC finds them lacking disclosure, they will have to get a court order to reveal the name of the person who holds the ownership of the domain.  So the FTC will have to weight taking the time to get the court order, and in some cases they will have to go through a court in another country, is it really worth all of that effort, time and taxpayer money for a possibly undisclosed material relationship?  You guessed it, I would go with “no.”  Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

All of the “bad” sites will simply move off shore to countries that don’t care about all of this hoopla, and the innocent people will yet again be left to jumping through hoops that should have never been required.

“This system is ripe for abuse.”

Yes, it is.

We have no clue what the investigation process will be like yet, but what is to stop people from reporting you for fun or revenge?  ”Oh, hey, I think so-and-so has a relationship with that company they just posted abut on Facebook.”  Oh won’t that be fun to defend yourself from false accusations?  This is why some people will be better off even disclosing when they purchased something to cut off any possible questioning to avoid any sense in impropriety.

In other words, people will be so annoyed by having to watch their behinds that they simply won’t want to talk any more.

“Aren’t you worrying about this too much?”

No, I’m not.

I have done more reading today, and the tone of the conversations have changed quite a bit in the second day.  Check out SiliconANGLE’s FTC vs. the Blogosphere Day 2 Roundup to get a better sense of what is being said everywhere.  (disclosure: I am linked to in that article and I work for SiliconANGLE … see … won’t that get annoying?)

Also make sure to check out Steven Hodson’s questions that he is still waiting for answers to:

1. Will these same ‘guidelines’ be applied against “traditional media” and if not – why not?

2. What exact form do these disclosure need to take? Per post? Per page? Per comment?

3. Is this retroactive? Does this mean that sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, – well every single blog past and present will have to go through all their archives and add a disclaimer. Because we all know that posts that are even months or years old can resurface.

4.Will book publishers make signing a disclosure form a part of bloggers doing book reviews and is it really worth the effort at that point?

5. Does the country of origin of the writer matter as to whether a disclosure is included?

6. Does it matter the country of origin of where the blog served from come into play?

7 Does the country of origin of the product, service or book come into play at all?

(disclaimer: I know Steven and make fun of his Canadian citizenship on a regular basis)

The FTC has got to start defining this whole thing better, but somehow I don’t see that coming any time soon.

The Federal Trade Commission has made the first steps towards a scary, scary precedent, and if you aren’t careful, you could be next.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has updated its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in advertising for the first time since 1980.  The new additions to the guides include endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as disclosing of “material connections” between advertisers and endorsers.  In plain English, this means that if you get paid to talk about an item, or you receive it for free, you must disclose those situations wherever you talk about them online.

Well, that is if you talk about it on the Internet, if you do the same in a magazine or newspaper, then you’re perfectly fine and don’t have to say a word.

You see, for years newspapers and magazines have received free items to review, but they have never been required to disclose the arrangement.  Do you really think movie reviewers pay to go all those movies?  Do book reviewers pay for the books they receive?  No, they don’t, but for some reason it is important that people know that those of us on the Internet who receive similar freebies are obligated to tell you because … well … we’re not really sure why, but if we don’t we could be facing fines of up to $11,000 per incident.

I have already written about this today at Tech.BLORGE.com and StarterTech.com, as well as having just recorded a podcast with Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and Steven Hodson about it that I will be posting later, and I have never thrilled to reusing a subject, but this is just too important to not be everywhere possible.  The StarterTech article in particular lists my major reservations over this, but it can all be summarized as I fear the precedent it sets.  It starts here, where does it go next?

My father asked me why I was so upset about this today as I don’t do reviews typically and it would have little to no impact on me, and I pointed him to one of my all time favorite quotes:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

This speaks to First Amendment issues, and is actually why I imagine this could end up being challenged in the courts at some point, but for now it is just frightening.  The FTC thinks they are helping the American people, but this leads to one of Mark Hopkins’ favorite quotes:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Ronald Reagan

If you don’t speak out against this, then where will they go next?

For as old an organization as the Associated Press is, you would think that might have some people around the offices that might be able to tell them how the Internet works.

Back in April, the Associated Press (A.P.) began its war on the Internet.  At that time they were already saying that they wanted news aggregator sites such as Google News to stop indexing their stories as it iolated the Fair Use doctorine in their eyes.  Fine, whatever, this is the same group of yahoos who was trying to set up a system where every site that quoted any story of theirs was charged $1.50 per word for the use.

Well, late last week the A.P. took another hit off their collective bong they keep in the office and came up with a new policy that is just mind boggling.  In a story from The New York Times entitled A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web (and I am using the full headline on purpose here), the A.P. has now said that no one may use their headlines without express consent from the association.

The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Now, you notice how nice all of this is for The New York Times? They’re getting a link (which helps get them better rankings in search engines… they’re getting free advertising… some of you will click on the link, giving them another pageview and assists in upping their ad impressions… heck, some of you may even click on an ad, generating revenue for them.  Well, here is just a little bit more from the article from you that shows you how the A.P. obviously doesn’t have a brain in their heads.

Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

Okay, let me explain this in the simplest terms for the A.P…. no, you are not going to grow a “multihundred-million businesses” out of this.  Well, wait, I take that back, you just might, but it won’t be yours, it will be all of the other sites that will get the traffic you once did.

Think I’m alone in these thoughts?

- Scott Rosenberg

Need another?

When AP tries to impose a license fee on linking to its content, people will stop linking to AP content. Not just some sites, but 99% of sites. There may be no official boycott as such, but likewise most won’t be interested in battling AP in court. The result will be a big drop in traffic to AP content as the link juice it previously had disappears, juice that also helps their search engine rankings.

But it could be better again, because big players like Google won’t stand for paying for the right to link, so AP content may disappear altogether from most search engines as well.

The net result is that papers who rely on AP content online will see their traffic and online revenue plummet at a time that many of them are struggling to survive as it is. The drop in newspaper advertising may have driven many of them to the point of extinction, but AP will help push them off the final cliff.

- Duncan Riley, The Inquisitr

How can a group that has been in the publishing business as long as the A.P. not be getting this?  Instead of making money you are only accomplishing making enemies out of every blogger out there.  Sure they will be able to continue to sell their wire services, but the idea that anyone on the Internet is going to pay them a single penny when there are so many sites that gladly welcome you linking to them, well then… the office bong is working overtime.

Give it up A.P., you have failed at the Internet, and you might as well leave because you are going to be non-existent here pretty darn quick.  No links = Internet death… I am sure it will be a lovely funeral.

After a long bout with illness, Walter Cronkite has passed away at the age of 92.

As any one who reads this blog on a regular basis knows, I am passionate about journalism.  I owe a lot of it to Mr. Cronkite.  I can remember watching him in the 1970′s, when I was in the single digit age range, and being mesmerized by his voice and delivery of the news.  Did that make him a quintessentially good newsman?  Not necessarily, but it planted in my mind that was what a newsman should sound and look like.  Mr. Cronkite wasn’t so much a newsman as he was the news.  For decades people thought of one name when you said you had been watching the news, and that name was always “Cronkite”.

I wasn’t alone in my thoughts about him as he regularly was named in opinion polls in the 1960′s and 1970′s as “the most trusted man in America”.

One of his most famous moments came on November 22nd, 1963 during the coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Newsman had always been assumed to be unemotional, delivering their reports without any hint of how they felt about a story personally, but all of that changed during his coverage of that tragic day.

After making the announcement that the President was officially dead, he paused for a moment, started his next sentence, and about half way through he coughed.  It was slight and brief, but it was obviously the cough of someone trying to hold back their emotions.  He said of that moment in a 2006 interview:

I choked up, I really had a little trouble…my eyes got a little wet…[what Kennedy had represented] was just all lost to us. Fortunately, I grabbed hold before I was actually [crying].

That little moment changed a lot of things for newsmen: they became humans. They had emotions, they could feel their stories and it was a moment that shall live on in the history of journalism.

Goodbye, Mr. Cronkite, you shall truly be missed.

Listen for the infamous cough around the 34-second mark in the video below.

Folks, please, just… stop.

I have really tried refraining from even touching on the subject of Michael Jackson, but this has now reached absurd proportions.  I can understand fans being sad at his passing, but the idea that the website set up to award tickets to his memorial service (which the fact they are giving out tickets to this is disturbing in its own right) received 500 million hits in the first hour of operation.  While it is safe to say many of those were multiple visits from the same people, that is still insane.

Even though only 8,750 people will be issued a pair of tickets, 1.2 million officially applied for tickets.  The city of Los Angeles is expecting around 500,000 to 750,000 to descend upon the Staples Center to stand around outside the center during the ceremony.

Now comes the news that the networks are going to make this in to even more of a circus

• CBS is handing over the majority of its programming for the day to coverage of the event.  The Early Show, Evening News with Katie Couric and a special edition of 48 Hours anchored by Katie Couric will all originate from the Staples Center in Los Angeles where the event is being held.
• ABC will be doing live coverage of the event starting at 10 AM PDT and will pre-empt their normal daytime programming.  They are sending Charles Gibson to do the coverage.
• NBC will not do live coverage, but instead will do a one-hour highlights show Tuesday night.
• CNN will be live.
• MSNBC will be live.
• E! will be live.

Stop… please, for the love of the deity of your choice, just stop.

Michael Jackson was indeed a talented singer, but he was just that… a singer.  He didn’t cure diseases.  He didn’t serve his country.  He did nothing heroic.  He was a cute child singer, and he grew in to a very disturbed adult man due to any number of reasons that became better known for his eccentricities than his talents.  If you want to mourn him, fine, but does anyone really need to stand outside of an arena in the summer heat to mark his passing?  (hope you all remember to bring water)  Does every network need to have a crew on hand for this?  No.

This is all part of an idolism of celebrities that makes no real sense.  Anyone remember the insanity surrounding the death of Princess Diana?  At least she went out and tried to change people’s lives, while Michael… spent money on amusement park rides?  The fervor over Diana’s death didn’t make any sense either, as I said in Scattercast Episode 50, I’m not sure a terrorist attack by Osama Bin Laden would have gotten media coverage during that week in 1997, and that’s how I’m feeling about this insanity swirling around everything involving Michael Jackson.

You don’t think it has spun horribly out of control? Did you know that Anderson Cooper 360 actually went through the trouble to track down Michael Jackson’s pet chimp, Bubbles? Thanks to The Colbert Report, you can see this news handled in the manner it was most deserving of.

When you start hunting down a chimp as ‘news’, you know this story has been beat to within an inch of its life.

Up until the day he died, Michael Jackson was vilified by the media for close to 20 years, but come the day he died, he turned into something close to being a saint in the eyes of the media, and that is just sickening to me.  Not only have you obviously used this man’s death to improve your ratings, but you have betrayed your previous stance on him with your sickeningly saccharine-laced new version of the events of what and who Michael Jackson was.  Shame on the media.  How about you take that energy you spent on finding Bubbles and look in to what happened in Ft. Worth?  What is the latest on the civil unrest in Iran?  How is the world reacting to the seven ballistic missles North Korea fired in to the Sea of Japan today?  No no, that’s okay, please go do a hard hitting interview with Bubbles… really, that’s what we need more of in this world, not real news.

As for the public… well… I won’t say “shame on you” because I don’t know what each person’s individual motivation is for caring about this man so much about him, but it sure doesn’t make any sense to me to get this worked up over a celeberities death.

Sometimes I read something online that is so mind numbingly stupid that I can’t even conceive how someone reached that conclusion. Yep… this is one of those times.

Over the weekend, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote up a post about how Judge Richard Posner wrote up a blog about the death of newspapers, and he had one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever heard of for saving them from the worsening economy:

Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week’s news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

For those of you unfamiliar with the theory of linking and how it works, it’s a fairly simple concept.  Take me linking the word “TechCrunch” above.  I chose to link to the actual story Ms. Schonfeld wrote, so now when this post is published he will receive a notice called a “trackback” that allows him to know that I referenced his article in my post.  This will also be used by search engines to see how relevant his post is and how much credence they should give it.  The more links a site or story receives, the more importance a search engine puts on it, and the more chance of people searching on the appropriate terms will see it.

Essentially, links are the life’s blood of blogging.

Now, what Judge Posner is suggesting that linking to copyrighted material, or using a portion of it as a quote (like I did with his blog post above), should be illegal under copyright law , you have to wonder how he thinks this will save the the newspaper industry.  I’m not sure where to even start with just how wrong he has gotten this, but lets give it a go anyway:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking…

Okay, lets say you want to link to NYTimes.com, that would probably be fine, but if you want to link to a specific story, say Karl Malden, Everyman Actor, Dies at 97, the link would look like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/movies/02malden.html?_r=1&hp

This is known as “deep linking”, and I have a feeling this is what Judge Posner is talking about as this is actual copyrighted material.  The problem is that without deep linking you could never share a story with any one.  Are you going to link to the main page and then tell them “Okay, click here… and then here… and then do this…”, no, you aren’t.

Deep linking is also essential to how search engines index the importance of a specific page so that it knows how much priority to gie it when people search on a term.  The more links a page has to it, the more important it is, the higher up in search results it appears.  Deep linking is a very, very good thing in the Internet business.

…paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent

What he is talking about here is block quotes like I did above.  The problem with this is that it would make it impossible for anyone to write a rebuttal to anything as you would have to do a long, drawn out, explanation of what the original article said.  You would have to make sure the wording was different enough so as not to be accused of plagiarism, but then balance making sure you got the original tone of the article.  That is essentially impossible.

Quoting stories is as old as journalism and is essential to editorials as well as stories.  So long as you only quote a small portion of the story it falls under Fair Use, and I don’t really see that ever being written out of copyright law.

It all comes down to “consent”

Judge Posner does stipulate that people could get the copyright holder’s consent and do the linking and quoting, but due to time constraints, and the timeliness of stories, would any newspaper want a dedicated person sitting around 24/7 just to approve requests?  Of course they wouldn’t,  so the solution would be giving people carte blanche to link and quote.  Those papars that wouldn’t do it would quickly see themselves losing popularity due to a lack of links, and… in short, everyone would have to give blanket permission and we would be back to where we started.  Everyone would have permission, and those that didn’t grant it would get zero traffic because of how far behind they are.

So, basically I am saying that Judge Posner’s solution is flawed beyond belief and that he shows a total lack of understanding for how the Internet actually operates.  His ‘solutions’ will do nothing but create grief for bloggers and newspapers alike  It would take no time for workarounds to be found, and in the meantime it would end up costing those papers money as they try to handle all of the increased number of requests for permission.

Try to save old media if you want, but at least have a working knowledge of your “solution” before you suggest it.