The rarest and purist form of public relations

An honest apology 

How many times in a lifetime do you hear the CEO of a major corporation use phrases like "I messed up" and "I owe everyone an explanation?" But there on his blog, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings came clean.



The company's disastrous decision to increase monthly rates by 60 percent to $16 from $10 resulted in Netflix cutting its subscriber projections by nearly 1 million members, or 4 percent of its total, and losing 56 percent of its stock price from its high. In the blog post, Hastings explains the miscues. "I slid into arrogance based upon past success."

Hastings' honesty is startling, considering that leaders today rarely take the blame and instead choose to pin problems on others. Particularly telling of this entire situation is where Hastings made his confession. Online. On the company's own blog. Direct to customers. Not mediated, deliberated, or reinterpreted by others.

In doing so, Hastings presents a compelling case by sharing his angst and explaining the difficulty any organization faces in embracing change. It's tough, he acknowledges, to accept a changing world, and difficult to know how fast is too fast to move a company forward.

What LinkedIn IPO investors know that the rest of the world might not

As I write this, LinkedIn shares are trading around $100, roughly double the price at which they debuted. Does this suggest smart money recognizes the value of this B2B social networking platform? Investment wisdom aside, the IPO sets the stage for LinkedIn to become an even more important channel of business communications, something that the investment community is uniquely positioned to understand.

Perhaps more than anyone else, smart investors realize that it’s not what you know, but who you know. And many investors have been using LinkedIn as a powerful tool to effectively get to know more people around the world. These new contacts then provide a valuable source of additional information and opinion that investors use to improve their investment success.

In my own research, I have found that investors are some of the most effective LinkedIn users. Unlike the typical user who views LinkedIn as a destination to host their resume online, the financial community is doing more to fully exploit its commercial potential.

The power of conspiracy theory in public relations and why the president's messaging is dead on point

For the Obama administration, yesterday was its finest moment of messaging. The decision to not release images of Osama bin Laden's corpse is fraught with peril during an age when conspiracy theorists can command the discourse even in the face of fact and evidence.

I have written extensively about the power of conspiracy theories throughout this blog, and how they can overwhelm reason and rationale, regardless of whether the topic is alien bodies at Roswell, stolen elections in Florida, or presidents born on foreign soil.

But yesterday, the administration took great strides in muting the conspirators and dulling the inevitable stories they will seek to peddle in the years to come.

Twitter vs. UberMedia: It's about time

UberMedia, a developer of applications and Web-based services, including various Twitter clients, said it might be interested in developing a product to directly compete with Twitter, a product that would allow for, among other things, the ability to write more than 140 characters.

I wondered, is the 140-character restriction on Twitter a limitation, or an advantage?

With more than 200 million registered Twitter accounts, will it take more than an extra character or two (or 100!) to convince people to switch and try a new platform?

So, just as many of us on Twitter do all the time when we are researching a topic or seeking opinions, I asked by tweeting it: Is Twitter’s 140-character UI a limitation or an advantage?

If you see only one monster movie this year, make it "The Social Network"

Here at Gregory FCA, we decided last week to be among the first viewers in the country to see David Fincher's "The Social Network." So Friday, late in the day and hours before the film's general release, we bought out the house at the nearby Bryn Mawr Film Institute, where I serve on the board, and invited about 200 of our closest friends to join us for the free premier.

For communications professionals, the film is so much more than just a retelling of the story of Facebook. Rather it opens to public display many of the issues we grapple with daily in back of walls, away from clients and the public.

In deep relief and unflinching candor, "The Social Network" challenges us to examine whether social media draws us closer together, or if it drives us further apart, and whether social media, such as Facebook, is about community and sharing, or exclusivity and manipulation.

Drawing from three distinct points of view, the film recounts how Facebook rose from the obsession of an arrogant, insecure Harvard sophomore (or should I say asshole, as he is repeatedly called in the movie), to one of the most powerful communication mediums of our time with some 500 million members and a market value of $33 billion.

It lays bare a world where status trumps even money and a cold, calculating consciousness wins out over loyalty and human emotion. Mark Zuckerberg is drawn in dark, heartless ink, driven by his outsider status to embarrass and ostracize others through his sheer computing prowess.

In Zuckerberg's world, creating a site that humiliates Harvard co-eds, steals others' intellectual property, and crashes the computer network of the country's most elite college is all fair game and paybacks to those whom he believes are dismissive of his considerable intellectual capabilities. Victims include his first real love, his only real friend, and two blue-blood Olympic rowers who at first refuse to sue Zuckerberg due to a quaint, Havardian sense of civility.

Irony reigns as we serve witness to the birth of social media at the hands of a seemingly near-autistic, anti-social being. As consumers and professional communicators, we are left to ask ourselves whether Facebook's calculated Rosemary's Baby-like birth -- which represents the antithesis of its public persona -- is worthy of our patronage.

Now we know that every feature, including the status bar, was conceived from an adolescent drive to determine who is sleeping with whom, and cash in the sexual chits that come from being that kid. The one who hacked a site or raised some venture capital or made millions while still in college.

So what will be the public relations price paid for such a monstrous portrayal? It will be great, as testified by Zuckerberg's decision the other week to donate $100 million to the Newark Public School System. I guess Zuckerberg's PR people think that the best way to get out in front of this steamroller is to slow it with wads of $100 bills. But you can't flatten graphic storytelling.

Millions of those who love Facebook will now have to re-evaluate their need to post those vacation photos for the world to see -- particularly, as the movie suggests, because Zuckerberg's greatest gift is simply the ability to exploit the blind spots of others.

Just who owns those vacation photos and personal data we all post to Facebook anyway? After seeing the movie, you can't help but wonder how that data is already being exploited, for reasons much more hideous than the simple sin of greed. So whatever happened to Friendster anyway? Maybe I should renew my old account.

Media malpractice or more?

Was the Quran-burning story a result of media malfeasance or an example of a non-story made a story by the legitimacy of others? 

What started as a tweet in July gave way to one of the most unimportant and over-reported stories of the year. And only by analyzing the media's response to Pastor Terry Jones' threat to burn a copy of the Quran can we appreciate the more nuanced side of public opinion and reputation management.



How could an unknown, unimportant, fringe figure with only 30 followers come to dominate national headlines for nearly a week? And why, at a time of great national economic and political uncertainty, did the media invest so many resources in such a non-story, overlooking real news with true gravitas?

Certainly, it could have all been the lunacy of the situation, juxtaposed against the mosque-building controversy near Ground Zero. For those in the media who support the building of the mosque, the Quran burning provides further evidence of anti-Islam sentiment and ices an already slippery slope they believe America is headed down.

But dig deeper and you discover that the real fan of the flame had nothing to do with New York mosque-building or media bent left or right. Rather, the Quran story is a perfect example of how we as PR counsels have to advise our clients. Every day, we must remind our clients that every issue does not warrant a response, and commenting to or about lunatics is a surefire way of elevating a story best left untold.

I am reminded of a recent issue about an iron manufacturer that was facing allegations of hiring illegal immigrants. A distorted and heavily edited YouTube video suggested as much. But the issue itself was nothing more than a union trying to undermine an open-shop business. Enraged, the client wanted to go on the offensive and make public the union's dirty tricks.

The smarter tact, though, was to ignore a potentially inflammatory situation that if handled poorly, could have transformed the client into a central figure in a national debate over illegal workers. We urged them to relent. They listened. They went back to selling iron, no less the wear.

In the case of Pastor Terry Jones, the story became a story after Gen. David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and President Barack Obama either reached out or chimed in on the issue, thus elevating it to the status of news. Pastor Jones rode the coattails of other men's errors and gained weight and prominence. Once this standard was met, media were free to cover the issue with impunity as to their own wisdom. A non-news story became news because of another's mismanagement.

It's a common situation -- one we as PR practitioners increasingly face in a world where anyone can gain voice, no matter their legitimacy. The Internet provides the forum. But does it all require a response? The answer depends on:

1. Are you effectively monitoring? Averting self-triggered communication annihilation is often as easy as knowing what's being said about you, your company, and its brand. In the Quran case, media were monitoring the situation, and knew that Islamic media were covering it. But that wasn't enough to elevate the issue to a story domestically. Rather it required legitimate responses from legitimate sources -- Petraeus, Gates, and Obama -- to trigger coverage. If level heads had prevailed, they would have realized that Terry Jones did not warrant a response, and the risk of doing so was transforming it into a national media story.

2. Who is the source and is it legitimate? Terry Jones was only legitimized after national figures responded to him. Our military and political figures need to stay clear of the lunatic fringe, rather than invite them into the dialogue.

3. Who are the influencers? The hothouse of the Internet can incubate non-stories into stories. CNN's Rick Sanchez, who first covered this story stateside after seeing it on Twitter in July, did us all a disservice by not ignoring a tweeting moron.

4. Is there any way to respond short of a public forum? Political and military leaders have a full arsenal of tools to respond. Does it have to be public, in light of media scrutiny?

5. Who responds, if a response is required? The Terry Jones case is directly analogous to any number of comments that take place 24/7 online. Those that require a response can often be taken care of by service-level employees, not the CEO. By elevating the response to Terry Jones to the most powerful people in the world, a story was made, the die was cast, and the rest of the madness ensued.

Public affairs in the Gulf Coast

With today's post, we're going to take a break from our usual reporting on PR to share with you a note we received from Ann Marie Gordon, a junior member of the firm, who is also a communications specialist and reservist in the U.S. Coast Guard. Ann Marie is participating in the Coast Guard's response to the Gulf oil spill. Here are her thoughts from ground zero.

---

Hi everyone!

Thank you so much for the box of Hope's cookies! I got word that I received a package and when I went to go pick it up, there were a bunch of Coasties waiting for me to open it because they saw cookies on the box. They are delicious, as always, and still soft and fresh! I really appreciate the thought, I never realized how comforting it can be to get a package from home.

I still can't believe I'm part of this response. I feel like it's turning into a political mess. One problem just turns into another one. I have been doing public affairs for two parishes (Louisiana is divided into parishes, not counties). They are only 10 minutes apart but they are dealing with completely separate issues. I'm right on the Gulf of Mexico and both places were hit with oil. Grand Isle was hit the hardest. I think it really hit me what was going on when I walked to the state park to watch the sunset over the gulf and I could smell the oil and I saw a dolphin swimming in the sheen that was washing in with the tide.

In Port Fourchon they are dealing with the moratorium the President placed on offshore drilling. If I wasn't here, I wouldn't really understand the effects this moratorium is having on the economy. I'm pretty confident in saying just about every person on this island has a tie to the oil business. Now with this ban, so many people are being put out of work. This just adds to the fisherman and restaurant business that is being affected by this oil spill. The gulf fuels about 18% of America and somewhere around 90% of the oil from offshore drilling is unloaded in Port Fourchon.

As a member of the Coast Guard, I can't get involved with the moratorium, that is just something the local government is dealing with. But when I walk around the community in my uniform, locals flock to me and I can just hear the hurt in their voices.

My primary responsibility down here is getting a Coast Guard presence in the media. I have secured interviews with USA Today, NYT, CNN, AP, CBS News, ABC News, FOX News, PBS, BBC, local New Orleans and Baton Rouge affiliates and foreign media.

I am here to document too. I am working on my first feature story today since the weather has shut down operations for the morning. But I have been taking a lot of pictures. The pictures I release, and any photos released by the Coast Guard or any military branch, are the public's domain. My photos made the covers of some smaller papers, my biggest has been the cover, above the fold, of The Washington Post and CNN and AP slide shows. And I have one picture running with BP ads on commercials and newspapers. I'm not really sure how I feel about that.

I'm starting to shift gears with coverage. I'm realizing now that national news has agendas. In a situation like this, I feel like it's most important to position to those most affected, the people of Louisiana. I have been reaching out to the local affiliates more to invite them to the staging areas to show all the good things the Coast Guard and the local communities are doing. The oil is still leaking, and the relief wells are projected to be completed in August, so I think it's important to show the people of Louisiana the continuous efforts to clean this up.

I was sent to the staging areas -- the areas hit with the oil -- and I hit the ground running. My hard work has paid off though because I am the only PA (CG public affairs specialist) that has not been pulled out of a staging area. I still have supervision and I am learning a lot but I am also teaching. The CG focuses a lot on the documenting aspect of the job and I help people at my rank realize the importance to reaching out to the media and getting the story out. I got so much out of this experience I can't express it in an email.

You can check out some of the photos I released here, and just search my name in the top left box.

Again, thank you so much for the cookies, it really means a lot coming from the company I work for. When I tell people I am a reservist the the first thing they ask is how is my full-time job taking this. I tell them I have full support and a great supervisor that really welcomes the experience I am getting from this response.

I hope everyone is doing well and I am looking forward to coming back soon!

Best,

Ann Marie

Gregory FCA's Ann Marie Gordon in the Gulf Coast

On writing well in public relations

CNN.com ran an interesting story this morning that quotes language guru Paul J.J. Payack as suggesting that the reason President Obama’s Tuesday night’s speech about the oil spill failed is that it was written at a 9.8 grade level. It's the highest grade level of any of his speeches, which average a 7.4 grade level.



This analysis is based on the presumption that most written work, especially that done by the media, is written at a sixth-grade level. It’s an urban legend that I have also been guilty of repeating, at times suggesting that a news release or executive speech needs to be simplified “to a sixth-grade level.”

But the entire notion of grade level communications is a red herring that fails because it breaks down language into discrete parts and then analyzes it by length of sentence and number of letters in a word. So the shorter the sentence and smaller the word, the lower the grade level and the easier it is to understand. Or at least the theory goes.

The entire notion is flawed. If you performed the same analysis on the music of The Beatles, you would come to a similar conclusion. After all, Paul, John, Ringo, and George used only four chords -- the same chords that any beginner learns in early lessons. Their lyrics? No greater words than you would expect from four boys from Liverpool.

The reality is that like The Beatles, great PR writing doesn't need to rely on an endless palette of multi-syllabic words. Rather, it's the specificity of the words chosen and how they are arranged that give us our power as communicators.

The best lessons of all were shared with me by my book and magazine editors when I was a freelance writer early in my career. Their advice was to get out of the way. Become invisible to the reader. They urged me to take command of readers’ thoughts by not tipping them off that I was controlling and manipulating their consciousness. That meant subordinating my own early tendencies to want to sound smart to the higher calling of imparting the most possible information in the tightest, quickest manner.

This week I met with our firm’s incoming class of interns, 10 young people pulled from the best colleges in America. I asked them, “How much would you pay if I could give you a ray gun that could control other people’s thoughts?” They all laughed and told me it was impossible.

I corrected them, and explained that when you write well, you are taking control of the reader’s thoughts. In essence, a well-written news story, blog post, or news release takes over another person’s consciousness, hijacks their awareness in favor of the ideas, concepts, and thoughts you prefer them to consider at a given time. Pretty powerful stuff. And certainly not the stuff of sixth-grade English class.

Contrary to Paul J.J. Payack’s research, the value of good writing cannot be calculated by simple word and letter counts. Here’s the real way a skilled writer controls the thoughts of a reader:

1. Disguises bias. Great PR writing is opaque in that you can’t see through to the writer’s agenda, opinions, or biases. It reads objectively and news-like in its presentation, when in reality, it quickly instills in the reader’s mind the importance of the facts, news, or story.

2. Appears in a style close to how a journalist might write it. Consider the typical news release with the obligatory corporate descriptors and disclaimers. Would it ever appear in the media in a similar format or style? Never. Whoever wrote the rule that news releases have to start with the company or product name, followed immediately by a tagline or description of the product or company, was a bad writer. Find him. Shoot him. Such notions have failed us in PR, who always champion the easy conveyance of a client’s sentiment or worldview.

3. Succeeds despite optimization. We now have a new restraint of good writing. The need to optimize news releases and blog posts for almighty Google. It’s a necessary evil. But it shouldn’t disrupt the normal flow of language.

4. Uses verbs and facts. Not adjectives. An editor of mine used to demand four facts in every sentence and a fine pruning of all adjectives. He demanded that writing be salted with power verbs (not unlike the word salted). Verbs, not adjectives, propel language. Two sentences can often be reduced to one by combining the facts of each into a single thought.

5. Plays well lyrically. Writing is lyrical. Bad writing is horsey, clunky, and plays poorly to the ear. Good writing is effortless, seemingly dispensable in the moment while lasting a lifetime in intention and meaning. It hits the right notes, clearly articulating all messages.

6. Speaks to the reader. The #1 rule of writing has always been, and will always be, know your audience. Perhaps more than any other principle, this one strikes at the heart of the grade level writing test. A good PR writer knows when to assume the voice of the CEO and speak to an audience of investors or regulators in exacting terms. But that same writer needs to understand when to assume a chatty, more personal style to score meaning with customers and employees. It might not be The Beatles, but it’s certainly not for a sixth-grader.

So I would hasten CNN not to give gurus like Paul Payack and his company, Global Language Monitor, much credence. Speeches don’t succeed or fail because they were written on a 10th-grade level. They rise or fall by the six points laid bare in this post.

A public relations game plan for BP

So finally this weekend, we received some good news from the Gulf Coast. BP's containment dome appears to be capturing significant amounts of the oil spill, and BP CEO Tony Hayward told the BBC he expects this latest development could lead to the vast majority of the leak being captured at, or near, the well head.

Even with this news, BP is left in a disastrous PR position, forever tattooed as the perpetrator of the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Can they ever rebound? Exxon did from the Valdez oil spill, even though a recent forensic study revealed open pools of oil still scar the shoals of Prudhoe Bay, 20 years after the catastrophe.

With more than $6 billion in first quarter earnings, BP certainly has the financial wherewithal to weather the storm. But the company has to change its approach to the public, and take real and lasting steps to systemically transform itself into a company that understands the public trust it holds in its hands every time it undertakes the risky endeavor to sink a well. Here's what I would be telling BP:

1. Put up or shut up. Now that progress is being made to capture the leaking oil, it's time for BP to put up a $1 billion remediation fund for the people of Gulf Coast. Use the money to ramp up restoration. Pay off claims. Bail out busted businesses. And clean the shores and wetlands. It's a monumental challenge that takes money. BP has the money and needs to spend it now to reclaim any hope of salvaging its global reputation. It's also in the best interest of BP shareholders. Without strong and quick action, the company faces tremendous risk that can be mitigated through sincere and immediate action.

2. Put up another $200 million to fund oil industry remediation research, centered at Louisiana State University. Since Edwin Drake, the oil industry's technological breakthroughs have focused on getting oil out of the ground. Horizontal drilling. CO2 injection. Tethered platforms. Deep water drilling needs technology to keep oil in the ground or from ever hitting the ground, beaches, and oceans. The unintended consequence of Prudhoe Bay is that the world actually believes steam and paper towels can clean up an oil spill. (They can't and they don't.) Oil industry technology has to go beyond simply drilling deeper and cleaning up the mess after the fact. The industry needs to develop new technologies to contend with the risk of today's deep water drilling, whether here, in the North Sea, or off Norway.

3. Get Tony Hayward off American TV. A recent study conducted by Gregory FCA shows that Hayward's reputation has cratered since BP started airing TV commercials with him serving as spokesperson. The American ideal of a leader isn't someone who looks like Liz Lemon's fall-back love on "30 Rock," Welsey Snipes. (No, not that Wesley Snipes.)

Separated at birth: Tony Hayward ...

Wesley Snipes (not that Wesley Snipes)


Rather, we need to see and hear from a fellow American who has a vested interest in our country, not the whiny Hayward, who recently lamented that he can't wait for the crisis to be over so he can get his life back.

Can public relations free us from the tyranny of recommendation software?

In an interesting article in last week's Time magazine, writer Lev Grossman gives readers an inside look at how recommendation software is used by online giants such as Pandora, Netflix, and Match.com to suggest relevant topics and products.

It's a good read, and full of little-considered issues as to how this software is created and what factors go into associating one song, movie, or lover with another. Once the purview of critics and reviewers, our tastes have been commandeered by software that constantly makes associations for us.

So if you listen to Pandora, your exposure to music is being controlled by an algorithm developed according to specific characteristics shared by the songs that Pandora is serving up at any given moment.

I started to shy away from the music recommendation software of iTunes and Amazon, and stopped listening to Pandora after realizing just how limiting my own taste in music had become. A year-long fetish for Death Cab for Cutie led me down an increasingly long, melancholy diet of Radiohead, Coldplay, and My Morning Jacket that ended when my personal trainer banished "slit-your-wrist" music during workouts.

As software becomes more important to consumer choice, we run the risk of narrowing our own field of vision, making it increasingly difficult for new products and services to break through our own air defenses. While convenient, recommendation software keeps us in a safety zone of music, products, and people who we already have some familiarity with.

It relegates us to our own tribe, and doesn't allow for that rare find of something new, outside the tried-and-true that might excite, educate, or expose us to a new thought, a new belief, or at least some new music that doesn't drown itself in self-sorrow (at least the way it did for me).

And perhaps that's good news for public relations practitioners. In a world of the expected, we have the skills and know-how to introduce audiences to the unexpected. Granted, it's not without bias. But it does run against the grain of mass recommendations made by the automated brain of the common wisdom. By playing against trends and bringing new ideas forward, we have the ability to break the lockstep that comes from recommendations based on past experience.

In the old days, that would be called news -- something other than convention. And news was -- and still is -- the very lifeblood of public relations. By countering trends, inverting the expected, we PR folks, perhaps better than any other player in the information markets, can help overcome the homogenization of taste and bring forth that which is outside what we have purchased, viewed, listened to, and dated in the past.

After reading the Time article, I am left wondering whether The Beatles, The Clash, Nirvana, and other game-changing bands would have been discovered by the masses and if they would have accounted for such great shifts in pop culture. None were based on the past.

All shattered expectation, rather than played to it, which is an important basic tenant of public relations and one that might explain why Lady Gaga is such a simple incarnate of Grace Jones and Madonna, and why, if recommendation software had existed in 1961, we still might be listening to Pat Boone.

Mommy, why don't companies talk like human beings?

Part of the public's disappointment over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico centers on our inability to gain any real information about the catastrophe. Five-thousand feet of water presents ample opportunity to conceal the truth, and BP has done little to nothing to inform the world as to the extent of the spill.

In an industry that prides itself on numbers (I should know, because my first job was working in public relations for an energy company compiling its annual fact book), it's remarkable that BP can't calculate the rate of flow from a well that cost $1 million a day to operate.

BP's unwillingness to share these numbers suggests that the spill is much larger than being estimated. Even more troubling is why our government refuses to force BP to divulge numbers, or even send our own research vessels and scientists to gain insight.

So then you turn to BP's website. Its homepage now opens in big bold letters that read, "Gulf of Mexico Response." There are a lot of links present, some of which are way too self-serving at this point in the crisis. I do give BP credit for linking to actual press interviews, many of which challenge BP managers for answers.

Click on the "TODAY Show" interview where Matt Lauer confronts BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles. Suttles is quick to note BP's success in inserting a four-inch tube into the collapsed underwater pipeline. But Suttles gives no idea how much of an impact the procedure will make, even after Lauer analogizes the process to inserting a straw into a swimming pool.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now turn to BP's own press releases, and you understand why BP's public response is failing. In written communications, the company turns to engineering jargon to give little real information about the incident. It makes you wonder, why don't companies talk like human beings? In times like these, why wouldn't BP want to impart meaning, instead of confusion?

Take the opening headline of one release. It reads, "Subsea Source Control and Containment." I assume the company is trying to update us on its progress in stemming the flow of crude oil. But that's left to our best guess, when the company refuses to even speak in plain English.

You can debate whether subsea is a word or just a term of art in the oil and gas industry. After all, the sea is water, not the air above it. So the subsea must be something underneath the sea -- maybe mud, maybe bedrock, maybe oil reserves. Who knows? Wouldn't it be nice if BP had just said, "Here's an update on our efforts to contain the spill on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico?" See, I would have understood that. But then the release gets even better:

"Subsea efforts continue to focus on progressing options to stop the flow of oil from the well through interventions via the blow out preventer (BOP), and to collect the flow of oil from the leak points."

"Focus on progressing options?" What is BP trying to say? I presume it wants to say that it is simultaneously pursuing a number of options to stop the underwater oil spill by working on the blow out preventer and collecting leaking oil. But the sentence is so poorly constructed, you don't know what it is saying.

I am sure the language was all twisted and edited by round after round of legal review, as well as the industry's own prescribed methods of responding to problems.

See in da earl bidnis, there is no such thing as a spill. Note that BP calls the spill a flow and a leak point. I can just imagine the powers that be debating the difference between spills, leaks, and flows. "A leak is a drip. A spill is a calamity," they might be saying to one another over a secure teleconference between New Orleans and London.

It's an energy company trick I learned early in my career, when a vice president of public relations explained to me that coal is not black, dark, dusty, or chalky. Rather, it's rich and luminous, and should be characterized as such in all press materials.

All this answers the question, "Why can't companies talk like human beings?" Some of the smartest people in the world work in the energy business, which is precisely why they refuse to talk like human beings. Using clear and compelling language would require BP to answer the prime question, "How much oil is being spilled?" Right now, that's the last thing BP intends to tell us, and it is doing a good job of it.

The Philadelphia Inquirer: winning by losing

The loss of The Philadelphia Inquirer to its investors could set the stage for an entirely new way of news gathering and storytelling in the digital age. A call to wipe away all expectations and start anew ...

I tend not to talk local when blogging because so much of our business is national in scope. But I am obliged to reference yesterday's news about the purchase of the bankrupt Philadelphia Inquirer by its creditors. The move marks the end of a long-fought battle by its current ownership and management to keep the paper in local hands, headed by former PR guy and publisher Brian Tierney.

How the Inquirer fell into bankruptcy underscores the plight of traditional media. Pages are falling (8 percent in the past quarter), ad revenue is drying up, and subscribers are turning to free online news services -- everything from Newser to Twitter -- to stay abreast of the day's events.

Personally, I was pulling hard for Brian Tierney, to whom I owe much in my own career for cultivating a local PR market and then moving on. That opened a lot of opportunity for my firm to emerge as the largest public relations company in our region. But alas, the Inquirer is now in the hands of investors, destined to be stripped down and resold to a media conglomerate or private equity play.

It's unfortunate, because so much could have been done to save the paper. To no one's fault, the Inquirer was too deeply in debt and too deeply steeped in legacy thinking and business practices.

That's a hard juxtaposition against what The New York Times or USA Today is doing to be in front of their audiences, "regardless of where they are," as Jennifer Preston, social media editor at The New York Times, told us only two weeks ago at a national media panel we sponsored here in Philadelphia.

Laden with debt, struggling with labor issues, the Inquirer simply couldn't turn fast enough in the water. But all is not lost. As they say, for every door closed ...

If I were Brian Tierney (which, confidentially I have sometimes wished I were), I would go back to my cadre of local partners and present an alternative. The Inquirer sold for $139 million, many more millions than what was expected for this aging brand. While current ownership didn't win the auction, it does have some valuable assets.

Pay for sway? Hardly. O’Dwyer’s pulls rank, Gregory FCA faces a decision

Here at Gregory FCA, we try not to comment much on insider PR news and views. Nothing is more boring than PR people sniping at one another.

But the recent dust up at O’Dwyer’s made me realize that their decision to charge to rank PR agencies is one that more media will have to make in the future as subscribers and advertisers disappear.

For those of you outside the PR industry, Jack O’Dwyer is a long time booster, critic, and commentator on PR, whose annual ranking of PR firms sets the pecking order for our industry.

Gregory FCA has been a beneficiary of O'Dwyer's rankings. As we have risen in the rankings, so too have the number of unsolicited RFPs we receive, often the result O’Dwyer’s rankings finding their way into corporate decision making.

Jack called me the other day from New York. As usual, he was out of breath and manic. He goes on to compliment Gregory FCA for once again being named one of the country’s largest PR firms. Then he gets down to business. The fact is, he’s hurting, and so too are his newsletter and annual rankings. He’s being hit by the same forces that are undermining mainstream media. No one wants to buy traditional ads or pay for subscriptions. It’s that zero sum logic that information should be free.

I appreciate his candor. Then he tells me that O’Dwyer’s simply can’t afford to publish the rankings any longer without more support from the PR industry in general, and Gregory FCA in particular. From here on out, he is charging the country’s largest PR firms, including Gregory FCA, to be included in his ranking.

I think for a moment about all the implications. Does this smack of pay for play? Should Gregory FCA be in the game or out?

I know firsthand how much work rankings demand, especially when you are dealing with cagey PR people given to huff and puff. In my own world, I contend with a local competitor that is forever telling local media they can’t disclose revenue because they’re owned by a public company and restricted by Sarbanes Oxley. It’s a sham, of course. SOX is about transparency. It’s more likely the competitor wants to unethically inflate numbers, and the public parent objects.

Then it occurs to me. If we want to continue to have media at all, the media needs to find novel ways to tap new streams of revenue. If you want a media property to invest hundreds of hours in researching and vetting an open and true industry ranking, then those who benefit from the ranking should be willing to send in a check along with their applications.

If media continues on its current self-destructive course and refuses to charge appropriately for content, then not only is the press in jeopardy, but so too is the PR industry, which depends on this inelegant symbiosis for its raison d'être. Pardon my French. And anyway, where is it written that readers, viewers, or listeners have the right to consume reporters’ work and publishers' property for free, simply by searching Google?

Rankings and awards are two areas that can be clearly delineated from content, and should be fair game for revenue. After all, the media often sponsors trade shows and charges their loyal followers handsomely for the right to hobnob.

Rankings are a similar gray area that, in these desperate times, should be targeted. Jack also deserves kudos for the transparency of his decision. O’Dwyer’s blog published comments from both sides, those in support and those who now consider Jack the Antichrist (which is not too far from my opinion on my competitor’s decision to hide behind SOX rather than disclose real revenue numbers). You can read the gory details of the controversy on the O'Dwyer's PR Blog.

So Jack, I've sent the check! Your work has been too important to the industry and too important to my firm to ignore your plea. I'm happy to pay up for work well done.