COM 221: Assignment for Fri., Dec. 1

Copied and pasted from the message board linked to my webpage at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/facultypage.html. While its purpose is to stimulate (a better word might be "create") class discussion, this is a mandatory, graded assignment.


doc
COM 221 -- Friday's assignment
Wed Nov 29, 2006 15:53
216.125.122.175


This will be the basis for class discussion Friday, but it is also a graded assignment. Your grade will depend on how extensive and relevant your discussion is of the point I ask about below.

Go to a college or university website (the one you did your term project on will probably work best but isn't mandatory. Surf around it till you find: (1) the college's mission statement and a statement of core values, vision or similar noble-sounding words; and (2) information about a community relations program it has undertaken.

Answer some or all of these questions on the message board. How does the college translate its core values as expressed in the statements of mission, vision, etc., into community relations? How does that relate to its overall public relations practice?

-- pe

New office -- directions

I'm getting moved into my new office now, so I'm cross-posting directions to my class blogs and the Message Board linked to my faculty page.

I'm in Beata Hall (the old Ursuline convent) across Eastman Street from St. Joe's parish and school. Either Room 31, if you go by the list of room assignments I've been given, or Room 8, if you go by the numbers on the doors. I've also attached my business card to the door.

To get there from Dawson, go out the south entrance and take the walk past Ursuline Academy. You'll go between the buildings, with the old building on the right and the gym on the left. Keep going through the parking lot, and there'll be a porch on the right (women's housing is straight ahead). On the south end of that porch, there's a door with a Christmas decoration. Go in the door, take the stairs just to the left and you'll be on the floor with faculty offices. They're in the hallway to the left at the top of the stairs. It takes a little less time to walk it than it does to give the directions!

Computer and phone are now hooked up ... you can reach me, as before, by phone at 525-1420 ext. 519 and by email at pellertsen@sci.edu. Email is usually better, but the voice mail in my office is working again.

COMM 150, 207: 'Next big thing' on the net?

Cross-posted to The Mackerel Wrapper and my cleverly named http://comm207fall06.blogspot.com/ blog for students in COMM 207 this semester.

Here's kind of a breathless, "gee-whiz" story about the latest round of innovations on the World Wide Web, that also gives a nice profile of Silicon Valley. It was in today's London Observer, the Sunday paper affiliated with The Guardian. I'll just post the lede, the nut graf(s) and an interesting observation or two that came further down in the story, by David Smith of The Observer.

The lede sets the scene:

The people spilling out of Ritual Coffee Roasters on to the San Francisco sidewalk scent more than coffee beans. Inside there are twenty and thirtysomethings, most of them male, working intently at laptops and harnessing the power of the internet. They are not merely logging on to look at MySpace or YouTube or The Next Big Thing. They plan to be The Next Big Thing.

It's boom time again in Silicon Valley and there is opportunity around every corner. Each month $180m (£94m) is invested in technology companies aspiring to change the lives of every person on the planet. A combination of youth, entrepreneurial spirit, technical insight, financial muscle and the American Dream, flavoured with West Coast utopianism, has formed a perpetual motion machine that is driving the information age. The brilliant brains of students and geeks, businessmen and scientists, angel investors and venture capitalists are feeding and thriving off each other, sparking the kind of electricity one imagines filled the air of northern England during the Industrial Revolution. A whole new world wide web is on the horizon.

'If you like the idea of going to a coffee shop and everyone works in software and in the conversation next to you someone is starting a company, this is the place to be,' said John Merrells, 37, who emigrated from Harrogate in North Yorkshire and runs a mobile phone software company here. 'Everyone you bump into is potentially something. The physical concentration of people is phenomenal. Like in the City of London, the continual rubbing up of people is how ideas come about.'

To British readers, the references to Yorkshire wouldn't sound "ye olde English-y," of course. They'd be no more exotic than Decatur or Bloomington.

Did you spot the nut graf, by the way? It's that second graf, that begins "It's boom time again in Silicon Valley ..."

A lot of the story is just a catalog of new ideas. Some, no doubt, will pan out. Others, I am sure, won't. And I wish I could say it held my interest better. But interspersed with the new product reviews are some good insights. Here's one on user-generated content like we see on YouTube or Flickr:

The idea of the moment, over-hyped perhaps, is Web 2.0. Before it, according to the definition, the web was a 'lean back' experience like television, in which official content providers' websites would be passively consumed by the rest of us. No one quite agrees on the meaning of Web 2.0, but everyone thinks it has something to do with social networks and content generated by users - a 'lean forward' experience in which consumers become creators. There are more than 1,000 such sites with prime examples including Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia written by users; Flickr, a photo sharing site; Facebook, which enables social networking; and Digg, in which the community selects and prioritises news stories like an editor.

Web 2.0's unprecedented army of contributors is capable of providing more detailed information about your special interest or geographical location than any traditional organisation could dream of. The race is now on to turn it into a commercial proposition.

Which leads into one of the clearest explanations I've seen of how they're changing things: "Each of these sites, and their many imitators, is taking something as old as human civilisation - word of mouth - and formalising it in a single space, giving consumers once unimaginable access to the recommendations of friends and the 'wisdom of crowds'."

There's also a very clear explanation -- again, the clearest I've seen -- of the "semantic web," and how it's expected to work. But I'll let you read that.

COM 221: 'Keys to the store'

In class today (Friday) I "gave away the keys to the store," by asking students to get in the Google search engine, search on keywords "community relations," look at the corporate websites in the directory (IBM, the U.S. Justice Department and The Palm Beach Post among others), choose one and post to the message board their answers to two questions:

1. How does your organization do community relations?
2. Why does your organization do community relations?

In this assignment, I was especially interested in how their community relations statements relate to their corporate mission statement, vision, strategic planning and other indicators of corporate values.

Here's why.

As we studied the chapter on community relations in our textbook, and especially as we visited the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship website in class Wednesday, I noticed some of our key concepts in the course coming together. For example, the BCCCC's discussion "What is Corporate Citizenship?" struck me as an excellent statement of core ethical principles:

Minimize harm: Work to minimize the negative consequences of business activities and decisions on stakeholders, including employees, customers, communities, ecosystems, shareholders, and suppliers. Examples include operating ethically, supporting efforts to stop corruption, championing human rights, preventing environmental harm, enforcing good conduct from suppliers, treating employees responsibly, ensuring the safety of employees, ensuring that marketing statements are accurate, and delivering safe, high-quality products.

Maximize benefit: Contribute to societal and economic well-being by investing resources in activities that benefit shareholders as well as broader stakeholders. Examples include participating voluntarily to help solve social problems (such as education, health, youth development, economic development for low-income communities, and workforce development), ensuring stable employment, paying fair wages, and producing a product with social value.

Be accountable and responsive to key stakeholders: Build relationships of trust that involve becoming more transparent and open about the progress and setbacks businesses experience in an effort to operate ethically. Create mechanisms to include the voice of stakeholders in governance, produce social reports assured by third parties, operate according to a code of conduct, and listen to and communicate with stakeholders.

Support strong financial results: The responsibility of a company to return a profit to shareholders must always be considered as part of its obligation to society.

Two other links from the BCCCC menu on Corporate Citizenship (third from the left among the pull-down menus at top of the page) that tell a lot about the concept are "The Value Proposition," which is kind of theoretical but very informative, and the "State of Corporate Citizenship," which gives results of a survey of businesses that summarizes evidence of how it is practiced in the real world.

In chapters 5-8 of our textbook, we learned howto do public relations. In this website, we learn why. Both will be on the final exam.

COMM 150, 221: 'Branding' Britney Spears

No, we don't mean "branding" like what they do to cattle to show who owns the cow or steer. We mean building brand equity in a commercial enterprise. In this case, the commercial enterprise is Britney Spears, and The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid newspaper, has published a very complete survey of her business dealings. Turns out she's more of a businesswoman than you'd think.

The version of The Mail's story that I'm linking here, headlined "No 'Oops' when she did it again," points up two important trends in mass media. One is about Britney's brand, of course, and what she's done to protect it, or, as some would argue, to run it into the ground. The other is suggested by where I found the story. It wasn't in The Mail, but a rewrite that appeared Nov. 13 in The City Times, on the Khaleej Times website from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Don't think we live in an age of globalization? Here's an Arab newspaper's website picking up a story from a London tab about an American celebrity.

Here's how they set up their story story about Britney's financial arrangments:

She has been dismissed as simply a bubble-headed pop princess. So when Britney Spears filed for divorce last week after two stormy years of marriage to Kevin Federline — now dubbed Fed-Ex — many assumed it would cost the 24-year-old singer a hefty chunk of her reported £65million fortune. But it can be revealed that, far from facing financial ruin, astute Britney safeguarded her global business empire with an iron-clad 60-page prenuptial agreement, prior to her wedding in October 2004.

Britney wanted every penny protected by the pre-nup and ordered her vast legal team to draw up a list of all her worldwide assets, held in a myriad of companies including Britney Brands, BritneyFilms, Britney Online, Britney Touring, Fairy Zone Productions, One More Time Music and Britney Television.

To find out exactly how much she was worth, they gathered together hundreds of financial and tax statements. These documents have now been seen by The Mail on Sunday, and they offer a fascinating insight into the finances of a pop phenomenon.

So the news "peg" or hook is Britney's upcoming divorce. And the journos play up the angle of starry-eyed romance -- or lack thereof. Apparently, she and Federline staged a wedding for the celebrity press, but did it for real in private, and only after "after Federline had signed the agreement that banned him from making any future claim against any assets his wife had prior to their marriage."

Britney's financial show her to be anything but starry eyed. Reports the paper in Dubai:

A source linked to the prenuptial negotiations said last night: 'Everyone thinks Britney is this hick from Louisiana but, in reality, she is an extraordinarily astute businesswoman who has built herself into a global brand.'

A great deal of her fortune was made prior to her marriage and, when Kevin signed the pre-nup, he waived any right to any part of Britney Incorporated.

Without a prenuptial agreement Britney, who built her fortune off the back of bubblegum hits such as Oops! I Did It Again and Baby One More Time could have been forced to split her empire 50-50.

The financial statements gathered for the 2004 pre-nup list total personal cash and assets at the time worth £16.92million.

Her biggest year for earnings, according to her income tax returns, was 2001 when she made £10.2 million. Current estimates put the value of her fortune now at £65m.

Britney, who has two sons with former back-up dancer Federline — 14-month-old Sean Preston and eight-week-old Jayden James - broke the news of the divorce to her husband via text message.

Her apparent relief at being free may also be down to the fact that, with her mighty fortune protected, she is still able to laugh all the way to the bank.

But there's another side of the story, and The Khaleej Times gets into that, too, reporting rumors that she's about to start performing in Las Vegas, "kitsch graveyard of the once famous."

Like Branson, Mo., the clubs in Las Vegas have a name for attracting performers whose careers have peaked. Elvis Presley, for example, wound up in Vegas long after songs like "Hound Dog" and "Hearbreak Hotel" made music history.

See how the branding issues play out in The Times' account of Britney's career and how she manages -- or mismanages -- her public image:

A series of dreadful personal and professional decisions has wrecked a career that could once do no wrong. It has changed Spears from being compared to a young Madonna into a favourite butt of watercooler gossip.­

Her first, brief, marriage, to childhood friend Jason Alexander, was conducted in a Vegas wedding chapel. Then came Federline, who was widely seen as using Spears to piggyback his own career. Then came Spears's disastrous decision to turn her second marriage into a reality TV show, Chaotic.­

After that there was a series of incidents involving her young children, including one in which she drove with her baby in her lap. Finally, there is also a rumoured Spears and Federline sex tape. Spears recently sued an American magazine that reported on the existence of the tape. Bizarrely, she sued not over the existence of the tape itself, but because the magazine had suggested she was blase about it. A judge threw the case out, saying Spears had made a career out her sexuality.­

That judgment, sums up what went wrong with Spears's career. She symbolised the hyper-sexuality demanded of American women in the modern era. It was the core of her appeal — but society wants younger, less maternal idols than her.­

But as the Khaleej Times says, and the details of Britney Spears' financial arrangements suggest, "it might be possible to launch a credible comeback."




If you want to find out more about branding ... and you do, if you want to major in communications or just to understand why you pay more for Tommy Hilfiger than you do for a knock-off you get at a "big box" retailer ... DNA Design, a communications firm in New Zealand, has a website called Allaboutbranding.com created to "to begin to reconcile the many and conflicting views of what constitutes brand; and to help our clients and others arrive at clearly defined views of their own brand, how to develop and manage it and how they would like to see it expressed." It is also clearly intended to attract business for the consuluting firm by giving away a free sample of its product.

Dr. Suess does the internet

Here's a rhyme about packet switching and data transmission that has been around since the early days of the internet and you can still find archived here or there. It's usually called "What if Dr. Seuss Did Technical Writing," and it begins:

Here's an easy game to play.
Here's an easy thing to say:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

And so it goes. I was assured in the mid-90s that it was technically accurate. It may still be, for all I know.

COMM 207: BP damage control. Read, post and discuss

We've read about crisis communications and damage control in our text Public Relations: The Profession and the Practice, and we've looked at the BP website to analyze how it gets the company's message across. Now comes a news story that deals with how BP dealt with a situation that put the company in a bad light -- a lawsuit filed in the wake of a Texas refinery explosion that cost the lives of 15 people.

The New York Times reports:

Just as jury selection was beginning in what would have been the first civil case to go to trial, the plaintiff, a woman whose parents were killed in the blast and who had expressed eagerness to go to court, settled.

The woman, Eva Rowe, 22, is to receive an undisclosed amount. The settlement also called for BP, which is based in London, to continue to release documents related to the case and to donate millions to schools and medical facilities, including one where victims were treated after the March 2005 explosion. The blast also injured more than 170 people.

“We are happy to have been able to resolve this and spare Ms. Rowe the task of bringing this case to trial,” said a BP spokesman, Ronnie Chappell.

Read the rest of the story, review the discussion of crisis communication in the text, post your thoughts as comments to this blog and be ready to discuss it in class.

COMM 221: Organizational culture in the news. Discuss!

One nice thing about the study of communications is that it's not just a sterile exercise confined to textbooks (although the textbooks are important). It also has application in the real world.

Here's a story in Thursday's Chicago Tribune on former CIA director Robert Gates' appointment to replace outgoing Defense Secretary Ronald Rumsfeld that touches on what we've been studying in class about organizational culture.

And here's one from The Washington Post on the same appointment, and what it might mean for the organizational culture in the Pentagon, the White House and high levels of government in general.

Read both stories, review the discussion of organizational culture in our textbook and post your answers to the following questions as comments to this blog. Here are the questions:

1. What kind of management style did Rumsfeld typify? Why was he sometimes resented by others at the Pentagon and in government? What specific evidence do you find in the two newspaper stories to support your answer? Cite the evidence. Be specific.

2. What kind of management style did Gates have at the CIA? Cite specific evidence in support of your answer. What changes in organizational culture do you think he might make when he takes over Rumsfeld's job?

3. Which kind of organizational culture would be better for public relations purposes? Balance the pros and cons. Consider the two definitions of organizational culture cited in our text. Be specific.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the Trib's story (and below I'll past in the first grafs of the Post story). Read them here get you started and follow the links below to find more evidence:

Gates seen as low-key loyalist

By Greg Miller, Tribune Newspapers
Los Angeles Times
Published November 9, 2006

WASHINGTON -- In turning to former CIA Director Robert Gates to take the reins at the Pentagon, President Bush has selected a low-key loyalist who is in many ways the opposite of outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

While Rumsfeld often seemed bent on running roughshod over the Pentagon brass, Gates is described by longtime associates as collegial and as a consensus-builder.

If Rumsfeld had little regard for the president's father and for many of the elder Bush's pragmatic security advisers, including Brent Scowcroft, Gates was part of that Bush inner circle. He remains close not only to Scowcroft but to other Rumsfeld rivals, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Rumsfeld placed little trust in intelligence agencies and pushed the military to encroach on their turf. Now, in a turning of the tables, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and the National Security Council is poised to take charge of the military.

Democrats praised Gates' nomination, hoping for a less combative Pentagon chief. But Gates has proven controversial in the past and was forced to withdraw from his first nomination as CIA director before winning a split-vote confirmation four years later.

Across the national security community on Wednesday, the deep contrasts between Rumsfeld and Gates were a subject of conversations.

Rumsfeld "is a guy who is kind of burdened with his own certitude at times," said John Gannon, a former high-ranking CIA official who worked with Rumsfeld and Gates. "That is not Bob Gates. He came out of an analytic culture where listening to the ideas of others and questioning your own assumptions is part of the tradecraft."

Link herefor the rest of the Trib's story.

And here's the top of The Washington Post's story:

Robert Gates Lauded As Breaker of Barriers

Military Leaders Describe Bipartisan Appeal

By Ann Scott Tyson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 9, 2006; Page A24

Robert M. Gates, a veteran intelligence official whom President Bush nominated to become his new secretary of defense, is widely viewed as a consensus-builder who may break down barriers between civilian and military leaders -- as well as between the Pentagon and other agencies -- that grew legendary under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Gates, 63, is a close associate of former president George H.W. Bush and was deputy national security adviser during the Persian Gulf War. He rose rapidly through CIA ranks as a Soviet expert with extensive White House experience to become director of central intelligence from 1991 to 1993. The only setback in his career came in 1987 when he withdrew as President Ronald Reagan's nominee to be CIA director because of his involvement in the Iran-contra affair. In all, Gates has served six presidents in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

A native Kansan with shrewd bureaucratic instincts, Gates lacks the top-down, take-no-prisoners managerial style that won Rumsfeld enemies and instead is more likely to set up task forces and forge agreements behind the scenes, associates said. While Rumsfeld issues flurries of directives and memos, nicknamed "snowflakes," in keeping with his business-executive past, Gates is a listener and leads with the inherent circumspection of an intelligence analyst, they said.

"Rumsfeld's a wrestler. Bob Gates likes to hike," said Richard Haver, a former senior official who has worked closely with both men. "Gates is not about to get on a mat with someone and pin him. With Rumsfeld, pinning is the name of the game."

At the Pentagon, senior military officers said that while Rumsfeld is perceived as arrogant and a fierce turf-battler, Gates is viewed as a far less combative and more conciliatory figure. "Gates has a track record of bipartisan support and being respected and accepted by . . . different parties," said a senior Army general, adding, "I think he'll be fine."

Gates could help ease the tensions that arose as Rumsfeld moved to impose greater civilian control on military services and operations, active and retired military officers said.

Military leaders "will find their voice in a way that they were never going to find it with Rumsfeld. My guess is that he'll listen," a retired four-star general said of Gates, whom he knows. Still, while Gates is expected to handle dissent with more finesse, "he won't be snowed or bamboozled" by senior military officers, said a former official who knows Gates well. "Gates will listen, but he will not always take their advice," he said.

Link here for the full WaPo story.

Of course you'll want to read both stories completely and review what the textbook says about organizational culture before posting your answer, because your grade for this exercise will be based in part on the detail with which you support your claims. You may even decide you want to do a Google search and find out more about Rumsfeld, Gates and their respective management styles.

COMM 221: 'Microtargeting' and angry voters. Extra credit

In class Monday, we discussed a Los Angeles Times story that compared get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts in the congressional district that includes Palm Beach, Fla. Incumbent U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., R-Fla., had a very sophisticated "microtargeting" campaign that contacted voters on specific issues of interest to their demographic groups -- Israel for Jewish voters, for example, and Fidel Castro for Spanish-speaking voters -- while his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Ron Klein, relied on traditional door-knocking and repeating the same "time for a change" message over and over. We kind of thought the GOP strategy would win.

Turns out we missed our bet. Klein, the challenger with the primitive GOTV strategy, won. He got 51 percent of the vote to Shaw's 47 percent.

So the simple, repeated message won out over microtargeting. Here's what The Miami Herald said about it:

Klein said Tuesday there was ''no question'' he successfully capitalized on the anti-incumbent, anti-war mood, defined by his apt but simple and oft-repeated catch phrase: ``It's time for a change.''

''I think people are looking for new ideas and new energy and people who are going to stand up for them,'' said Klein, 49. ``They've lost trust and confidence in Washington and they want change.''

Shaw, who was in his 14th term as a U.S. representative, was personally popular. But this year that wasn't enough to overcome Klein's message. The Herald reported:

Shaw, 67, spent the final day of the campaign in radio appearances, thanking supporters, calling recalcitrant Republicans to urge them to the polls, and waving signs and voting in his home precinct.

Ultimately, though, the hometown popularity and grandfatherly demeanor that helped Shaw squeak past previous challengers just wasn't enough to overcome the volatile election politics that swept Republican incumbents out of office across the nation.

Neither was the legendary GOP get-out-the-vote effort, which was dwarfed by widespread dissatisfaction with national Republican leadership.

In the final months of the campaign, Shaw worked to distance himself from Bush -- even as Klein pushed an unrelenting message that his Republican opponent was too closely tied to GOP leaders, including the president.

Does that mean microtargeting doesn't work? Not necessarily. But it does mean it didn't in this election. I am inclined to think you have to do both -- identify your core voters and contact them personally, or have your campaign workers do it, and stick to one message in your public statements. Sell it both wholesale and retail, in other words.

For more on microtargeting, GOTV and elections in general, Donald A. Green, professor of political science and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, has a very interesting proposal on on Harvard University's Neiman Watchdog website.

Green, in so many word, says more people would vote if we made more of a party out of it:

Social scientists are far from answering this puzzle, but recent experiments suggest some interesting hypotheses. Here is a bit of background. Voting in the 19th century was an all-day affair. People would mill about for hours, socializing with friends, imbibing free booze supplied by the political parties, and watching their neighbors cast what was until the 1880s a public vote. The advent of secret balloting did not bring about an immediate drop in turnout. In fact, the effects of the secret ballot were initially fairly modest. But the same social movement that cleaned up elections by instituting the secret ballot also instituted the rule that said that party workers had to remain a good distance from the place where balloting occurred. That innovation seems to have undermined parties' incentives to supply booze and food; voting gradually became a sober affair in which voters cast ballots quickly and quietly. As the fun went out of voting, turnout rates gradually declined. In the North, for example, turnout rates in the 1880s were roughly 30 percentage-points higher than in the 1920s. One might suppose this decline was due to the end of petty bribery, but in fact the decline is evident not only in cities (where machine politics was common) but also in outlying and rural areas as well.

In an effort to understand the role that the social environment may have played in the 1880s, recent experiments have investigated the extent to which a festive, carnival-like atmosphere increases voter turnout. Randomized experiments have gauged whether Election Day festivals increase turnout. Potential festival sites are identified, some are randomly assigned to the treatment group, parties are thrown, free food and (non-alcoholic) drinks are served, and votes tallied. Approximately two dozen such sites have been studied, and the results suggest that creating a festive atmosphere generates a statistically significant increase in turnout. Of course, 21st century voters have no idea what to make of announcements of an Election Day festival, so time will tell how this innovation alters turnout patterns over the long term. Nevertheless, the results are an exciting potential development in the understanding of what makes -- and made -- people vote.

For extra credit. What do you think? Would a big election-day party be good PR? Would it be good politics? Would it give us good government? For extra credit, post your thoughts as comments to this blog.

COM 150 -- term paper topics?

Here are some ideas for viable term paper topics in mass comm., to get you started brainstorming your own. Some I'll put in the form of research questions: Ask yourself a question, do a web search or two, find out what's out there, and your answer to the question will do for a working hypothesis. Others may be vague ideas, topics. All will have to be narrowed to make a viable research paper.

Read the ideas, and note the in-class discussion assignment (in bold type) below.

In no particular order:

• Are negative political ads turning Americans off on politics?


• How does a major league baseball team use the media to maintain its fan base?


• How does a singer or a band use the media to sell records or maintain fan base?


• How does a singer or band stick make money and keep artistic control by sticking with indie labels? Or, alternatively, how does a singer work with the major labels?


• What does it take to get a song on the charts? How does radio determine the profitability of pop music?


• How does a corporation use the media to communicate with its customers?


• Do television commercials have an negative impact on teenagers' body image?


• How do category romances (or any other kind of paperback book) use their cover art and blurbs to sell product to their market nitche?

Some other ideas: Go to the Google News page and surf around today's news, and you'll find plenty of current stuff on computers and the internet, the health of the newspaper and television industries, elections (especially today), celebrities, etc. There's a story today on Katie Couric, who's kind of a celebrity and a news person both. A couple of stories on pro football. That's part of the entertainment industry. It doesn't have to be American football, either. I had a student do a really good paper a couple of years ago on how Manchester United uses the internet and other media to reach out to fans in the U.S. In class, brainstorm with the people sitting nearest you and come up with three to five sure-fire topics. As you share them with the rest of the class and hear each other's ideas, you'll be amazed how easy it is to come up with a good topic that interests you.

COMM 207, 150, 221: Bad photo crop!

I'm cross-posting this item to both of my blogs for mass comm. students ...

You'll see why. It's a casebook example of how not to crop a photo -- why you've really got to think about what it's going to look like in print.

Follow this link to Daily Kos, then scroll down till you see this tag, "Update on a completely unrelated matter -- here's a lesson in how NOT to set up a photo shoot if your name is 'Charlie Bass'," followed by the picture.

I don't know who Charlie Bass is, or what he's running for. But I've got to be sympathetic! [See below for update.]

Daily Kos, by the way, is a very partisan weblog for self-described progressive Democrats. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the blog administrator, is becoming a force in the Democratic Party, and it's considered a valuable networking tool especially for more liberal Democratic grass-roots activists. Here's what Wikipedia says about Zúniga, and the weblog.

Update. When I was watching Tuesday night's election returns several hours after posting this, I noticed a U.S. Rep. Charlie Bass, R-N.H., who lost his bid for re-election. Talk about adding insult to injury!

COM 221: Targeted vs. message-driven strategies

A very interesting story in today's Los Angeles Times contrasts the Republican and Democratic GOTV (get-out-the-vote) strategies in a Florida congressional district during the run-up to Tuesday's election.

The article, by LA Times reporters Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, sets up the contrast in the lede -- between the Republican's nitche marketing and the Democrat's repetition of a simple message, over and over and over again:

BOCA RATON, FLA. — Jewish voters received a pamphlet about Israel's fight with Hezbollah. Spanish speakers heard radio ads about Fidel Castro. Seniors got recorded telephone calls from crooner Pat Boone, now 72, about Social Security.

As Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) fights to keep his seat in Congress, he is drawing heavily from the Republican playbook of dividing voters by their backgrounds and interests and appealing to them with tailored pitches. His success — along with his party's hopes for hanging onto its congressional majorities — relies in part on databases and search tools used to identify sympathetic voters and move them to the polls.

Shaw's Democratic challenger has a far different strategy. Instead of specialized appeals, state legislator Ron Klein repeats a simple message to nearly every audience: Iraq is a mess, and it is time for a change.

That contrast underscores a central question to be answered Tuesday in this South Florida House district and other competitive races across the country: Which political force will prove stronger — the niche-marketing effort, led by GOP strategist Karl Rove and powered by computerized outreach methods, or the classic "throw the bums out" mood of an electorate uneasy with the Iraq war and unhappy with one-party rule?

Well, we'll find out Tuesday. But I think there's a broader lesson here -- both techniques are proven, market-tested and effective.

The dynamics of this particular election in that particular congressional district will probably determine the outcome. That's how elections work. But the way the two candidates are going about it is a good, very timely demonstration of the underlying principles of public relations.

And GOTV at bottom is about public relations. It's moving your latent public to an active public, and you can read about in our textbook, Public Relations: The Profession and the Practice by Dan Lattimore et al. So I'll skip over the stuff about Tuesday's election in the LA Times story and get back to public relations.

Here's how "the GOP strategy of narrow-casting and voter identification" plays out in Shaw's campaign:

On Friday, as in GOP campaigns across the country, the Shaw team's "72-hour plan" got underway — its final effort to reach people who, according to their profile in the party's national database, are likely to favor Republican candidates.

At a field office in Boca Raton, dozens of volunteers turned up to knock on doors and talk to voters. A staffer distributed clipboards with printed pages of names, addresses and detailed maps.

The printouts came from the "Voter Vault," the GOP's national database, which tagged voters with labels showing why they were worth contacting: Some were dubbed "socos" (social conservatives) or "fiscos" (fiscal conservatives) or "soft Dems" (crossover voters). Each had already been identified as ready to favor Shaw. The goal was to persuade each one, using hints from the database, to make the effort to go to the polls.

Party leaders have built a 72-hour plan for every significant GOP race in the nation. The effort was developed by Rove and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman after the 2000 election, in which Democrats outpaced the GOP in grass-roots activism and nearly won the presidency.

The "Voter Vault" is a central element of the plan, and the party invested more than $15 million to update the system this year. So far this election cycle, it has guided 24 million phone or in-person contacts to conservative voters.

Following the plan, over the campaign's final three days, GOP field offices in Shaw's district must file updated spreadsheets every three hours to the state GOP in Tallahassee, showing how many voters have been personally contacted. State party officials report that data to national headquarters, where staff members make sure that individual campaigns are meeting their goals.

And here's what Klein, the Democrat, is doing to hone his message and drive it home:

Klein acknowledges that the GOP has an advantage in voter turnout, but said his campaign has spent a year building a field organization and a competing database. However, his database received only limited help from the national Democratic Party, and it has less detail than the GOP's.

Despite fewer resources, Klein's field director developed a program to reach seasonal residents, or "snowbirds," at their homes outside Florida. Klein's campaign has tried to identify residents of gated communities that are off-limits to candidates and canvassers, and to recruit volunteers within the walls. It also used a visit by former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, disabled in Vietnam, to reach out to veterans.

Klein says he has employed enough canvassers to contact 60,000 backers in the final three days; on Friday alone, the campaign says, it reached 7,000 people by phone or in person.

And Democrats are counting on additional help from an ambitious voter-contact program by labor unions, though it is not coordinated with Klein's campaign.

Yet Klein's campaign appears to be behind Shaw's, whose workers say they reached 15,000 people Friday and have a goal of contacting at least 100,000 in the campaign's closing days.

Klein's GOTV efforts are more traditional than the Republican GOTV whiz-bangery, relying on volunteers and labor unions, and they're also more reliant on the message. That's why Cleland visited the district.

It's pretty clear Klein is also relying on free media, news coverage of the issues that resonate with voters this year ... the war, stem-cell research, scandals in the House Republican caucus ... and his GOTV effort is primitive compared to Shaw's. At the moment, whatever advantage Klein might enjoy seems like it comes mostly from the free media. The Times reports:

After 2000, Shaw's district was redrawn by Florida's GOP-led legislature to include more Republicans. But this year, even some Democrats have heard from Shaw about his opposition to President Bush's stance on stem-cell research.

By Tuesday night, voters here and across the country will show whether such precision tactics can withstand the broader wave of anger that Klein hopes will send him to Washington. A poll in Sunday's Miami Herald showed Klein with a 10-point lead, suggesting that Democrats may soon be celebrating.

But there's another election in just two years, when Iraq and GOP scandals may not dominate the debate. So what would Democratic incumbents, forced to combat all of the Republican advantages, do then?

"Maybe we can learn from them in the future," Klein said of the Republicans' tactics.

If not, even Democratic strategists concede, their party could soon find itself relegated again to the back bench.

That 10-point lead in the public opinion polls could evaporate by Tuesday's election. Congressional districts are notoriously hard to sample, and the only poll that matters is on election day. But the GOTV techniques being used by Shaw and Klein alike will be around as long as we have elections.

COM 150 students, MIT, Brits study wired world

Shades of Philo Farnsworth, who invented television and wouldn't let his children watch it?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a key early developer of the World Wide Web, has called for a Web Science Research Initiative that, according to a BBC News report, "will chart out a research agenda aimed at understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web."

A joint project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in England, the Science Research Iniative will be cross-disciplinary. Berners-Lee said it is needed because uncontrolled growth of the internet is "a social as well as technological phenomenon." And it's one that worries him. He told a BBC reporter he "is worried about the way it could be used to spread misinformation and 'undemocratic forces.'" The story continues:

The web has transformed the way many people work, play and do business.

But Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he feared that, if the way the internet is used is left to develop unchecked, "bad things" could happen.

He wants to set up a web science research project to study the social implications of the web's development.

The changes experienced to date because of the web are just the start of a more radical transformation of society, he said.

But Sir Tim is concerned about the way it could end up being used.

He told the BBC: "If we don't have the ability to understand the web as it's now emerging, we will end up with things that are very bad.

"Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web.

"Studying these forces and the way they're affected by the underlying technology is one of the things that we think is really important," he said.

While the news media, including the on-line media, have been more interested in things like sex scandals and congressional elections, Berners-Lee's concerns and the MIT-Southampton study group are probably more important than either.

In its Nov. 3 story on MIT's announcement of the group's formation, The Boston Globe gave some of the backstory:

Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989 as an easy way to share vast amounts of scientific information. He developed HTML, the simple language used to create basic Web pages. But Berners-Lee was as surprised as anyone by the rapid public embrace of the Web. "We really just created the underlying rules," he said, "and then it created itself from a mass of humanity."

As a result, scientists don't have a complete understanding of how the millions of computers now on the Web interact . The institute wants to recruit mathematicians and computer scientists, but also psychologists and other social scientists, to develop models of how information is stored on the Web.

"We need people who understand the social and the technical aspects," said Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton. This will help them devise better ways to search for data, share it, and secure it against unauthorized access.

And a news report by on the magazine Scientific American's website gives more of the backstory:

In one decade the World Wide Web has exploded into 14 billion pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life. The network has grown in a grassroots way, based on a handful of pervasive protocols and aloof guidance from the World Wide Web Consortium, a forum based at M.I.T. for Web developers. Essentially, millions of devotees have spent countless hours advancing the Web bit by bit. Although forceful, the effort has also been piecemeal and inefficient.

Furthermore, vast emergent properties are beginning to arise on the Web, and no one is studying how they have blossomed or what they may mean for society. E-mail led to instant messaging, which grew into social networks such as MySpace. The transfer of documents led to file sharing sites such as Napster, which led to user-generated portals like YouTube. Tagging documents with identifying labels is prompting the emergence of a Semantic Web, a global effort to allow computers to recognize not just what online documents are, but what kinds of information they contain and what it might mean. The Semantic Web promises to bring all sorts of useful data to users, not just text and imagery.

In fact the Semantic Web, whatever it may be, is one of Berners-Lee's main concerns at the moment.

Among the few U.S. newspapers outside of Boston (where MIT is a local story) that ran a story was The San Francisco Chronicle, which does a creditable job of keeping up with developments in nearby Silicon Valley. A story headed "What are Web's Societal, Scientific Consequences? Academics Begin Studying Impact of Having a Wired Planet" by staff writer Tom Abate quoted several Silicon Valley types on the implications. They're huge. They extend from marketing techniques to freedom of speech and techolology in the People's Republic of China.

Communications 150 students: Read the stories, especially the ones in the Chronicle and Scientific American. Go to the Google News directory. Do a keyword search on Tim Berners-Lee, MIT and web. Decide for yourselves what's going on with the web. How imporant is it? What does it mean for the future? For your future? For your career?

Here's a half-serious footnote on what it means to be wired. It's about coffee, but it's also about how people in authority all too often respond to change. Is it also about the free flow of information?

In a commentary published in The Guardian (U.K.), Calestous Juma, the director of the Science, Technology and Globalisation project at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government, suggested Berners-Lee was right. Juma said, "What is critical is not simply worrying about spread of 'bad things', but finding a healthy balance between the benefits and risks of the web." He finds wisdom in the history of how coffee came to be accepted, first in the Middle East and then in Europe.

Coffee?

Yes. Coffee. And coffeehouses. The problem wasn't so much the coffee, in fact, as it was where people drank it and what they said to each other while they were drinking it. It began in Arabia, says Juma:

In 1511 a viceroy and inspector of markets in Mecca, Khair Beg, outlawed coffee consumption and coffeehouses. He relied on Persian expatriate doctors and local jurists who argued that coffee had the same impact on human health as wine.

But the real reasons lay in part in the role of coffeehouses in undermining his authority and offering alternative sources of information on social affairs in his realm. His masters in Cairo, however, were not amused. They castigated the scientific basis of the claim and ruled that nobody would be denied access to heaven because he drunk coffee.

Europeans were no more receptive. In England, Juma suggests, there may have been an economic conflict of interest, too:

In 1675 England's King Charles II issued a declaration "for the suppression of coffeehouses", charging that coffeehouses were the source of malicious and scandalous statements aimed at defaming the king and undermining public order. He directed that coffeehouses be shut down. His appeal to national security was partly a cover to protect tea interests.

In time, cooler heads prevailed in England, too. Good thing, too. How could books, articles and, yes, student papers, get written without coffee?

Without the internet, for that matter?

COM 150: Read and discuss (post below)

Here are a couple of things for you to read along with the "kid with a modem" piece on the Danwei website in Beijing. They'll give you three points of view on how the internet appears to be opening up the political process to people who aren't traditional "gatekeepers," i.e. interested citizens, bloggers and, yeah, kids with modems. Once you've followed the links, read all three, thought about them for a minute or two and discussed it with classmates sitting near you, post your thoughts as comments to this blog.

Here's a good overview in USA Today. It appeared three years ago, at the end of 2003, and that's a lifetime or more on the World Wide Web. But it gives the main outlines of the blogosphere. Says staff writer :

The freewheeling, gossipy Internet sites they operate can be controversial: Matt Drudge, the wired news and gossip hound who broke the story about Monica Lewinsky's affair with Bill Clinton, is a blogger. Many bloggers are not professional journalists. Few have editors. Most make no pretense of objectivity.

Yet they're forcing the mainstream news media to follow the stories they're pushing, such as the scandal that took down Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. And they've created a trend that almost every major presidential candidate is following. Even President Bush's campaign Web site hosts a blog.

Lott, R-Miss., is still in the U.S. Senate. And Drudge is still blogging. And the mainstream media are blogging now more than ever before. Here's a link to "The Swamp," a political blog on the Chicago Tribune's website. Unlike the daily Trib (in which it doesn't appear), the blog is updated several times a day -- as the news happens.

I found the USA Today profile by searching keywords "politics" and "bloggers" in Google. Why don't you do the same? Then post your thoughts, along with interesting nuggets of fact you found out, as comments to this message.

BP's operations in Alaska

An Anchorage Daily News story on a new head for BP's Alaska operations gives a good overview of the troubled company's challenges in the past year. The ADN reports:

This has been a tumultuous year for [outgoing BP Alaska president Steve] Marshall and BP, which operates the nation's largest oil field, Prudhoe, on behalf of itself and other owners including Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobil. BP also runs most of the other North Slope fields.

Industry regulators and lawmakers have condemned BP for failing to safeguard key pipelines within Prudhoe against corrosion, which led to leaks and a partial shutdown of the field on Aug. 6, a decision that briefly roiled world oil markets. Federal criminal investigators are probing a major spill in March, and Marshall and other BP executives have appeared repeatedly before congressional committees considering pipeline reforms.

Yet Marshall has a good reputation in the oil industry, the ADN reported, and BP's troubles don't necessarily indicate malfeasance. Among this year's major events:

• Largest oil spill ever on the North Slope -- an estimated 201,000 gallons from a corroded pipeline -- discovered March 2.

• Emergency shutdown of Prudhoe starts Aug. 6 after another corroded pipe leaks. Production cut by nearly half for six weeks.

• Federal criminal investigators, Congress launch investigations into Prudhoe troubles.

• BP reports $2.6 billion profit on its Alaska oil production in 2005.

• Legislature overhauls tax law to collect more oil revenue when oil prices are high.

• Oil companies negotiate state tax contract to spur natural gas pipeline construction, but deal stalls.

All this can give us a context for evaluating BP's website and its other public relations initiatives.