On The Road This Week
Am in Las Vegas for LogLogic’s annual sales conference so posting will be light. Also gearing up for my Educause keynote next week. If you are attending Educause and there are specific things you would like me to touch on related to blogging, wikis and the participatory movement, let me know.
More On Pay-To-Play
Paul covers the Pay-to-Play issue, pointing to Richard’s comments. Paul makes a fair point that lisencing a first ammendment right isn’t a good move. Richard has some good ideas as well:
“…have CEOs of PR firms sign onto a code of proper behavior, that forbids payments to reporters, that mandates transparency on arrangements with third party experts and that bars a media company from having a licensed PR firm in the family. These standards must be enforceable, with the group given power to expel transgressors, then to demand a public apology and remanding of questionable earnings to the aggrieved client.”
At the end of the day, we do need an industry code of ethics backed by some kind of certification standard. You break the rules, you loose your certification. If accountants, lawyers, even sailors can organize this, why can’t the PR industry?
Then what we need is the CEOs of all PR firms to mandate certification for all employees, and for clients to only hire certified practioners. While this will take many years to implement I beleive it would ultimately put us in a better place.
The PRSA and IABC could act as vehicles for certification, but if they aren’t able to do this, maybe it’s time to form a new, independent group to handle this.
Another Media Disgrace
The NYT reports that the ex-chief of HealthSouth (he claims unknowingly) paid for positive coverage:
Throughout the six-month trial that led to Richard Scrushy’s acquittal in the $2.7 billion fraud at HealthSouth Corp., a small, influential newspaper consistently printed articles sympathetic to the defense of the fired CEO.
Audry Lewis, the author of those stories in The Birmingham Times, the city’s oldest black-owned paper, now says she was secretly working on behalf of Scrushy, who she says paid her $11,000 through a public relations firm and typically read her articles before publication.
It’s just stunning that this kind of stuff keeps happening without any kind of ability for censure by industry bodies – both media and PR. I’m sure there are as many frustrated journalists as there are PRs who are sick of having their profession tarnished by this kind of behavior.
Sweet Squeet
This is cool. Get your RSS feed as an email. I’m using this to get RSS feeds of news releases etc. in email on my Crackberry. I just don’t have the time to look at another interface on that little screen, so the more I can get in email, the better. Squeet is sweet.
Two Cool Kiwi Blogs.
Liked these. One on the move to NZ. The other from a Kiwi in NZ. And if you are wondering what the weather is like today, here you go.
