“Booby Mom” was Both Shocking and Awesome: Can Provocative Content Improve Print’s Prospects?

Did I have a problem with now-infamous boobsucking TIME cover? Not at all, but I was somewhat surprised by the brouhaha that surrounded the image of the “booby Mom” whose 3-year old was photographed standing on a chair suckling her boobies.  Does that sound so pornographic or rude? You’d think so based on the throngs of readers (and media outlets) who commented on the controversial cover, considering it pornographic. Really people? I was a lot more troubled by what was going inside TIME Magazine and the article about attachment parenting than the cover. Truly troubled.

But back to the image… “Booby Mom” has spawned an avalanche of coverage and launched much discussion, not just about “attachment parenting,” the actual subject of the TIME cover story, but about the ways in which magazines (like all print media), have taken massive hard-copy readership hits can use thoughtful, provocative content and social-media relationships with readers to boost revenues. A TIME spokeswoman told the New York Times that the cover helped that issue become the magazine’s best-seller so far this year and doubled the subscription rates for that week. Says a lot about the so-called disgust about a breastfeeding mom on the cover, right?

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that since around 2003-2004 newspaper and magazine circulation numbers have plunged as a result of the internet revolution. This got me thinking, as someone who pitches stories to media outlets for a living, about how print media can use provocation and button-pushing to help bolster their other ongoing efforts to slow the slide. Of course, a lot of the time provocative content gets shelved on the recommendation of the bean-counters who are afraid of offending anyone who might possibly buy a copy of the paper, or better yet, a subscription.

Let’s Face it, Bare Skin Sells… Is That So Bad?

And yet it is the most controversial messages that generate the most visceral reaction. Let’s face it, they are the messages that lead to water-cooler talk, arguments and coveted mindshare of brands.  If you’re old enough you’ll probably remember Demi Moore’s naked and very pregnant Vanity Fair cover in 1991.  The “decency police” went berserk denouncing the cover as obscene and generally gross. But like TIME’s “Booby Mom” cover, the Demi Moore cover is one of Vanity Fair’s best-remembered  and most imitated ad nauseam by celebrity women with a bun in the oven.

And then there was the The New Yorker, whose editorial staff must have been sweating (and likely second-guessing themselves) on the eve of the publication’s 2008 cover lampooning Fox News’ take on Barack and Michelle Obama’s onstage “fist bump” as a “terrorist fist jab,” bracing for the storm of criticism that followed.  That happens in lots of industries:  fear of offense and of reduced revenue discouraging unconventional or “risky” views.

Fear is contagious and all too soon there is nobody left who is willing to voice an idea that could be seen as too “out there.”

I’ve seen this with numerous clients I’ve dealt with throughout my career. It’s understandable, especially in the tetchy economic climate we’ve been living in for the past several years. And, when necessary, it’s been my role to poke, prod and nudge a nervous client to take a risk that ends up paying off. As someone whose business is to improve clients’ business, I know it’s important to encourage “outside the box” ideas because that’s where innovation comes from. When we push ourselves beyond our comfort zones we often end up succeeding way beyond our own expectations.

So kudos to TIME Magazine. Kudos to the “booby Mom” Jamie Grumet. And kudos to the other half of TIME readers who could stomach a 3-year-old nursing from his mother’s breast.

Of course, if we didn’t have that brouhaha in the first place, maybe I wouldn’t have written this piece to begin with. And that’s exactly my point.

Stop The Presses!

Yes, there are still presses!

And, no, we’re not talking about cookie presses, juice presses or drill presses, but rather that staple of mechanical print writing that for oh, about the last five and ¾ centuries –iPads and other iOS devices aside— dominated the newspaper and communications industries and marked the dawn of our information age, version 1.0.

That was the heartening, (and perhaps stunning) conclusion in a recent article on The Daily, which profiled a Brooklyn “pressman” Dan Morris and his efforts through his business, The Arm letterpress, to help a now-niche industry prosper in decidedly digital times.

Considering that I recently wrote about the power of old school print and supported our cheers with data that suggests print media – in all formats – may have endured the worst of its circulation declines, I wanted to throw my support (and ThinkInk’s), albeit digital, to Mr. Morris’s work. His business, launched in 2005, offers Sunday DIY classes on the mechanical printing art while his own 1950s-era Vandercook presses, according to The Daily, pump out wedding invitations among other individualized requests.

Morris’s passion for print preserves our written heritage. From Gutenberg to Jobs, we all should offer a simple thank you.

Now start those presses!

Old School Media Is Still Relevant, For Now

By: Vanessa Horwell

For all the funerals planned and obituaries written for traditional journalism — those things called newspapers, magazines, broadcast television, oh, and radio — one would consider them finished. Just how many years of revenue and circulation declines can an industry endure before packing it in?

Plenty, it seems.

Without question the last five years, or even 10, have not been kind to traditional media. Its influence has shrunk from a global superpower to merely a component of an increasingly diverse set of media outlets all vying for attention and relevancy. I liken traditional media’s current power position to the United Kingdom following World War II: Stripped of its empire status, the war-torn country reemerged as a component of Western power, no longer its sole mover and shaker, or indeed master.

In response to a rapidly remade media landscape, PR firms have rightly shifted their focus to all things digital. Can you imagine a PR company — or any successful organization — not relying heavily on the digital space to advance their company or client’s brand?

Our clients now expect digital competency as a matter-of-fact and not some retainer-plus extra. Many of the college graduates knocking on our door have been using Facebook for a third of their lives, they prefer texting to talking (which we try to undo) and some have even earned their Masters in social media.

But for all the hoo-ha over social media, it’s essential that companies, especially PR agencies, remember the UK analogy. Traditional media, may be a shell of its former self –at least in terms of average profit margins — but it persists. Our industry gives so much lip service to integration and being multi-channel. Perhaps it’s time we listen to our own advice and not jettison traditional media from the marketing mix?

At a recent mobile marketing summit in New York, I sat next to the mobile marketing director for USA Today, and talked with several digital media directors of magazines that many would consider very traditional – only they are far from it.

Their digital model has and continues to evolve as they realize that traditional media still does have a place — and is it not in the coffin. The PR industry shouldn’t forget this either.

In its annual report on American journalism, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, highlights some positive news hinting that the worst of traditional media’s die off has ended. Newspapers, once a bulwark for our industry, saw its weekday circulation numbers contract by 5% in 2010. While not fantastic, the losses in 2009 were twice that. Revenue too, saw, similar declines, (a drop of 6.3%) but that softening was nowhere near the death spiral of 2009 where revenue atrophied 26%.

The revenue picture looked even brighter at cable news, network television and local news outlets, as all three saw growth. Overall local news and radio faired the best, as many stations added early morning programs. For instance, in 2010 69 US cities offered a 4:30 a.m. TV news program, up from 28 in 2009. Radio, which has long since found its niche on car dashboards, saw revenue tick upward by 6% in 2010 after an 18% fall in 2009. Finally, magazine ad revenue was flat, compared to a 26% drop in ’09. While readership/viewership struggled, all traditional media outlets combined still enjoyed many millions of consumers.

As for the fine print beneath the big picture?

The reports of old school media’s death (in all its forms) are exaggerated. Americans continue to rely on traditional outlets — along with newer ones — to consume information. They are still relevant to many of us, as least for now.

My advice to my PR peeps?

Don’t turn your back on traditional media. Not yet. Remain plugged in with your broadcast and print contacts – don’t overlook them for lure of likes and RTs. While the media pie has gotten bigger and there are more pieces to cut, you never know when you might need them.

Winston Churchill, England’s WWII Prime Minister, cautioned against looking too far ahead into the future, saying, “Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

Let’s wait and see how the future media chain links connect and how that affects the destiny of traditional media before we sever those ties for good.

Via Marketing Daily 

Print’s Death March, Again

Here we go again. Another article predicting the end of print media, or to be more precise, referring to its now sunset years. A recent post called Editorial Exit on the Future of Media blog, joins a chorus of naysayers predicting the end of the traditional newsroom and dismantling of old school media.

But are we talking about a sunset or merely a solar eclipse?

Without question the last five years (and even 10 years) have not been kind to a host of traditional media. Web 2.0 (or are we nearly 3.0?), running lightening fast, interactive sites and “iWeb” – the Internet’s mobile revolution – is enjoying double-digit percentage growth. Certainly, traditional media’s influence has shrunk from a global superpower to a component of an increasingly diverse set of communications outlets, including web sites, mobile apps, blogs, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages.

But referring to the present time period as traditional media’s sunset years is premature at best, and dead wrong at worst. In its annual report on American Journalism, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, highlights some quite positive news hinting that the worst of traditional media’s die off has ended. Newspapers, once a bulwark for the communications industry, saw its weekday circulation numbers contract by 5 percent in 2010. While not fantastic, the losses in 2009 were twice that. In revenue terms the picture looked even brighter at cable news, network television and local news outlets as all three saw growth.

The bottom line: Record stores still exist, vinyl can still be purchased, and the “paperless office” has yet to fully mature. Traditional media may no longer be king, but it’s still serving in the king’s court

Is Journalism As We Know It Becoming Obsolete?

Not yet. But a few prayers couldn’t hurt.

Last week Gigaom.com blogger Matthew Ingram resurrected the decade-old question: is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete? His answer – after a nearly 900-word build up:

No. “I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing,” he writes.

Pardon the bluntness, but to me that doesn’t read like a satisfying conclusion. The cells in my stomach are evolving, dividing one by one, millisecond by millisecond, year by year. My stomach expands with each new meal I consume. But without a little help from digestion and peristalsis to keep that expansion in check or DNA coding to prevent runaway “cell evolution,” my body would grow sick and unable to function.

If left unchecked I’d land in the Morgue – the place where humans – and newspapers ultimately retire.

To conclude that today’s twitter-centric and blog-frenzied journalism is “evolving and expanding” isn’t good enough. Chalking the process up to the cyclical “rise and fall” of newspapers and bloggers doesn’t cut it either. A more nuanced question is: how is journalism expanding and evolving and what safeguards, if any, are working to ensure its healthy growth?

Ingram rightly points out that journalism is about: “a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things.” He’s also correct when he references programming scholar Dave Winter’s suggestion that in today’s world, with often zero mass publishing barriers, anyone can do it.

But the fact that “anyone can do it” doesn’t mean that everyone can do it equally well. Possessing a spirit of enquiry, of curiosity, and of wanting to make sense of things are platitudes that can be applied to almost any profession.

Eighteenth and 19^th century journalism, wrought with hyper opinion, political party dominance, and a healthy dose of sensationalism effectively blurred the lines of hard news, soft news, and what today would be called “infotainment.” Not until the middle and latter 20^th century did a more separation of church and state-like thinking transform journalism into today’s polished and professional product.

It’s not that today’s citizen journalists, CNN’s iReporters or Arab Spring bloggers are bad. It’s just that too often their skills are unrefined.

To be sure, gathering facts, observing breaking news, and collecting what else has been written on a topic – termed aggregating on the web – is the first step toward quality journalism. But placing that information into a compelling and concise narrative with context and fact-checked sources is where the professional differences lie. A world where citizen journalists, bloggers, and traditional reporters remember they’re playing on the same team, in equal numbers would be the best way to ensure that the hard fought professional standards achievements of the 20^th century and the internet mass publishing miracles of the 21^st work in concert, not in chaos.

In the last decade, as newspapers and other print formats struggle to engineer the magic bullet of profitable web publishing, thousands of professional journalists have left the profession entirely, jumping ship for the perceived safer and often better-paying waters of public relations, corporate communications and government outreach.

An industry losing its institutional knowledge is an industry in danger of losing itself.

Is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete?

Only if we let it.

Thinkink’s Horwell: Print Media Still Important

Vanessa Horwell, who is chief visibility officer at PR firm Thinkink in Miami, gave us a very lively interview about the future of journalism. She’s worried about it.

“Without newspapers and the existence of quality journalism and print media, the PR industry and indeed the entire advertising industry will suffer in a very big way,” she told us.

She said many businesses and consumers “just don’t hold the same value for online content as they do for print.”

For example, “we had a client who complained that his company was being featured in Forbes.com, but not the print version. We argued that 15 million eyeballs seeing his story online would make far more impact than the 5.4 million print readers … but the client wasn’t convinced. He wanted the prestige of print. He also told us … ‘who wants to be online if it’s free?’ ”

http://ourblook.blogspot.com/2009/07/thinkinks-horwell-print-media-still.html

Journalism Rocks!!!

Hey, in case you missed my article in MediaPost last week – here it is.  Called Journalism Rocks, it discusses how unbiased news and free speech come with a price tag, and that is not a bad thing.

Here’s the link, or read on below:

Journalism Rocks, June 1, 2009

Talk is cheap, but good content, labor and product are not. In an era of thrift and the return to newfound values — where less of everything is the new world order — everyone is talking about what will happen to American newspapers. I think, more importantly, we should be asking what will happen to American journalism right now? I’ve been harping on about this topic for some time (like as far back as 2006), and my words have usually been met with equally strong worded opinions.

Opinions, coarse or otherwise, are good. In fact, they are to be encouraged — they stimulate critical thinking and discourse. Look, plain old-fashioned thinking is good — that’s why we live in a democratic society, right? But opinions are just that — a personal viewpoint like this very piece you are reading. And so, while I like to think of myself a good writer, a journalist I am not.

Journalism is a profession, ignited by a thirst for the facts and the truth, accompanied by deep passion for telling it how it is and in a way that will impact lives. These are skills which cannot be acquired via a webinar or a Bulldog Reporter Media Blitz one-day circus for $399.

While the business model for newspapers may be broken — and, yes, they’ve been irresponsible, unresponsive to changing needs — let’s not miss the point here. What happens to news, and in two words, our intelligence, if we don’t support journalism?

We will be force fed biased, paid-for-content. It will be like an election year, but without end. We will have to put up with more inane PR crap — and I say that confidently as a PR pro. We will stop having conversations with our colleagues about Daniel Politti’s remarks on Slate, or why Glenn Beck is getting ANY coverage at all.

Instead, we’ll be reduced to posting posts in response to posts, in response to posts, positing, posturing and basically learning a whole lot of nothing. And, while blogging may be good for our inner-journalistic soul, consumer journalism is an oxymoron. Frank Rich wrote an outstanding piece in The New York Times a few weeks back, echoing this very same sentiment.

Ultimately, we’ll have less choice to make informed choices and decisions. So while big biz ponders the future of the newspapers and how to fix them, we should be having discussions about quality content.

What makes good content, and why do we need it?

The Internet, amen, has given us access to just about anything and everything we need to know… and then some. At times, it’s overwhelming. Filtering through on what to spend precious time reading is a tough call because, right now, there is a lot of quality content and journalism available.

For now.

Let’s take this site, as an example. We contribute here because we’re passionate about this industry, because the content is always on the mark, and those who write and report here know their stuff. This is our bible, because the information we get here is unbiased, objective and of value to us.

The reporters need to get paid, the staff needs to get paid and the business needs to function as a business — otherwise we all lose the privilege of having access to this quality content and the conversations and intelligence that come with it. You only need to read the feedback loop comments, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I’m not ready to let that go. Are you?

To borrow from Frank Rich again, in the end we pay for what we get, as is the case in almost every aspect of life. If we don’t support the development of intelligent and unbiased reporting, the sensible and objective gathering of news we can use and meaningful, knowledgeable discussions — what have we got to look forward to? Not only will my business and industry crumble away, but I suspect the support system for many of yours will, too.

So I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is and pay for content that I read and use. And I’m sure that a lot of you would as well.

The trick is getting the public to do same.