BlogPhiladelphia Conference or Bust!

Our fair city, the birthplace of liberty, is birthing something brand new this year:

The BlogPhiladelphia UnConference

(note the lack of spaces between words -- we're very hip here in Philly)

For all the details, visit www.blogphiladelphia.net. We'll be there. You should be too!

Civilizing the Blogosphere

One of the scariest aspects of blogging can be the sometimes nasty nature of the blogosphere. Anonymous readers can leave some pretty awful stuff on comment boards, and anyone with an opinion -- whether substantiated or not -- can post instantly accessible information at the click of a button. In response, a small set of bloggers are joining together to set online standards of conduct. The final result could take any number of forms -- perhaps a seal of approval and a third party that monitors your blog -- but you can read all about the proposals in an article from today's New York Times. The article is here.

A Blog in Pictures

A pretty funny picture from today's New York Times that details the evolution of the comments section on a blog post. Click on the photo to enlarge.

A Runner's Best Friend

We have a couple runners in the office (and the optimistic goal of having a Buchanan PR team at this year's Broad Street Run), so when we stumbled across this tool, the runners in the office got pretty excited.

http://www.walkjogrun.net/

Click your running route onto a Google Map, and it'll calculate your mileage and calories burned. Very helpful. Very cool.

Journalism As We Don't Know It

Internet-based media is forcing the field of journalism to undergo a change as epochal as the invention of the printing press, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's fourth annual "State of the American News Media" report. In an analysis of the report, the Columbia Journalism Review worries that the rise of internet-based media formats is forcing journalists to become self-promoting "buzz machines" and deliver a heavy dose of opinion with their reporting:

The obvious worry in all this is that, in order to succeed, the priorities of journalists will change -- and not for the better. It's easy to imagine a new type of journalist emerging -- a Careerist Journalist who may work out of a sense of civic duty, but whose fierce personal ambition devalues professional ideals on the way to personal advancement...The media business seems to think it can save itself by asking journalists to generate glitzy, gripping content regardless of the day's intrinsic drama or the complexity of events. Maybe it can, but not without creating a new kind of journalist at its top levels.

Read CJR's analysis here. Read the report of the Project for Excellence in Journalism here.

Getting Mean On the Internet

The proliferation of anonymous bulletin boards and comments on the Internet has birthed a new type of "PR" highlighted in this AP story, which ran today:

''It takes one person 20 minutes to destroy your reputation, and it costs them nothing,'' says Michael Fertik, who employs about 40 part-time ''agents'' on what he calls ''search and destroy'' missions against unwarranted Internet attacks. ''It can take you 200 hours to try to clean it up.'' ... Fertik says he offers ''a PR service for the everyday person,'' charging a fee that can be as low as $10 monthly, for a thorough search of Internet references. The ''destroy'' part starts with a polite letter and can occasionally lead to threatened legal action. (Generally, Web site operators are not liable for offensive postings.)

It's more a modern-day offshoot of traditional crisis communications (there's certainly not any two-way symmetric communicating going on...), but it looks like Fertik found a niche with plenty of demand. The whole story is here.

People Power on the 'Net

Tom "The World Is Flat" Friedman has a column in today's NYT that chronicles the changing face of the US environmental movement and the role of PR.

Before embarking on their recent leveraged buyout of TXU Energy, the firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Texas Pacific Group sat down with enviro groups Environmental Defense and National Resources Defense Council to get the groups' approval of the merger. Why would buyout firms care about two environmental groups with no financial stake in the transaction? Because the groups were in the middle of a messy online fight with TXU about its plans to build new coal-fired power plants and the buyout firms wanted to resolve the issue before sealing the deal. Before okaying the buyout, the enviro groups were successful in negotiating down the number of planned coal plants from 11 to 3, among other compromises.

Friedman thinks online activism is the sit-in of the new millenium.

Fred Krupp, head of Environmental Defense explains:

“The reputations of companies are going to be less determined by the quality of their P.R. people and more by their actual actions — and that empowers more of an honest debate on the merits,” said Mr. Krupp, adding, “It’s just harder to keep bad environmental news secret and expect the public to sit on its hands in the Internet era.”

Sounds about right to me.

Read the whole story here (subscription required).