All the News That’s Fit to Print … According to?

By Robbin Goodman, Makovsky + Company

The story didn’t make it to the mainstream media, but B.L. Ochman’s blog asks the right question: What constitutes news now that everyone is a reporter?

She cites how Tony Katz used Twitter — a social networking site that lets its users stay connected with colleagues, friends and family in real-time — to provide an eyewitness account, that unrolled a bit like the frames of a film, about how a man who claimed he had a detonator in his pocket was taken off a US Airways flight… while he, a passenger on the plane, sat observing.

You can read the details on BL’s and Tony’s blogs. The long and short of it is that the gentleman was quickly escorted off the plane without incident and the airline received glowing praise.

This gives new meaning to “If a tree falls in a forest….” Except for a handful of bloggers who reported it, at the time of this writing no mainstream media appeared to have picked up on it.

This fascinating account complements a recent study on the State of the News Media by Pew Research, which has done landmark work on the role of the Internet and social media in people’s lives. The study suggests that the trend toward user-created content for news appears more limited, including on “citizen” blogs.

The Pew study reported that the agenda of the traditional news media continues to narrow, not broaden, based on an audit of topics of coverage, according to the study. While it would appear that online news content could provide new opportunities to aggregate more sources, online platforms are limited by what the originating sources are providing. (In other words, citizens aren’t doing original reporting in the context of mainstream media [MSM] sites which focus on a narrow band of news. Although clearly some of them ARE reporting it elsewhere.) All the news that’s fit to print is clearly a function of who’s trying to report it.

But lest we be too critical of the MSM, Pew also reports that the (traditional) newsroom has seemed to adapt very well to the new media environment. The laggard in news operations now is the business side of the organization.


Technorati Tags: B.L. Ochman, Tony Katz, Twitter, social networking site, US Airways, eyewitness account, State of the News Media, Pew Research, mainstream media sites, traditional news media, communications

Apocalypse Now? Or Survival of the Fittest?

By Robbin Goodman, Makovsky + Company

“Media Work Force Sinks to 15-Year Low,” (subscription required) screamed the Ad Age headline. Reporter Bradley Johnson went on to describe how one in four media jobs has disappeared since the peak of newspaper employment in 1990. Loss of subscribers and ad dollars, and competition for readers’ attention with a wide range of media, including digital properties, have all contributed to the slump. Over the past year alone, 16,900 newspaper staff have been cut (nearly five percent) … while, interestingly, employment in marketing consultancies is up nearly 11 percent.

I question the implicit assumption that there is an inverse relationship between the number of staff positions on newspapers and the growth of marketing services agencies. It’s more complicated than that. Ad agencies aren’t growing. They’re slimming down and consolidating. I’m certain many of those who are leaving the world of conventional advertising are, in fact, starting their own marketing services agencies or joining other, smaller independent firms. Another factor that wasn’t explored in the article is the degree to which corporations are choosing to use external experts, rather than staff up internally.

I believe that marketing consulting is growing because, increasingly, print ads aren’t working as well as they used to, and marketers are interested in trying new things. The fact that the “mix” of marketing services is increasing is because of that experimentation.

Studies conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton, a client of our firm, in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers have shown that world class marketers are increasingly dismayed by the ad agency community’s slowness to come to grips with this shift in spending.

According to “HD Marketing 2010: Sharpening the Conversation,”, more than 90 percent of marketers surveyed say they plan to increase their digital spending. However, only 24 percent of the survey respondents think their organizations are digitally savvy. Almost 60 percent of participants believe creative, creative and media capabilities should be rebundled …but not by traditional full-service agencies. In fact, media partnerships — with both media companies and media agencies — are becoming more important than traditional full-service agency partnerships to twice as many marketers.

With respect to the decline in newspaper editorial jobs, actually, a good study that needs to be done is an examination of trends in the utilization of freelance journalists by newspapers. While it’s clear newspapers are indeed eliminating headcount … it seems that newspapers such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are using a higher percentage of freelance journalists in recent years than ever before.

With the increased number of articles that are appearing online only (and the Wall Street Journal is a good example of this), there are many more opportunities for freelancers to byline articles. The Saturday and Sunday New York Times business sections have a significant amount of freelance-written content. Many of the Journal’s features, such as Career Journal, feature many freelance written stories.

The bottom line? I don’t see this as the decimation of the fourth estate. It’s just a matter of adaptation and the survival of the fittest.

Technorati Tags: media, Ad Age, Bradley Johnson, marketing consultancies, ad agencies, Booz Allen Hamilton, Association of National Advertisers, newspapers, freelancers, communications

Where Worlds Collide

By Robbin Goodman, Makovsky + Company

The feats made possible through technology perhaps were never struck home in quite as dramatic a fashion as the achievement of Israeli scientists at the Technion Institute in Haifa who inscribed the entire text of the Old Testament on a space less than half the size of a grain of sugar.

As reported by the Associated Press, the scientists "carved" the 300,000 words of text by blasting tiny particles called gallium ions at an object that then rebounded, causing an etching effect. (In case you were wondering, the previous smallest known copy of the Bible measured 1.1 x 1.3 x 0.4 inches, weighing 0.4 ounces and containing 1,514 pages, according to Guinness World Record).

Of course, we live in a world where we've all gotten rather blasé about breathtaking technology achievements. I still remember writing articles and press releases on manual typewriters, and the days before there was FedEx and email, never mind Blackberrys and instant messaging. It was in 1965 that Intel's Gordon E. Moore stated what came to be known as Moore's Law - the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, to paraphrase, doubling price-performance of semiconductors approximately every two years - and along with that, processing speed and power. Moore's Law, over 40 years old now, was said to continue to be alive and well at the end of 2007, although improved hardware performance is not always equated with innovation.

One of the first computers, the ENIAC, released in 1946, cost $500,000 and was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. It weighed 30 tons. We all have just as much or more computing power on our laptops and PDAs and Wiis for just a few hundred bucks.

That said, in spite of the difficulties of achieving true innovation these days, optimism and advancing technology go hand in hand. May they continue to flourish in the New Year and with them, humanity.

Technorati Tags: technology, Techion Institute, Guinness World Record, Intel, Moore's Law, ENIAC, Ballistic Research Laboratory, Wiis, innovation, communications

Time For a Facelift?

By Tim Kane, Makovsky + Company

I used to work for one of the legends of the advertising business, a woman known for her incredible talent, her great wisdom and her extraordinarily ageless beauty. Long past the time when a woman is expected to settle into a more matronly mien, Nina was still turning cranky captains of industry into tongue-tied schoolboys.

Naturally, this was a subject of great discussion around the agency. How did she manage it? Had she been nipped and tucked? “Of course she’s had work done,” a competitor once sneered. “It’s just that … you can’t tell where.”

When I finally got up the nerve to ask her, Nina didn’t hesitate. “I had a little lift,” she admitted. “When I was in my thirties.”

In your thirties?

“Well, you have to get the work done before anybody notices you need it.”

As I said, she’s wise as well as beautiful. And I was reminded of that wisdom today, as Makovsky + Company officially celebrated the launch of the newly revamped www.makovsky.com. Because the time to give your website a facelift is not when it starts to look a little long in the tooth, or when your customers and your constituents start having trouble with it.

The truth is, our original website was perfectly fine. Nobody was complaining about it. But the site did have a few wrinkles: It wasn’t as client-focused as it could’ve been. It wasn’t as easy to update and navigate as it should’ve been. It needed less copy in some places, and better copy in others.

And so, long before anyone started clamoring for changes, we redesigned the site. We made the navigation more intuitive, and the content richer and deeper. We added new content management software. We gave it a look and feel that was a more artful expression of our identity, and a more accurate reflection of our brand.

Nina’s already visited. “I love your new site,” she wrote. “And your picture looks exactly like Russell Crowe.”

Yes, she’s still beautiful.

But I think her eyesight is starting to go.

Technorati Tags: website+redesign, facelift, communications, public relations