Jason Vines, who has held the top communications posts at Nissan, Ford and Chrysler, has left the auto industry to sell prophets for profit at Zondervan, a Christian book publisher based in Grand Rapids, Mich. that is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. As vice president of public relations and communications he will direct communications initiatives and will lead brand development for Zondervan and its authors. . . . . Dave Sedgwick has left Automotive News. His replacement as editor is slated to be announced August 1. Other missing from the publication’s masthead: Harry Stoffer, David Kushma, and Alysa Webb. While Chrissie Thompson is a new reporter there.
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Daniel Weiland – for four years a fleet driver for ESI at Dallas, Tex. succumbed on June 13 to juries incurred from a May 29 motorcycle accident.
“Fraud” is a tough call to make publicly but “Landspeed” Louise Noeth says she has chronicled and photographed, “too many people struggling and sacrificing, some even giving their lives to set a landspeed world record, to allow the heritage and community of landspeed racers to be demeaned or ‘hi-jacked’ by a television stunt.” Accordingly, she issued a press release titled “TV’s Jesse James fraudulently claims besting BMW’s FIA ratified hydrogren-powered World Record Speed Record.” She should know when to call a fraud a fraud in the landspeed community. She was part of Don Vesco’s world record-setting team and she authored “Bonneville, The Fastest Place on Earth,” now in its seventh printing. Her complaints with the TV show’s claim are: 1) The requisite flying mile runs in both directions within one hour were not done; 2) There was no independent FIA or USAC sanctioning personnel timing the event, all timing was done by personnel from the TV show; 3) Instead of being timed over a one mile course, the stunt was timed one way for 132 feet in a drag racing style top-speed trap -“5,148 feet short of a world-record.” 4) Even assuming the speed trap figures are correct, Noeth notes, they prove nothing with respect to BMW’s hydrogen-powered world record of 185 mph because that was the average of two mile-long runs in opposite directions. And, the El Mirage, California course where the stunt was staged is too short for a flying mile record run. Sounds as legitimate as reporting on the war in Afghanistan from a set at Universal Studios. Noeth says 47 of 48 responses so far to her news release are favorable and many blogs and online sites are taking down the TV show’s news release on the stunt. While she has reason to believe the show knew the full requirements for setting a world record before they began, she says the show’s response to her objections to the claim was “unprintable.” Click here to read Noeth’s press release.
Brett Becker sticks up for print in his rejoinder to Gary Grant’s Tom-Tom of last month. Becker is a freelance writer and photographer who writes and shoots for Web and print titles. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in mass communication from the University of Central Florida.
In Defense of Print
In last month’s Tom-Tom, an amateur blogger, ostensibly emboldened by his own self-published Web site, disparaged print media. That’s certainly nothing new, and he is entitled to his opinion. In fact, we see similar beliefs expressed regularly in the Autowriters.com newsletter.
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Brett Becker |
Before I touch on last month’s erroneously titled missive from http://www.thegarageblog.com/ proprietor Gary Grant, “Why Traditional Print Media Sucks,” allow me to defend print by examining what it does that other media cannot.
Foremost, print media actually can hold people’s attention for more than 500 words, and print is the best medium for making complex issues understandable. People will read features and other long-form journalism in a magazine or newspaper, but are less likely to click past the first page of Web site copy. What’s more, university research has shown fairly conclusively that retention is greater when subjects read a story on paper compared with a computer screen.
From other studies, we also can establish that what appears in a magazine has greater perceived value than the same user-posted message online. Commodity theory holds that people tend not to value what comes easily to them. The theory also stipulates we tend to value what we must work for, which is why a letter to the editor printed in, say, Road & Track has greater perceived value than a comment following a blog entry on GarageBlog.com. Why? Because editors are gate-keeping what gets into a magazine, your letter must be lucid to be printed. If it does get printed, it shows third-party acknowledgement of your position, which adds value to it.
Now, any nitwit with an Internet connection can have his comments seen instantly, regardless of whether they are worth reading—virtual graffiti at its finest. Read the rest of this entry »
In his keynote at the American Association of Advertising Agencies in New Orleans, Bob Schieffer said, “that if the railroad companies had thought of themselves as being in the business of transportation, rather than just the business of railroads, they’d likely own all the airlines today. If the news media believes itself in the business of selling newspapers or aggregating television viewers, rather than being in the business of delivering the highest quality news experience over the best available media, they have already lost. Even worse is if news media outlets believe themselves in the business of delivering advertising rather than news.”- Joe Marchese writing in his June 16 Online Spin for Media Post Publications.
Speaking at the same conference, Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt advised publishers “. . continue to look to the business model that he believes is best suited to digital age, and which is the source of 97% of Google’s revenues–advertising. There’s room for other media business models–like subscriptions and micro-payments–but not at the same scale,” he argued. The reason: those models rely on scarcity, which the Internet continues to break down. “The Internet distribution model doesn’t work on scarcity, it works on ubiquity.” – As reported by Jessica E. Vascellaro for the WSJ Digital Network.
Ironically, a recent Nielsen survey revealed that reader’s trust in newspaper advertising dropped 2 per cent last year. But the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism believes, “The death of newspapers is not imminent, despite news of bankruptcies and even some closures. The industry still took in roughly $38 billion last year, and earned profits in double digits. Some 48 million newspapers are sold everyday. Even newspapers whose companies are in bankruptcy are profitable. But revenues fell 14% last year, and have fallen 23% in two years. The industry lost 11% of its newsroom jobs last year, and more than that at larger papers. By the end of 2009, a quarter of all the newsroom jobs that existed in 2001 will be gone.”.
“Certainly, the Web is an amazing reporting tool in the hands of almost anyone and has enabled all manner of efforts by bloggers and others to reveal stories. But some stories are beyond the database. Sometimes, people have to make the calls, hit the streets and walk past the conventional wisdom” – David Carr, The New York Times.
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