Archive for December, 2008

Clink!

Once again, it’s a new year!  A part of me always loves the last day of the year a little bit more than the first day.  The last day is where you look back at all the adventures, memories (and…well, mistakes) and can wrap it up in a neat little box and look forward to the future.  If it was a bad year, then it’s over!  If it was a great year, it’s very satisfying to feel like you’ve accomplished something in a mere 525,600 minutes.

Incidentally, do you think anybody would know the amount of minutes in a year if it were not for that song?

Anyway, the FIRST day of the new year is different.  Other than being the first day, it’s also the new slate.  The new blank sheet of paper, and thus possesses a bit of pressure (oh the pressure) to get the new year started off with a bang.

At any rate, another practice I’ve grown to enjoy is the process of analyzing the previous year resolutions, the progress I made, and making new ones.  Unfortunately, I can’t really find my laundry list of 2008.  On the bright side, there were many happy accomplishments that made this year an exceptionally special one in my life (to date), and a lot of lessons learned.

Great moments of 2008…

• Moving to a whole new state
• Getting my own place for the first time since my dorm room in college
• Going skiing and snowboarding for the first time
• Going on my first business trip
• Finally starting a ‘real’ blog 
• Yosemite trip with friends
• Running my first ever half-marathon
• Taking my first planned trip to Disneyland
• Attending my first close friend’s wedding as maid-of-honor
• Dip party on the 4th of July in Dallas
• Meeting tons of new and fabulous people
• Reuniting with old and familiar friends in NYC

I’m pretty sure the best way to lose reader(s) is to, uh, not update. Like what I’ve been doing these past few days. But, in my defense, it’s pretty hard to blog when I’m too busy stuffing my face with food and cramming in as much fun and family time as possible.

It always catches me by surprise when I find myself about ready to leave and a friend or family member inquires, “when will you be back?” Instead of the usual college answer (sigh) of break, I really have to think: “when WILL I be back?”

Sad.

And, to cop out, here is an old YouTube video courtesy of one of my friends, rating M for mature due to the expletives included. You’ve been warned.

Although I don’t want to post too many personal things, this past weekend was an amazing time with old friends.  There were so many moments of laughter and reminiscing, adventures, mishaps, and all around fun.  To end the bittersweet moment where we found time to come together and part again, a friend picked up a book and shared this with us.  In the spirit of the season, I just wanted to share it as well - 

“And a youth said, Speak to us of Friendship.

And he answered, saying:

Your friend is your needs answered.

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

And he is your board and your fireside.

For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the ‘nay’ in your own mind, nor do you withhold the ‘ay.’

And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;

For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable are caught.

And let your best be for your friend.

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?

Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and the sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”

I’m in New York!  Hooray!  Other than the paranoia that my flight from Chicago would never leave the tarmac, things have been *knock on wood* a fairly smooth experience so far.  The only other kink is the small cold/flu developing, but I’m diligently smothering it with Emergen-C, throat drops and Sudafed.

Nothing much to really report today, other than to note with slight bitterness how ironic it is that I FINALLY have a two week vacation after a full year of work only to kick it off with a cold.  Hopefully this won’t mar the rest of the holiday season.

Oh, and on another note, I STRONGLY feel that there is quite a need for an enforcement of unspoken airline etiquette.  More on that later.  In the meantime, I’m just going to enjoy the company of familiar, close friends from the days of yore.

Peace out, yo

(Nope, still can’t pull that off)

Thus begins the first day of my holiday season, and it was made even more special with a brand new LAPTOP! 

Woo hoo!!!

Who says holidays are just for kids?  I love Santa.

On a not so related note (but related to an earlier post), I received a copy of a link to this post by David-George Cosh.  I thought it was very thoughtful, and definitely fair.

http://strangehold.com/blog/?p=18

Is the embargo really necessary?

Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has widely announced his complete reluctance to deal with embargoed information. Is he right? Maybe.

Although I’m going to try to write a story reflecting what the PR firms I deal with think about this issue, let’s assume Arrington is absolutely right.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

Embargoes are really widely used to curry some special favour with journalists who promise coverage in exchange for a certain level of exclusivity or timed media coverage. Personally, I love embargoes but would say I’ve actually engaged in them roughly two-thirds of the time. It’s always a nice break to be granted something in advance so I can walk, not run, to the editor, have a leisurely chat, not a rushed one, and decide if this is something I’d cover.

Although I really don’t get embargoes that much, I’ve also never, ever broke them and will never understand why someone would break a promise to report on it ahead of schedule. Call me a professional, but there’s to do otherwise is highly unethical, which is why I’m not applauding Arrington wholeheartedly here.

Arrington also describes the actions of one Lois Whitman, who appears to spam her targets with her PR pitches to the point of complete annoyance. Based on the evidence presented in that blog post, I’d say it’s a fairly easy to throw the rulebook out of the window. I’ve dealt with a few Lois Whitman’s myself and frankly, it’s easy for these types of PR professionals to be lumped with their peers into the single annoying flack category. As some of my colleagues would like to point out, this has made me very frustrated, something I hope people would understand given the amount of pitches I get daily.

The problem, as PR blogger Brian Solis says, is two fold. One is opportunistic bloggers or reporters looking for an edge will break a story ahead of the agreed-upon embargo and the other is just PR firms leveraging the embargo while privately knowing that the “scheduled” wire broadcast time isn’t that important anyways.

Hopefully, the outcome of Arrington’s lead could be a decidingly shift in how PR works with blogs and the mainstream media. If this concept of ignoring the embargo begins to take off, this will undoubtedly create a shift in how coverage is awarded to certain organizations. Will this make the reporters job harder? I’d like to hope not. But it might help the whole process between PR and reporters better.

Even though I’m not a blog writer (although I’m sure one day that will happen), the embargo will always be a welcome tool to my coverage. But it shouldalways, always, always be up to the PR rep to have an understanding of how the media works and what makes a good story will always win out in the end, something I rarily have seen during my experience with PR folk.

Trust and relationship building, as Allen Stern notes, is certainly part of the equation, but if Arrington’s ways catch on and PR folk can’t rely on their most powerful weapon in their arsenal anymore, I can only hope that the only outcome of this movement will force blanketing of cut-and-pasted pitches to die a welcome death.

One of the things that my mother asks me (over and over) is…what exactly do you do?  Short of drawing diagrams and taking her to my office, I usually just tell her that I help with media relations for clients.  I help clients relay their news, their story, and pass it along to the media who are (for the most part) reputable and admirable news mavens.

Every once in awhile, I get a lot of harsh responses from journalists.  Some yell, some belittle, and some just get crotchety.  I understand the frustration (after all, nobody likes to be bombarded with emails and phone calls) but at the same time, I sometimes wonder why some people feel it is perfectly justifiable to lash out.

All of this spurred from a recent article (no, not the infamous Chris Anderson letter from WIRED)…without further ado, check out the latest from Tech Crunch - justified, or someone just having a really bad day?

On one hand, I can understand a few of the complaints, and I understand his stance and somewhat convoluted encouragement to the industry to improve the way they conduct business.  Yet, on the other, I can’t help but think - Ok.  We get it.  You hate flacks.

Can’t we all just be friends and get along?

Any objective third party thoughts?

PR firms are out of control. Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.

Background:

Tech companies are desperate for press and hammering their PR firms for coverage on blogs and major media sites. That in turn means that PR firms hammer us to get us to write about their clients. Gone are the days of polite pitches and actual relationship building. Today, PR firms email a story to us as many as 20 times, and call every TechCrunch writer on their cell phones repeatedly. If we say we won’t write a story (which is most of the time), things often turn nasty (check out Lois Whitman at HWH PR/New Media for a fine example).

For the most part we’ve dealt with the problem quietly over the last couple of years, other than the occasional lashing out on Twitter. Others, like Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief Chris Anderson, have been more public with their frustration.

But now a new problem has emerged that we won’t ignore.

A portion of the stories we write are “embargoed” news items. They aren’t stories that we’ve dug up ourselves. Instead, PR firms have pre-briefed us on the news and have asked us to write, if we choose to, no earlier than a set time.

A lot of this news is good stuff that our readers want to know about. And we have the benefit of taking some time during the pre-briefing to think about the story, do research, and write it properly. When embargoes go right, we get to write a thoughtful story which benefits the company and our readers.

But there’s a problem. All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.

One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first.

That means it’s a race to the bottom by new sites, who are increasingly stressed themselves with a competitive marketplace and decreasing advertising sales.

A year ago embargo breaks were rare, once-a-month things. Today, nearly every embargo is broken, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes by half a day or more.

We can’t continue to operate under these rules.

Our New Policy

The reason this is becoming a larger problem is because there is no downside to breaking embargoes. The PR firm gets upset but they don’t stop working with the offending publication or writer. You get a slap on the wrist, and you break another embargo later that day.

There are a few (very few) exceptions. One is Waggener Edstrom, who handles PR for Microsoft. Their embargoes don’t break because they’d unleash hell on the offender. Another is Google. The few times they’ve had problems they’ve chosen the nuclear option and banned the offender for as much as a year. As you can imagine, Google and Microsoft embargoed news doesn’t break early.

We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

There will be exceptions. We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful - maybe three - people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes (if you are a PR person and wondering if you’re on that list, you’re not). But for the vast majority of news we get in our inboxes, we’re just going to fire it off to our readers ad hoc whenever we please.

This policy stays in effect until I update this post, which won’t be any time soon.

I’ll also be publishing a blacklist on TechCrunch listing every firm, company, publication and individual writer involved whenever an embargo is broken. Of course, given our new policy, I’ll be putting us at the top of that list.

A lot of kids (myself included) use the lame argument “how can I learn from my mistakes if you won’t let me make them?”

Now that I’m a lot older and wiser, I do firmly believe in passing along my little granules of wisdom wherever I can, so people don’t need to make the same mistakes (or go through the same misfortune) in order to come out better in the end.  Henceforth, you can find these granules here, on my little slice of the Internet pie.

The lesson for today is: Avoid wet manholes and grills on rainy days in San Francisco…unless you like slipping and landing on your face.

You’re welcome.

Yikes. So it’s been awhile since my last post.

Many apologies to the one or two readers out there.

Things lately have been crazy - not only professionally, but socially as well. Anybody who knows me or has an elongated conversation with me past five minutes knows that I -

1) love December and the holidays and
2) have the tendency to try to cram in as much as possible

I’m very thankful that things have been busy, actually. Although I do whine and complain about it and often pontificate on how luxurious it would be to sit and home and rot away with daytime television, I admit that I like things fast-paced. Although sometimes it’s nice to sit back and relax, sleep in or just veg around, one of the best feelings in the world is to feel productive.

I admire many of the friends, family and acquaintances out there who seem to juggle ten to fifteen projects each day - my mind is absolutely flummoxed at how they are able to budget their time. One friend is in the midst of working a full time job along with two very successful side projects, with yet another one down the pipeline (to write a column for a daily newspaper).

Envious? Yes. Absolutely confuddled as to how she is able to do it? Absolutely.

The first thing I asked her when we sat down for a drink a few weeks ago was - how do you do it? Without going into much detail, she told me that two people that she was fairly closely connected to passed away. Although it wasn’t a close family member or her best friend, it was enough to shake her to the core.

Recently, I found out that a classmate of mine since elementary school recently succumbed to lung cancer. We weren’t the best of friends, but we were stand partners and we shared a few mutual friends. The most incredible thing to me is the mere fact that she is just one year younger than me.

I know these things happen, but it never crosses your mind to think that it will actually happen to somebody you know. I’m not sure how I would react if it were a family member or a close friend. For now, my heart just goes out to the family that must be having one of the hardest Christmases…

And despite all the mild grumbles and groaning about a stressful time… I am just thankful for being able to go out and spend time with the people I love.

Christmas in San Francisco
What a lovely place to be
Seeing the hills being all lit up
Like a diamond Christmas tree
Hearing children singing carols
People come from everywhere
To sing along with the children
Standing all around Union Square

Christmas in San Francisco
Looking like some fairy land
People with gifts in the crispy air
Giving old Saint Nick a hand

Let’s take a peek in Chinatown
Eating lychee nuts and barbecued boar
What can you say about the Golden Gate
That hasn’t been said before

Christmas in San Francisco
There is no place quite so dear
It’s the closest thing to heaven
How I wish that you were here.

What can you say about the Golden Gate
That hasn’t been said before
Christmas in San Francisco
There is no place quite so dear
It’s the closest thing to heaven
How I wish that you were here.

I always like to skim the top headlines on Google News, mostly because I feel as if it keeps me in the loop (albeit superficially) of what is going on in the world.  Sometimes headlines really catch my eye and I end up clicking through to the article, only to be lead to a subsequent article, then another, and another….

At any rate, the one thing that caught my eye today was that it’s the anniversary of the mouse, which was demonstrated and invented a mere 40 years ago.  40 years!  Crazy.  That means a good majority of the population knows what life was like without computers, the Internet…and mice!  Strangely enough, I think the mouse was made before the PC.  Hrm.  Cart before horse, anyone?  

Happy birthday, mouse!

Admittedly, I think I have a fairly addictive personality. When I watch a television show that has cliffhangers, I have a hard time turning off the tv or computer screen if I have a few more episodes left that I could watch.

When I played video games that roped me in with their storyline, I end up roaming around just a few hours longer. And, when the final book of Harry Potter came out, I curled up on the couch and my tired eyes would not stop skipping and scanning across each page, drinking in the words and waiting to read what happens next. Even after five solid hours and a whole night of no sleep, it was hard for me to put the book down.

The point of all this?

Social media.

Facebook, Twitter, email, and tens of thousands of ways that I can check statuses, updates, posts are just continual digital feed for my insatiable appetite of addiction.

At any rate, the wayward point I am trying to make is that I was checking my phone on my way home tonight when I found a link from one of the Twitter-ers that I follow in one of her tweets:

Ever get text shorthand and think what the heck is this? not anymore! http://tinyurl.com/5o61

I clicked on it. And a part of me thought it was funny, another thought it was ridiculous, and third part thought it was rather sad that people are either -

1) SO ridiculously lazy
2) haters of the English language

Of course, I get that there are text “codes” that people in other countries use. And I get, for ease of use, that messages should be succinct. But therein lies the point, people! Much like twitter, texting should be SUCCINCT, not a way to be 1) or bastardize the English language! Shakespeare and Carroll gave us deliciously wonderful words, so descriptive in even the mere way they roll off the tongue.

Now our future children will send messages like this -

omfglmaobbqroflcopteriss OOTD NW, AFAIAA, will PPL SPK NRMLY. SICNR. TBH, SSINF!

Bleh.

Don’t get me wrong. I love abbreviations. Hence, one of my favorites -

WTF!!!