Cedar Mill Communications

One of the best things about having an annual subscription to the Associated Press Stylebook is its regular updates. I learned how the Christmas Day bomber spells his name, for instance, and how it’s pronounced. It’s Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (OO’-mahr fah-ROOK’ ahb-DOOL’-moo-TAH’-lahb). In my line of work, I don’t deal with terrorist suspects, but I appreciate knowing the info’s there anyway.

Just this week I got another update that made me realize I’m not too technologically challenged – at least in knowing the terms for fast-changing technology. AP has listed nearly 50 terms or words with new definitions that are associated with social media. In fact, the editors have created a whole section called Social Media Guidelines in which the umbrella term is defined: “tools that allow the sharing of information and creating online communities.” I applaud the conciseness. While you could argue you’d have to have been under a rock the past few years not to know about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, it’s also clear that traditional media reporters have a lot to learn about their online cohorts, whom they do they quote. AP points out (to those gullible few) that “phony accounts are rampant in the social media world.” You don’t say.

The fact that AP just now chose to recognize – and in its way legitimize – social media, says to me that the editors were like most conservative institutions and dismissed friending and tweeting as passing fads, but now have decided, like most of us, to just go with it. Why not get a Facebook page? It’s a great way to keep up with folks and reconnect with old, nearly forgotten friends.

By the way, I ran through the terms just to make sure I knew them all. I did pretty well; only hashtag threw me.

Share on Facebook

I have to admit we named our company Cedar Mill Communications because No. 1 it’s where we live, but No. 2 because I thought a tree would make a nice logo for our business cards. Turns out both are still true, but it’s also true that we’re even more firmly rooted to this lovely area now that we’re members of the Cedar Mill Business Association, a community and business organization that works in our unincorporated part of Washington County.

You’ll be hearing more about the CMBA in coming posts. If you live in the area, those colorful flower baskets that will soon be hanging from Cedar Mill light posts are a CMBA effort. Virginia Bruce, the editor of the Cedar Mill News featured us – along with several other local businesses in the April issue’s New Member Spotlight. So have a look, and please introduce yourself at the next CMBA meeting.

Share on Facebook

I like the sound of those words liberation theology. I like that you can sense freedom through words, in this words from a person of God. Just the sound of those words inspires me. Even better the true meaning of them: if you believe and follow the words of Jesus, you will do right by all people. In other words if you’re a good Christian you will not abide oppression and inequality from one person to another.

I’m not aiming to preach here. I’m aiming to remind you that we, humans, are capable of much good.

Sunday we saw that we could come together for the greater good of all Americans and bring good, hopefully someday even affordable health care to all. We want to extend a hand so that young people, those with pre-existing conditions, those of us who haven’t stockpiled thousands or even millions to afford ever more expensive health care might have the same care our politicians have. We aren’t a society that believes “I got mine, now you get yours.” We showed we believe we all benefit if we’re healthy. If we’re able to worry less about a doctor visit busting the monthly budget – yeah, $100 per is a lot — never mind the thousands a surgery might cost.

I don’t feel as good about it as I would have if I’d gotten the option of joining a government plan that likely would have been less expensive and more comprehensive than the high deductible plan I have now. I’m envious of my German friends’ public/private plans that pay for everything, even dental, at a reasonable price. But I’m hopeful the Democrats will polish the offerings as they go along. I have no hope for the Republicans whose obstructionist ways seem without end.

How does liberation theology tie in with health care reform? And why am I talking about it now? Today’s the 30^th anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, by a paid government assassin. He was gunned down during Mass, the day after he’d pleaded with El Salvador’s police-cum-thugs to listen to the small, quiet voice in their hearts — the one that compels us to love one another. Those guys preferred to listen to the rightist government that paid them to kill a man of God. Romeo spoke out against the government that had sent death squads to kill the poor who had the audacity to fight for fairness against the government that had been rewarding only the wealthy for years.

Romero’s legacy was mixed in that his death started a 12-year civil war in which thousands died or were displaced. But when that ended El Salvador saw a 70 percent reduction in armed forces, economic growth programs to alleviate poverty and monitored elections. It’s still not a wealthy place, but El Salvadorans born today can expect to live just about as long as Americans, which is a huge step up from Romero’s time. He lost his life for seeking equality and dignity for all, not just those who can pay for it.

Share on Facebook

The editors of the Wall Street Journal probably thought the story of Angela Iannelli and her parrot Luke, prominently displayed in a full color photo teaser, above the fold, in today’s paper was a good color story. It was. The story was an ooops, look what the silly bank did piece about how Bank of America erroneously sent a contractor into Ms. Iannelli’s house, changed the locks, shut off her utilities, fouled her toilets (?!), damaged her flooring and took her bird — all as part of the process of booting out a deadbeat mortgagee. Turns out she wasn’t in foreclosure. Nope, she wasn’t even behind in a payment.

Understandably, she was pretty darned upset at the turn of events, particularly the abduction of her parrot. She lost track of him for over a week (one wonders how the poor thing was treated while in custody), and wound up with anxiety such that she needed medication. Gee, I need medication just thinking about the mess she must have faced. Imagine coming home to a trashed house? Well, trying to come home to one. The locks were all changed.

The story reminds me of a book I read recently, The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. It’s the story of a murder involving a parrot that was thought to be a witness. But the bird was abducted because he endlessly recited a series of numbers that the killer thought was the code for a Swiss bank account. When a friend of mine first heard the story of the bank error/parrot taking she thought maybe the bird was spouting pin numbers. Ah, that would be nice touch, wouldn’t it: Big BofA worried a parrot was going around reeling off customers’ pins.

Sadly, it was the bank that was (again) the culprit. Taking $20 billion in taxpayer money wasn’t enough. They take a parrot, too.

Share on Facebook

Committing to buying a spot in the Super Bowl is always a big risk due to the vast sums of money at stake. For those with the wherewithal to pull it off, a big splash around the Super Bowl may generate more buzz than a year’s worth of mediocrity.

The year’s game, featuring one of football’s biggest stars in Peyton Manning and the feel good story of the past year in the New Orleans Saints, was the most watched TV show in the United States ever with 106.5 million viewers. With all the entertainment options people have now compared to when the previous record was set by the MASH finale in 1983, this is an amazing accomplishment.

Even more astonishing, people don’t DVR the Super Bowl and zip past the ads; instead they sit in groups and watch the ads intently hoping for a big laugh. In my case, I printed out a list of the expected ads from adbowl.com and had the people at the party help me decide on the rankings. (Next year, I’ll be doing this in realtime with the aid of my iPad).

More than just the massive, rapt audience, marketers also get the benefit of all the hype and exposure surrounding the Super Bowl.

And, now, it has caught on with social media.

BtoB magazine reports that of the 38 brands that ran TV spots during the Super Bowl, 75% saw the number of blog posts about their brands double, compared with the average number of blog posts on Sunday evenings over the past six months. Overall, blog posts about the Super Bowl increased to 25,725 this year, up from 15,702 last year. Of these, more than 3,600 posts were specifically related to advertising. Twitter also saw increased Super Bowl-related activity, with more than 720,000 tweets about the game.

Seriously, if you’re a marketer and you’re considering this brand-building extravaganza, do it. But do it right.

Here are a few basic observations on what “right” looks like. It still boggles the mind that companies can get this wrong. I’m not going to bash anyone, but there were some real stinkers in the mix, as there have been in the past.

1. Be clever and funny. David Letterman nailed this with his 10 second spot with Oprah and Leno. Did it help Leno? Who cares, it was funny and led to gobs of media coverage. Learn from this folks. We’re watching the Super Bowl at a party and we want to be amused.
2. Don’t get old and worn out. Hey is anyone home at eTrade and GoDaddy? The baby thing isn’t funny anymore (loved it first time out) and GoDaddy, it’s time to move on. Come up with something new.
3. Big names doing funny things work. The consensus #1 ad this year was Snicker’s with Betty White and Abe Vigoda. Hyunda’s ancient Brett Farve and VW’s Punch Dub with Stevie Wonder and Tracy Morgan also were hits with the audience.
4. If you can’t be funny, sentimental works too. Google’s surprise ad – which had been on YouTube for a few months – about using search for Paris love was fantastic. Our crowd thought that it was the winner.
5. Keep coming back – but with new stuff. Audi’s brand is quickly moving to the top of the charts. The German automaker has been on the Super Bowl roster for a couple of years and had a clever entry this year.
6. Maximize your PR and social media outreach. Be sure to wrap lots of marketing, PR and social media activities around your investment in the Super Bowl.
7. Give stuff away. As was humorously portrayed by terrified chickens, Denny’s used the Super Bowl to promote free Grand Slams on Tuesday. Well it worked. At least one of my neighbors braved the crowds to get her eggs and hash browns.

If you missed out on the Super Bowl, you still have some big sporting events on tap. In particular you might want to think about real football, as in Futbol or Fußball, like what’s played everywhere else on the planet. If the US team makes the World Cup quarterfinals or semifinals it will be huge. Or not. Like it or not, the Super Bowl is the biggest and best brand building machine in the US today.

Share on Facebook

Too often it seems our world is surprised by violence or death or simply disappointment. I can’t bring myself to read the Wall Street Journal some mornings when the world or the country has had a particularly awful previous day. (The Oregonian doesn’t upset me as much – don’t know why.) But in the past few days I’ve been pleasantly surprised by two events: the birthday of the coining of “serendipity” and a true incidence of the same.

On the first. Serendipity was first coined on January 27, 1754, by British member of Parliament Horace Walpole. In a letter to a friend living in Italy he mentioned he’d come up with the word from a fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip,” in which “as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Though they were from Serendip – today Sri Lanka – their happy accidents (and I do believe they must have been happy) seems to me the best way to travel.

Which brings me to event two. Our morning dog walk often takes us to a small park near the house. Lost Park isn’t really lost, but it is far from the madding crowds, especially in the mornings after the official work day has begun. This morning we climbed the stairs at the base of the park and heard music drifting over the trees and the tennis courts. As we got further in, it became clear it was trumpet music – random notes, perhaps scales, then gradually bars of a song I thought I could pick out. What could be more charming then a sunny February day in a cool and lush park populated only by two people, three dogs and one trumpet player (with her own dog) playing the Pink Panther theme song?

мебель в болгарии

Share on Facebook

Tablets like what Steve Jobs and Apple just introduced have long been forecast in science fiction, so you just knew that sooner or later devices like this would become reality. 

Steve Jobs with his new pad.

For example, in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke describes something called a “Newspad” that Heywood Floyd, “plugs into the ship’s information circuit and scans the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.”

While there will be little need to know codes by heart, Clarke’s vision of getting electronic papers on a pad-like device is finally here.  To be sure the iPad is likely far from perfect, I fully expect that it will inevitably become more refined and in the process move us much further to full electronic delivery of premier content – much of which is currently paper-based. 

Sure you can get content on either a smartphone or a laptop, but neither is ideal. The smartphone is just too small and the laptop is too clumsy. I just don’t find myself sitting at breakfast surfing news on my laptop, or trying to peer into a tiny screen on the BlackBerry. 

Instead I get volumes of newspaper – big piles of it that inevitably end up being recycled.  Speaking of which, the environmental impact of all that paper is not good. Paper consumes large amounts of water and energy, levels forests, and requires many gallons of fuel to get it to my doorstep. Electronic delivery has almost zero impact in comparison.

I can, however, imagine using the iPad as my daily news feed. What’s more there’s economic justification simply on the basis of replacing paid-for printed content I currently consume.  While I expect to still pay for the electronic content, the price will go down significantly.  Note that some of the publications have yet to adopt eReader technology like what the NY Times currently offers, but publishers that expect to survive will offer similar technology. Based on my calculations, I figure I could save $652 per year, easily justifying a $499 iPad.

Beyond lowering costs, the iPad will deliver a much improved experience.  Publishers will be able to blend video and printed words. Instead of a few photos, I will be able to see the entire sequence if I so desire. I’ll also be able to look up related information, or make comments. Basically it’s everything we love about the Web, but in a nice magazine-like format.  When I’m travelling, all I’ll need to pack is my iPad and a cell phone. No longer will I need a few magazines, a couple of books, media player, GPS, or even a laptop. And, of course, there will be countless numbers of cool apps.

Sounds like science fiction? Not anymore.

Share on Facebook

In my last post, Real Journalism, I pointed out the benefit of educating and paying people to investigate and write about our world. How else will we know about abuses of power or inequality or any number of societal ills? But as a writer, if I’m given a choice between tackling a paying job that comes in or writing a blog about a subject that rankles me, I’ll take the paying one. The bills can’t be paid on ire after all.

I still stand by that argument. But I’ve learned that the blogosphere does have the power to help traditional media effect change. The most recent evidence is a story of how a New York City college student went up against two large retail chains over an apparent policy to destroy unworn clothing they couldn’t sell. Cynthia Magnus found garbage bags of slashed clothing outside a NYC H&M store along with bags of clothing bearing Wal-Mart tags that had been punched full of holes. Rather than donate the clothing, the retailers left them fit only for the garbage dump. H&M’s action was especially egregious because the garbage bags of destroyed clothing were just around the corner from a collection point from New York Cares, a charity that collects coats for the needy.

I heard the story as a quick news blurb on KINK, the station my alarm is set to. I woke up thinking geez, what a crappy thing to do in a city with so many poor people – and such cold weather.

Turns out the story didn’t spring from a blog as KINK reported, but from the New York Times. Magnus had tried unsuccessfully to contact H&M. When they wouldn’t give her the time of day, she turned to the Times. Two days after the story ran H&M issued a promise to donate, not destroy unsold clothing. I searched but didn’t find out what happened with Wal-Mart. The story got picked up by AP and ran about everywhere. Twitter even got in on the action, as one blogger claimed the flurry of tweets led H&M to straighten up. What this says to me is that reporters and bloggers and people who twitter (twitterers?) can have a synergy that leads to action, in this case for cold, poor New Yorkers.

Share on Facebook

We were playing Loaded Questions following a delicious Christmas dinner with our Olympia, Wash., relatives Ann, Eric and Faye and Eric’s girlfriend Julie. One question we drew was to name a profession that would be extinct in 10 years. Two of the group guessed journalism-related jobs: paper delivery and journalists in general. How could I argue with our own Oregonian shrinking like the Wicked Witch of the East before our very eyes and other newspapers laying off reporters, photographers, even editors. As a copyeditor who’s worked at several newspapers and magazines, I feel sometimes like a horseshoer watching horseless carriages taking over the road.

Here’s an argument for keeping the journalism profession alive. I’m talking about the kind of journalism I went to school to learn and get a degree in, not the kind of stuff we call New Media. My argument goes like this: Someone with writing and reporting skills gets paid to use them for the ferreting out of information vital to us all. I’m sitting here trying to cook dinner, do laundry and walk the dogs, feeling the need to write, but hey, if a paying job comes in I’ll drop the blog post-haste.

When I worked at the News Tribune (sorry, no link; it’s been dead for years) or the Press-Enterprise or the Portland Tribune those folks got my undivided attention because they helped pay the bills. Don’t get me wrong, I admire writers and editors who will work for free. In fact, I advise fresh-out-of-J-school grads to do just that: give away their writing by working gratis for some publication — any publication that will give them clips. But that can’t go for long. Nor should it. I was reminded recently about why we desperately need paid, skilled journalists.

The Oregonian ran an investigative piece on Dec. 30 on the sale of green energy tax incentives to corporations, among them Wal-Mart, Costco and U.S. Bank, that effectively allowed these companies to avoid paying millions of dollars in state taxes — and here’s the clincher — without actually doing anything green. Turns out these tax incentives can be bought and sold just like derivitives — but at a much better rate of return.

‘Course we Oregonians lose the tax income, but that’s business, right?
I’d never have known about that if the Oregonian wasn’t around. Good job Harry Esteve.

Example number two: the graph from the Washington Post that ran on A4 of the same edition showing every U.S. senator’s vote on the health care reform bill along with how much money each has gotten from health care lobbyists and the percentage of uninsured in their states. How can senators Hutchison and Cornyn sleep at night knowing they voted against reform when their state, Texas, has the highest rate of uninsured in the nation? And John McCain (who can Twitter) pulled in more than $9 million in lobby geld voted lock-step with the other pull-up-the-ladder Republicans. His state only has 19% uninsured. I’m sure those folks will understand his vote, right? Interestingly John Kerry got more than $8 million from health care groups but he voted for reform.

I guess you can see where my loyalties lie. Given a choice between blogging and newspapers, I’ll take real journalism any day — every day, pitched on my driveway!

Share on Facebook

First of all, I confess that I don’t go in for Twitter. I’m way behind John McCain on that one. I just don’t feel the need to send off a comment about my breakfast (granola and copious cups of coffee, if you must know) or the dust bunnies under my desk (dog hair, actually). Brian, on the other hand, twitters constantly. Nothing’s sacred, though usually it’s comments about music or work or the dogs. Hopefully not too much in the way of personal stuff about me (gasp!).

I’m more of a Facebooker. I like the give and take of posting to people I actually know and getting feedback. Like the day I noticed there is a variation on raindrops on weather.com. Your basic rainy day rates six drops; a gullywasher, a couple more. We take our rain seriously here; so any time someone else does too, even if it’s only a rain graphic, it’s cause for an appreciative nod. When I noted that on my status, I got some almost instant comments from fellow Northwesterners — a couple of Washingtonians, an Idahoan, an Oregonian, even a Californian.

So, regarding the people who partake in Twitter, here’s my question: What do you call them? As an editor, I need to know this. Those of you out there who do imbibe, so to speak, let me know. I’ll fire off a reply to ex-AP Editor Norm Goldstein who writes for Copyediting magazine and who wrote on the subject recently, sharing my burning question. He’s probably a Luddite like me, so I’ll use old-fashioned email.

Share on Facebook