Hallelulah! Allegedly one of the world’s top spammers, Robert Alan Soloway, was arrested today and charged with 35 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, email fraud, etc.
Spamhaus has been keeping track of him, including this defiant rant from someone who calls himself a “Proud Spamhaus TOP 10 Emailer in the World.”
His mistake, made by so many, may have been to take Microsoft .
CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is a ticking time bomb–and he’s starting to damage CNN’s credibility. The New York Times, finally catching up with MondayMorningMediaQuarterback, challenged Dobb’s reporting on immigrants bringing leprosy to the United States.
Dobbs needed to back away from let-them-eat-cake remarks like “If we reported it, it’s a fact,” and respond with a brief statement like this. “On a couple of things we’ve broadcast, I’ve got to admit our critics may have a point. From this point forward we’ll make doubly sure everything we put on the air is accurate, and while we’ll continue to advocate for the American worker, I apologize to those I may have given offense to.”
Instead, we get this 900-word rant, as swollen with ego as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float. Here’s some quotes with our commentary.
My concern is that Dobbs will damage the CNN and Time Warner brand, devaluing an image of credibility and unbiased news built up painstakingly over 20 years. In the past month, Time Warner has quickly fired the head of HBO and their leading African reporter, both for alleged offenses against women.
With Dobbs, it may be a tougher call, as he has the ratings lead . But if he doesn’t start acting less like Howard Beale and more like Anderson Cooper, Dobbs credibility, already in tatters, will disappear completely.
Millions of dollars are spent on advertising, but a good publicity stunt gets attention for much less. All it requires is clear thought and the creativity to come up with a great stunt that won’t damage your brand.
Sure, you can spend a lot of money, as did the Bee Movie producers who put Jerry Seinfeld in a bee costume and flew him down a 9-story-high wire to promote the film at Cannes.
But timing and chutzpah can charm the press at low cost. Recently, tenant activists ambushed their landlord, Professor Eric Sussman, at a class he was teaching at UCLA. They presented him with a ceramic pig for raising their rents. The stunt resulted in an LA Times story and coverage from Long Beach to San Jose, for the cost of a bus for the tenants and ten bucks for the piggy bank.
In 1999, FHM Magazine set a publicity stunt standard by projecting a 60-foot naked image of starlet Gail Porter on the side of the British House of Parliament.
So the New York Times has finally caught up to Monday Morning Media Quarterback–three weeks after we posted questions about Lou Dobb’s claim on CNN that immigrants have brought 7000 cases of leprosy to the United States.
I warned Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons about the downside when your news anchor goes demagogic. He claimed Dobbs’ controversial remarks were all ‘opinion’, not news. I hope he’s watching Dobbs’ rants–and remembering the Don Imus debacle.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Lindsay Lohan, especially compared to the other pop tarts. Unlike, say, Nicole or even Brittany, her talent is not in question, and she earns her money, unlike a certain heiress.
Our favorite of her films is The Parent Trap, where she plays charming but determined twins dedicated to getting their parents back together, but Mean Girls, Freaky Friday and even Herbie have lots of entertaiment value.
Even if we liked her best in a kid’s film, don’t accuse us of not wanting her to grow up. Her relationship with her divorced parents has been like a car crash, and now she’s had a real one. If anyone could say ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ it’s her father, and to young people, hypocrisy is the greatest crime of all.
Her DUI trial (more likely the plea) will be a circus; the only good thing is that unlike Lane Garrison or Brandy (not a DUI) she hasn’t killed anyone (yet).
The partying, the lateness to work, the failed rehab, all seem a cry for help, but there’s been no one willing or able to say “No” to Lindsay and tell her “Nose to the grindstone,” as my father said to me. Parenting is hard, but someone’s got to do it.
The personal lives of performers have been exploited for over a hundred years to promote their entertainment projects. The situation has been reversed as millions focus on the antics of the stars, rather than on their movies.
Lindsay Lohan needs to buckle down (and buckle up) get serious about her work, and put her fame to positive use. People love to trash Angelina Jolie and her ‘zoo’ of adopted children, but she uses her fame (and channels her own family problems) into worthy work like A Mighty Heart, and her charity work dramatizing the problems of the suffering.
That’s a lot to ask of Lindsay, who’s still not old enough to drink legally, but it’s a way to lose the lack of self-worth that’s driving the continuing car crash.
In a recent column, Howard Kurtz raised the suggestion that the face-to-face interview is essentially dead.
”In the digital age, some executives and commentators are saying they will respond only by e-mail, which allows them to post the entire exchange if they feel they have been misrepresented, truncated or otherwise disrespected. And some go further, saying, You want to know what I think? Read my blog.
Jason Calcanis, chief executive of Weblogs Inc., says on his blog that “journalists have been burning subjects for so long with paraphrased quotes, half quotes, and misquotes that I think a lot of folks (especially ones who don’t need the press) are taking an email only interview policy.”
Veteran magazine editor Jeff Jarvis adds at his BuzzMachine blog: “Are interviews about information or gotcha moments? . . . Isn’t it better to get considered, complete answers?”
There’s a lot of food for thought here from both a journalistic and a media training perspective. How do you verify who you’re actually ‘talking’ to? If physical description is important, how do you know the 53 year-old woman you’re talking to isn’t a spoofing 15-year old boy?
Creative spellers, the less educated and non-native English writers may look dumb in an email exchange, unless reporters “clean up” their quotes, a long and dishonorable journalistic tradition. And far from any control advantage, the spokesperson may be actually be at a disadvantage by putting thoughts in writing he could more easily back away from in a verbal interview.
For public relations pros, often acutely aware of how little control they actually have over their message, email interviews pose another control challenge. If you’re aware of an email interview, will you hover over someone’s shoulder or watch/jump in on another screen? More importantly, anyone in a corporation or government structure with an email address can now be subject to an email query from the press which becomes an interview. People want to be helpful, but putting their own answers in writing without the knowledge or approval of management and public relations staff can be disasterous.
Certainly, as news organizations ruthless trim staffs, the do-more-with-less pressure means journalists will be reluctant to leave the office for even the most critical face-to-face, so phoners and email ‘interviews’ will become even more important. (Smart publicists will continue to push for press tours that bring their spokesperson and product into the office and into the journalist’s face.)
Face-to-face interviews will continue in many settings, such as all kinds of television (no one wants to read email off another screen or have to hear the reporter’s deadly voice-over) trade shows and conferences, press tours, investigative reporting (when the reporter actually leaves his office to track down a story) and for politicians and others who need to show sincerity and thus, as Calcanis puts it, “need the press.”
But email interviews are perilously close to pure public relations opportunies. I recently sold an international airline magazine on my doing a story on a Japanese company’s innovative female CEO, a phenomenon even more unusual in Japan than here. I’d met the woman and spoken with her briefly.
But the company publicist told me she was uncomfortable communicating in English and would only agree to do an email interview. I initially refused, concerned I wouldn’t know who was on the other end of the line and that I would be getting canned answers crafted by the publicist. I wanted to do a face-to-face, or at least a phone interview, because as Kurtz says, “When you see someone’s expressions or listen to someone’s voice, you get a sense of the person that words on a screen lack.”
We went back and forth for a couple of weeks, until it all blew up when the CEO resigned, with my story departing with her.
Watching is like watching a spectacular car accident; you can’t look away. Johnston is the talented but clearly mentally-ill singer songwriter whose songs have been recorded by over 150 artists; Target even licensed his “Speeding Motorcycle” for a commercial. He’s also a visual artist of the outsider school.
I was first turned onto his music on KXLU-FM in LA, perhaps 20 years ago.
At 45+, Johnston lives with his aging parents, has been committed several times, and has attacked people close to him, hitting his manager with a lead pipe and causing his father to crash his private plane.
As a parent, my heart goes out to those suffering like this, and especially to Johnston’s elderly parents, who clearly have gone through the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance).
Watch this film if you want insight into a disordered mind, and perhaps you’ll better understand Virginia Tech killer Cho (substitute Johnston’s obsession with the devil for Cho’s “rich brats“.)
The San Francisco Chronicle is making one of the biggest newsroom cuts yet; 25%, writes a Chronicle reporter(!) Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others will be laid off.
“Analysts predicted the reductions at The Chronicle could have repercussions for readers. While an increasing number of people get news from online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo, those stories are most often originally reported by print journalists. “
Then there’s the news website in Pasadena, that has unrepentently (and to great publicity) outsourced its city council coverage to India to reporters paid $7500 a year.
While I have sympathy for those cutback or outsourced, I’m not going to cry crocodile tears. As my Dad told me more than 30 years ago, you’ll never see pro-labor sentiment in a newspaper because they’re an employer. As the last person I know who owns three American cars, (a Ford, a Lincoln and a Jeep) where were these people and their publications in terms of supporting U.S. industries?
Still, it’s tough times, and for a communications person, the whirling scythe dumps more competitors into the pool.
At the Time Warner shareholder meeting microphones were set up around the room for comments. I couldn’t resist, making a point about how media companies are vulnerable to a crisis arriving at Internet speed. I said that Time Warner handled the arrest of HBO head Chris Albrecht on domestic charges ‘about as well as it could’ by firing him ASAP. Then I brought up two other Time Warner properties ripe for potential crises.
One is TMZ.COM, a celebrity gossip/paparazzi site that many see as a disaster waiting to happen, with paparazzi engaging in car chases, harassment of celebrities and their kids, and pitched street battles with other photographers to get shots. Then I mentioned Lou Dobbs on CNN with his “protect our borders” rhetoric, as having potential for crisis impacting Time Warner. I asked how the company planned to deal with it.
“That’s a good question,” said Richard Parsons. “Everything he says is clearly labeled as opinion.” I don’t think so, but at least Parsons addressed the question. The news media, on the other hand, only got part of my point; The Hollywood Reporter did it best, at least mentioning the Lou Dobbs issue.
Claudia Eller of the LA Times, who did great reporting on the Albrecht assault, couldn’t let go of it in her piece . “One shareholder mentioned Albrecht in passing, praising Time Warner for acting swiftly in discharging the executive after he was arrested in Las Vegas for assaulting his girlfriend and after the Los Angeles Times ran a story about his 1991 physical altercation with a subordinate.”
When you’re the ‘covered’, as opposed to doing the ‘covering’ as a journalist, it’s interesting to see what gets picked up–and what doesn’t.
On May 17 I attended the Time Warner annual meeting in Burbank. CEO Richard Parsons gave a presentation, told us “we toil on your behalf” and said after years of “going sideways, we finally got some movement in the stock.” He pointed to the board of directors, “I work for them, they work for you.”
He went over numbers and showed graphics like InStyle with Haile Berry, Bugs Bunny and CNN with Anderson Cooper, adding ”I’d like to salute publicly our journalists who put themselves in harm’s way.”
Befitting the Warner Brothers location, he showed a pair of film clips. The latest Harry Potter looked vivid and great, while the new Hairspray left me wondering if John Travolta (in drag as the mom) has a speech impediment. Parsons noted the studio won 10 Oscars in 2007, but I don’t see Travolta finally getting his for this. Nonetheless, Parsons urged the audience to see the films “early and often.”
“Can old media exist in a digital world?” is the challenge for content creators, according to Parsons, and is something a writer like myself struggles with every day. “We’re in the content creation business; ink on paper, television, video. Our challenge is to move our company into digital, whether you own it, rent it, watch it on an iPOD.”
Parsons is unflappable, as befits a man who says he’s a big fan of Happy Feet. He also has a good sense of humor, staying calm while noted corporate gadfly John Chevvedden talked about Parson’s high ($22 million) compensation. When another stockholder admonished Parsons for selling Google years ago, he said, “We could have done better, but no one has ever gone broke taking a profit.”
What’s Time Warner all about? Parsons put it this way:
1. Make money for our shareholders.
2. Do some good in the world.
3. Have some fun doing it.
From a media training point of view, couldn’t have said it better myself.