Monday Morning Media Quarterback

It’s good to see the discoverers of the basic science around hard drive technology winning the 2007 Nobel Prize.  The hard drive has become the ultimate commodity product–everyone reading this has one, but like Rodney Dangerfield, the spinning disk that stores your applications, music and porn ”gets no respect.”

One industry spokesperson described manufacturing disk drives as “the longest-running industrial philanthropy.” If someone could find a way to make money with hard drives, that would be worthy of an economics Nobel!

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.

WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, is a hard-core technology event.  The attendees are mostly engineers from hardware companies (and a few freelance geeks) building devices around Microsoft products like the Vista operating system, which Bill Gates says has sold 40 million copies. (I’m still waiting for my promised free Vista upgrade from HP 5 months after I bought my new PC; HP customer service is right down there with Dell.)

I missed most of Gates’ presentation, but I did catch one by one of Microsoft’s unsettlingly young and poised product managers.   He was talking about Rally,  which Mary Jo Foley calls “a set of networking protocols and licenses designed to simplify consumers’abilities to connect peripherals to Windows Vista and to each other.”

The presenter was a techie, presenting to a techie audience–yet he took the time to create and go through a slide explaining arcane Rally terms and acronyms like Windows Connect Now (WCN) and Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS). 

In our media training program, we call this ‘when in doubt, spell it out.’  Too often, speakers cannot resist the urge to do an ‘information dump’ on their audience, who won’t understand the jargon, acronyms or internal Kool-Aid that company spokespeople have been drinking.  And when an audience doesn’t understand, they won’t ask for clarification; who wants to lose face?

So kudos to Microsoft for understanding this and enhancing communications with their target audience.   But don’t rest on your laurels: twenty thirty years of media training has almost brought forth a kindler, gentler Bill 2.0.

Tech journalists would generally rather write about cool products and score them for themselves than attack powerful companies.  Computer magazines, like automobile magazines, are generally uncritical “enthusiast” publications.  Journalists for both love to write stories with leads like “The new ________ is the best _______ yet.”

However, sometimes push comes to shove, and Harry McCracken, editor in chief of PC World, resigned last week after the magazine’s chief exec (or publisher) killed a story about Apple Computer.  The story, perhaps not wisely for McCracken’s tenure, was called “Ten Things We Hate About Apple.” 

That kind of story is only OK with the publisher (read ‘chief ad salesman’) if all “ten things we hate” are on the order of “1. Apple is so darned innovative that’s it’s hard to keep up with all their insanely great products.”

With more and more readers migrating to the Web, and thus not actually buying magazines,  advertising, both print and web, becomes increasingly important.  Indeed, the PC World publisher, Colin Crawford, claims 35% of IDG’s income comes from digital sources.  So what’s been called the  ‘Chinese wall’ between the editorial and advertising sides is becoming increasingly porous.  As McCracken seems to have discovered, editorial independence is falling by the wayside, and the ‘new Golden Rule’ is in place: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”