Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters without Borders) has issued a handbook for bloggers in countries where the media is censored or under pressure. The book contains handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

Blogs get people excited, or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them, others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom. Bloggers are often the only ones in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure to provide independent news at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.

Of course, some of the suggestions do work also if there isn’t any censorship or pressure upon you.

Tags: media, Media Relations, pr

Ubuntu Linux Bible is the book to read if you want to know everything about the most user friendly Linux distribution. A must read if you have decided to leave Microsoft for a less expensive, more stable and secure operating system.

The book is free, but - being well over 900 pages - is a sizeable 33 MB download for (to extract the PDF from the ZIP you have to enter the following password: ebookspyder.net).

Enjoy.

Technorati tags: ubuntu, linux

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• Web 2.0 Wake-Up Call: Six Tips for Web-Savvy PR-and Tech Trends to Watch
• Mediaroom 2.0
• Delivering the New PR 2.0
• Thoughts on teaching Journalism 2.0
• How Web 2.0 is Revolutionizing Mainstream Media

Tags: Journalism, media, pr

Heather Yaxley at GreenBanana writes:

I believe online is the natural home for public relations. We are used to discussion and confronting negative viewpoints through our experience with journalists, activist groups, etc. We are able to respond quickly and flexibility from crisis and issues management perspectives. We are a people business, skilled in group dynamics, connections and interpersonal relationship building. We understand the value of reputation and how this depends on the perspectives of others rather than on simply what we wish to portray. We understand information - how it flows, the power of word of mouth conversations, the use of narrative to improve recollection. We work creatively with much lower budgets than marketing’s big spend. We have experience in not being able to directly control or measure the outcome of our actions - something business is having to recognise as the power of networks, communications and public opinion is moving to the masses.

I’m not a native English speaker, and therefore I wouldn’t have been able to express these concepts in a better way. I do believe that online is the natural home for public relations.

Tags: Marketing, pr, Public Relations

In mid September I will be in Barcelona for the OpenOffice.org 2007 Conference. I will meet all the friends from around the world that work as volunteers to support the open source office suite which is quickly increasing its popularity and market share around the world. It will be an exciting time.

If you still don’t know OpenOffice.org, you can find all the necessary information and download - obviously for free - the software for Windows, Linux, Solaris or MacOS from this site.

Technorati tags: openoffice

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Thanks to Stuart Bruce, I’ve reached these sever rules for getting ink in business magazines. Although they have been written by the editor of a UK business magazine, Real Business, I’m pretty sure they’ll work almost everywhere. For sure, they work in Italy, with the exception of rule number six.

1. Most of our stories talk about how a company solved a particular problem. So, don’t be afraid to admit you’ve run into difficulties. Conflict is interesting.
2. Tell us what makes your company unique. Is it your product or your business model? Have you found a new way of getting finance or advertising your product/service? Make it crystal clear why we should write about you and not your competitors.
3. Write your email as if you were talking to a six or sixty years old chap. Don’t talk about “value-added systems integration management solutions specialists”, say: “we sell software”.
4. Do give numbers. Turnover, profit, number of employees, years in operation. They’re the only way to prove that you’re as successful as you say you are.
5. Tell us what section of the magazine you think your story would work for.
6. Don’t send a press releases every day or every week. We get too many to deal with! Instead, send a really well-crafted proposal for an article, listing everything you think we ought to know about your company. (This is the only rule that I would question, at least for Italy. When you don’t have that many business or “vertical” magazines, journalists are usually generalists and tend to forget companies if they don’t receive press releases on a regular basis).
7. Anniversaries, milestones, charity donation, new products, sponsored events? No thanks!!! Maybe it works for local papers, but it doesn’t for us. Lots of companies have anniversaries, lots give money to charity. Again, it’s about saying what makes you unique.

PR agencies should read these rules with a lot of attention, and maybe send them to their clients with a comment, underlining rules number four and number seven.

Tags: pr, Press Release

• Terrific insights into pitching the media from Peter J. Howe, business reporter for The Boston Globe
• New Tools for the New Year: My PR Measurement Tools Wish List
• What newsrooms should be
• Can press releases be more sales oriented?
• How to Email a News Release
• How to Pitch the Media

Technorati tags: media relations

Tags: media, Media Relations, pr, Press Release

Paul Gillin has written a lengthy article on How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvent Journalism (available also as a PDF file), where he outlines a new business model for publishers of “paper” media. The text is quite long, and is definitely worth reading with attention. I will try to summarize it.

Internet has completely disrupted the traditional communication industry, and has broken the business model of daily newspapers, which was developed over 150 years ago to support a delivery method that is now irrelevant. At that time, paper was the only way to deliver information on a daily basis. Large editorial staffs were needed to create proprietary content, which was necessary to ensure a large circulation, which was necessary to justify high ad rates. For a long time, newspapers were the most effective mean to reach consumers in many geographies.

This business model is about to collapse, in a way that will be stunning in speed and scope. Web 2.0 and its vastly superior economics are quickly killing publishers, which will be replaced by new media more cost-efficient: information sites based on blogs.

They outsource everything: editorial content is outsourced to individuals, and editorial expenses are close to zero; circulation is outsourced to Google and links from other sites; production is outsourced to hosted services at minimal cost; sales are outsourced to Google Adwords or other sales agents; and marketing and promotion aren’t even done. This model is so compelling that it will almost completely upend the existing mainstream media model in a short time.

During the first decade of the Internet organizations put their brochures online and users got comfortable with the idea of a global network. Search tools were rudimentary, Web content was difficult to create and interactivity was limited. That’s all changed. Today is easy to create Web content. Computing power, storage and bandwidth costs are declining rapidly. The open-source software movement has dropped the price of software to near zero. Search engines have become a better marketing channel than email. Google AdSense and affiliate marketing networks can generate income for Web site operators, even at low traffic levels.

So here’s where the spiral begins. Newspapers’ advertising business will be gone in 10 years, a victim of the superior results and economics of search-driven online advertising. The department stores and cell phone companies that sustain newspapers’ advertising business will apply intense pressure on papers to bring down prices. Newspapers will be forced to lay off staff in order to maintain margins. Cuts in services will lead to cuts in editorial coverage, making papers less relevant to subscribers. Once this spiral begins, it will accelerate with breathtaking speed. And it has already begun.

Experience has shown that business models based on proprietary products collapse when confronted with competition that is open, standardized and less expensive. It’s happened in consumer electronics, telecommunications, computers and household appliances, and there’s no reason it won’t happen in media.

History has also demonstrated that business models based on scarcity collapse in the face of abundance. The whole newspaper model is predicated on the idea that timely information is hard to come by. But information is now cheap and abundant.

The sole advantage that newspapers still have is their reach in local markets. But that, too, is changing. Search engine makers are figuring out how to provide value in local search. These forces are converging to attack newspapers’ last refuge. In 10 years, probably a third of metropolitan daily print newspapers will be gone. What will replace them? And what will the new journalism look like?

What emerges from the rubble of the newspaper industry will be a fresh, vibrant and very different kind of journalism. It will make a lot of traditionalists uncomfortable. It will force us to re-examine our assumptions about everything from readership to libel law. But it will ultimately be an evolution of the profession into something that is richer, more inclusive and much more dynamic than anything we have ever known.

The craft of journalism will evolve to include far more aggregation and organization than it has in the past. Editors will assemble their reports from a vast library of resources located across the Internet. Some information will come from paid staff writers, others from freelancers and still more from reports and opinions published by independent third parties and even competitors. Editors will still have a critical role, but their value will increasingly be in assembling and organizing information for readers who don’t have the time to sort through the vast Web.

The craft of reporting will become faster and more iterative. Rumor, speculation and incomplete information will be published far more readily, on the assumption that errors can be corrected. Stories will, in essence, be built in real time and in full public view. Readers will be a central part of the process, correcting and commenting upon articles as they are taking shape. Reporting will become, in effect, a community process.

This new model will be very disruptive and very controversial. The idea of publishing information which have not been double checked and of actively involving readers - who have no formal relationship with the news organization - in the reporting process will be too much for some editors to accept. But this is where journalism will go, and it is happening now, every day, on blogs and community media sites across the world. There, authors publish information that is unverified and unreliable. They do so with the expectation that their readers will set them straight and that the truth will be arrived at through a process of publishing and correction.

Journalism will become much more local. As the cost of publishing falls to near zero and citizens become more comfortable with the tools of publishing, thousands of mini “newspapers” will form around different geographies and topics. Aggregation sites will emerge to sift through and organize the reports and conversations going on in these small communities. Many of these sites will involve human editors who understand the needs of their audience and monitor online activity on their behalf.

This will be a complete rebirth of journalism around the concept that information is plentiful and cheap. Instead of 1.500 print newspapers, there will be five to 10 national “super-papers” and thousands of regional and special interest community news sites. The new model will create a more dynamic and diverse information landscape than we have ever known. It will be incredibly exciting.

What is happening to the newspaper industry will have a significant impact on the PR industry. The printed press has been for decades one of the most important targets of public relators. Newspapers are disappearing and journalists are decreasing in number: specialists are becoming generalists, and staff is shrinking to the point that there are already several “one man bands”. This increases the difference between good and bad PR, in term of results.

Today, a good PR agency is a professional boutique capable of ensuring coverage on paper and online thanks to the quality of the contents that is capable of generating and providing to traditional and social media. Today, the press release is just one of the tools, and its quality - given the extremely short time available for reading and judging its content - is more important than ever. Therefore, the PR agency capable of writing “good” press releases in a consistent way has more chances to see them published, and can also multiply the opportunities thanks to the capability of transforming any suitable information in viable content.

Unfortunately, companies have not understood this evolution, and insist in choosing large PR agencies - although they already know that the account, after the first meeting, will be handled by juniors which are supposed to be there to learn the job and are totally unable to provide any decent output - which regularly fail in reaching any target (even the least ambitious). Hopefully, time and experience will change this situation.

Technorati tags: business model, journalism, newspaper industry, pr agency, press release

Tags: Journalism, Marketing, media, pr, Press Release, Social Media