Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Reuters reports that master/slave, as used in the computer industry, was the most politically incorrect term of the past year.

We found ‘master/slave’ to be the most egregious example of political correctness in 2004,” said Paul JJ Payack, president of The Global Language Monitor.

“This is but one more example of the insertion of politics into every facet of modern life, down to the level of the control processes of computer technology.”

In computer terminology, “master/slave” refers to primary and secondary hard disk drives. But a Los Angeles county purchasing department told vendors in late 2003 that the term was offensive and violated the region’s cultural diversity. The county’s department of affirmative action undertook a hunt to replace it on packages.

Well, that changes everything.. In our terms it looks like this…

The V6M6HS baseboard consists of a VME master/slave interface, global DRAM, a local 100 Mbyte/sec PCI bus and four TDM (Time-Division Multiplexed) serial buses for inter-module, inter-board communications.

Now I can’t remember ever using the term in a press release but it’s definitely well used (pops up all over our site). So email me your alternatives.

Thankfully it wasn’t the only offender:-

The phrase “non-same sex marriage,” was used by a former congressman who did not want to offend gay people by using the term traditional marriage, Payack said.

Also on the list this year were “Red Sox lover,” to use in place of “Yankee hater,” “progressive” for classical liberal, “incurious” rather than more impolite invectives for President Bush, “insurgents” instead of terrorists in Iraq, “baristas” for waiters, and “first year student” rather than freshman.

stumbled onto a good synopsis of media trends… pretty broad and misses most of the blogsphere. Here’s a quick summary:-

1) A growing number of news outlets are chasing relatively static or even shrinking audiences for news. (more to read…)

2) Much of the new investment in journalism today – much of the information revolution generally – is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom.

3) In many parts of the news media, we are increasingly getting the raw elements of news as the end product. This is particularly true in the newer, 24-hour media.

4) Journalistic standards now vary even inside a single news organization. Companies are trying to reassemble and deliver to advertisers a mass audience for news not in one place, but across different programs, products and platforms.

5) Without investing in building new audiences, the long-term outlook for many traditional news outlets seems problematic.

6) Convergence seems more inevitable and potentially less threatening to journalists than it may have seemed a few years ago.

7) The biggest question may not be technological but economic. While journalistically online appears to represent opportunity for old media rather than simply cannibalization, the bigger issue may be financial.

8) Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them. As more outlets compete for their information, it becomes a seller’s market for information.

To which we can add:-

9) The transformative economics of the Web drive micro publishing to new levels,

10) Participatory Journalism and the “evolving personalized information construct” change everything, and

11) Audiences, driven by mistrust of media, increasingly turn directly to the source for information, and; the source, empowered by the web has the capability to “print” in real time.

Gerry Griffin shot me this story (which features him) on the ineffectiveness of email as a communications tool. Gerry’s onto something here. Email isn’t the problem. Neither is it’s ubiquity or volume.

The problem is that the average employee takes little time to communicate effectively. Or, they haven’t developed the skills. Or, like it has for many, email has become like an arcade game in which we win by shooting the bastards down as they flood our inbox. What is said matters less than the quickness of the finger. This eventually develops into a deep form of gaming addiction in which we have to be ready 24×7 to fire!

Here are eight of my rules:-

1. Do your best to restrict email to a couple of windows every day. Don’t sit there hammering away. Your communications effectiveness generally declines the further you progress through the pile;

2. Use the title bar to headline you email. And make it entertaining;

3. Take the time to write short emails – you know how it goes – didn’t have time to write a short memo so here’s a long one;

4. Use rules to eliminate the junk and sort newsletters and the like into a reading folder;

5. A mentor of mine – Michele Moore of Dell – taught me the trick of the ‘tickler file’. I have one in my directory and drop into it things that can be dealt with later or that need to be chased;

6. Doing both 4) and 5) unclutters your inbox and gives you room to focus of communicating;

7. Never email in anger (do as I say, not as I do…);

8. Clearly articulate the decision or action you require in the first sentence.

Remember – you don’t do email. You communicate.

(btw – Gerry is an ace media trainer – best I’ve seen. I’ve learnt a ton from him.)

Lotsa hype but well worth a look. Perhaps the longest webisode I’ve ever watched while not being aware of who it was by. What this points to is eerily likely.

Pegasus News is a really cool notion. An interesting exploration of the future of news. Both point to the transformative effect technology and citizens and, “the evolving personalized information construct”, will have on the future of public relations.

Pegasus News is a local news company that is reinventing the model of local market content and advertising. We intend to launch our new model in every major U.S. city with a monopoly newspaper — for starters.

Our beta test will take place in Dallas, Texas in late 2005. We will distribute content via a website, e-newsletters, RSS feeds, a daily print edition, SMS messaging and any other medium we can think of. Except for carrier pigeons. They smell bad.

btw – there is many a day when I wish the media as I know it didn’t exist… 🙂

A few folks are pointing to this item for sale at Target…

This looked like it first popped on Saturday. Now if someone had been participating in the blogsphere – let alone tracking company postings – they might have picked this one up.