Many of you are former reporters, and perhaps at one time aspired to be White House correspondents.
Well, ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper takes us on a three-minute tour of the network's workspace at the White House in this video from Web site, White House Correspondents Insider. My reaction to the video: I want to have a beer with Tapper.
'He’s got a gun’: An e-mail subject line that captured my attention
So I’m sitting at work Thursday morning when I receive an e-mail from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) with the subject line:
He’s got a gun! Are You Ready for Violence in Your Workplace?
I read it and quickly turned around. “He does?” I thought. “Who’s he? What’s going on?”
My pulse quickened.
“Oh my,” I mumbled. “I picked a helluva day to quit sniffing glue.”
I took a deep breath, exhaled and then read the e-mail.
Yes, it can happen in your organization. Incidents of physical and verbal violence continue to increase in number and in frequency in U.S. and Canadian workplaces. Yes, you can be better prepared than you are now.
One possible scenario:
Tom Wilson, a 20+ year veteran employee who was laid off nine months ago, enters his old office area, chats with the security people (whom he knows well), then proceeds to the lunch room. As he enters the lunch room, he spots his ex-wife, Sandy, at a nearby table. He reaches back and pulls a pistol from his belt at the small of his back. Tom assumes a target practice stance and opens fire. In less than one minute from the time he enters the building, one person is dead, several employees are wounded, pandemonium has broken out, and there appear to be at least 11 hostages . . . . Are you ready for this scenario?
No, I’m not. I don’t even know Tom.
The entire e-mail, which is a promotion for a virtual seminar, is pasted below. Where the ellipses appear, I eliminated administrative details, like the date of the seminar, details about the cost, opt-out instructions and speakers. Make sure you page all the way down to the bottom for the unfortunate pun in bold.
Sure, preparing for any crisis is important, but does anyone else find this e-mail a tad ... sensational?
He's Got a Gun!
Are You Ready for Violence in Your Workplace?
...
Yes, it can happen in your organization. Incidents of physical and verbal violence continue to increase in number and in frequency in U.S. and Canadian workplaces. Yes, you can be better prepared than you are now.
One possible scenario:
Tom Wilson, a 20+ year veteran employee who was laid off nine months ago, enters his old office area, chats with the security people (whom he knows well), then proceeds to the lunch room. As he enters the lunch room, he spots his ex-wife, Sandy, at a nearby table. He reaches back and pulls a pistol from his belt at the small of his back. Tom assumes a target practice stance and opens fire. In less than one minute from the time he enters the building, one person is dead, several employees are wounded, pandemonium has broken out, and there appear to be at least 11 hostages . . . . Are you ready for this scenario?
What about the quiet bully, she pushes everyone around, always gets her way, and even though every boss and supervisor fears her and knows of her behavior, nothing is being done? She spots you and is heading your way . . . you are instantly uncomfortable. She publically berated you last week.
What of the irate customer or ex-patient who wants to take his revenge on those he perceived wronged him?
According to the U.S. Department of Justice:
1. 1.8 million U.S. employees are assaulted in their workplace annually
2. During the last five years, 14% of Canadian homicides occurred in the workplace
3. England, France, and many other European countries report expanding levels of workplace violence
What are you doing to be prepared for this huge and growing workplace problem? These incidents have enormously high visibility and extremely long-term organizational impact. Are you ready to prevent, mitigate, and de-escalate the circumstances of such events? To properly and safely respond to the worst case scenarios when they happen?
On Wednesday, June 24, 2009, step out of your comfort zone ... to learn about workplace violence prevention, detection, de-escalation, and response approaches.
These two highly experienced experts will discuss the practical components of workplace violence prevention and response programs. They will walk through several cases, talking about the patterns of behavior to expect, the extraordinarily emotional outcomes that these situations cause, and will provide a number of important checklists to help you assess, prepare, rehearse, and execute should situations of violence occur where you work and where you have some responsibility.
You will also walk through response framework templates you can adapt to your organization. You will come away from this program being better able to prevent, detect, deter, de-escalate, and respond to these potentially devastating situations.
Topics:
- 3 components of the ideal workplace violence program
- 4 types of workplace violence
- Advising management (helping to manage their emotions)
- Assessing the violence threat potential of management decisions
- Behavior indicators
- Communicating in explosively emotional circumstances
- Conducting a threat investigation/assessment
- De-escalation techniques
- Detecting early warning signs
- Enhancing safety while reducing contention
- Long-term impacts of localized violence events
- Management briefing strategy
- Managing the victims
- Mitigation strategies
- Patterns of the most devastating workplace violence circumstances
- Planning for triggering or precipitating events (i.e., terminations)
- Safe response strategies
- Using the threat management team approach
The creator of this video has taken Rickrolling to a new extreme. Here’s the concept: Someone goofs on tape, and the footage of that goof immediately cuts to a cat playing a keyboard.
For instance, a guest on the Glenn Beck show passes out on screen and then suddenly we see the ivory-slapping cat.
It’s silly.
But have you seen the original video that launched this latest craze? A man in a wheel chair falls down an escalator.
I was horrified.
And that emotion was strange, because I’m among the top 75 or 100 most desensitized Web users. I spent my college years eagerly stealing music on Napster and waiting 30-minutes for a video to download (a lifetime today, a mere instant then) so we could watch two people—well, you can probably imagine (but you probably don’t want to).
The result: Show me something gross, disturbing, insulting—whatever—and I’ll greet it with a “meh.” So it was strange when I saw Keyboard Cat and felt—shocked.
But who cares? Why write about it? Just don’t pay attention to Keyboard Cat—or blog about it. That’s true, and I did dismiss the video when I first saw it. And then on Friday, I caught an AP story on the New York Times Web site about the video.
Here’s how the AP described it:
A clip is played of a pratfall or some unfortunate, self-inflicted accident. This is immediately followed by (always the same) old clip of a cat playing an upbeat tune on a keyboard.
The keyboard cat is, in a way, the smiling face of fate, perpetually making light of silly human failures. It's not stupid pet tricks, it's stupid people tricks. Like the old vaudeville hook, the keyboard cat will play you off the stage.
A pratfall? Really? A pratfall is Dick Van Dyke stumbling over an ottoman or Inspector Clouseau being Inspector Clouseau. But a man in a wheelchair falling down an escalator, a pratfall?
We’re only a few steps away from watching an execution and then seeing a clip of dramatic lemur.
And what does this mean for communicators creating Web videos? Anything goes apparently. How about a food maker shows someone choking on their beef jerky and then—Keyboard Cat. An automaker shows a family in a fiery car crash and then—you guessed it—Keyboard Cat.
This is ending badly for all of us.
Or maybe I just need to lighten up. College Michael would be very disappointed in adult Michael's take on this video. Plus, Stephen Colbert’s use of it was pretty funny.
Have you taken part in Facebook's "25 random things" meme? If you haven't (where have you been), the concept is simple: people write 25 random things about themselves and then tag their friends, which means their friends have to create their own list.
For the record, I opted out of this particular meme.
The good people at College Humor have spoofed this meme by reworking the Miley Cyrus song, "7 Things I hate About You."
Web site lets readers rank credibility of news stories and journalists
There’s a new-ish site ranking the credibility of journalists and bloggers. It’s called NewsCred.
Take a look. NewsCred enables readers to do several things, including personalize the news they want to receive from mainstream sources and blogs. It also ranks the credibility of each article, journalist and news source, and shows overall trends on media credibility based on those scores.
For instance, today there is a story from Slate indicating one in seven Gitmo detainees rejoin the ranks of militants. According to NewsCred, that story is 80 percent credible.
How did it reach that number? Readers voted. So that means the conspiracy theorist in the cubicle next door and all his buddies could've deemed it credible. Although I'm sure that's not the case—this time.
The folks at NewsCred anticipated a snarky remark like that. They have this to say in their About Us section:
"We agree that not everyone can know if every article is credible or not. We don't expect that. However, we truly believe that being a newsreader is qualification enough to voice your opinion. And if enough members of our community take the time to participate and vote, we can get it right."
Museum creates Web video to attract art skeptics that non-skeptics will love
On today’s PR Daily, there's a news item about a new Web video from New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that the museum hopes will draw the attention of modern art skeptics.
MoMA spokeswoman Kim Mitchell told the Wall Street Journal the video is “an effort to highlight the museum beyond just listing upcoming exhibitions.”
She added: “We wanted to try to convey to audiences of all ages that there may be something that they may not have thought of in a museum visit.”
It’s a lovely minute-and-a-half video, starring Meryl Streep’s son Henry Gummer, developed by the boutique ad firm, Taxi New York.
Too bad the wrong audience is going to love it. People of all ages will not watch this video; fans of MOMA and modern art will.
From the same cartoon that explained what Twitter is, comes a video exploring what Twitter has become—a virtual echo chamber for "Hollywood narcissism."
"Remember when trucker hats were cool?' The video's voice of reason asks. "And remember what killed them?" (Ashton Kutcher, the guy with over 1 million Twitter followers.)
Funny stuff. Watch for the surprise ending. And now I'm going to tweet about it.
Tribune-owned paper runs front page wrap ad for Target
The Chicago Tribune fooled me.
I was walking down a Chicago street today when I glanced at a newspaper box containing the RedEye, which is the free commuter daily the Chicago Tribune prints. As you can see with this 2008 edition (below), RedEye cover designs are often splashy.
Today's issue of the RedEye had the Target logo plastered in the middle of the cover with a headline screaming “Bullseye Bazaar.”
Knowing this Bullseye Bazaar is the temporary store Target has opened on Michigan Avenue, in the Tribune Towers, I thought: Wow! Front page, good PR for Target. I should get someone from there on the phone and see how they did it. So I grabbed a copy and stuffed it away.
That's me, back at the Ragan offices, surprised by Target's placement.
Man am I naïve. It wasn’t Target’s PR guy I needed to contact, but their advertising agency instead.
Turns out the front page was actually a wrap ad, meant to look very similar to the actual cover of the RedEye—similar enough to fool a passerby. (Atop the wrap ad it says, "Your Full RedEye Inside.") Chris Pine, from the new Star Trek movie, is on the real cover. I noticed it after I actually sat down to read the paper.
Touché, Sam Zell. (But thanks for the reminder on the Bullseye Bazaar, seriously.)
And there I am, holding the actual RedEye in my right hand, and the wrap ad in my left.
Gawker has put together a 3 minute “sizzle reel”—basically, a video to attract advertisers.
Most sizzle reels celebrate the company that created it. Gawker’s version highlights all the people that despise not only the site but blogging in general.
The video includes a gem from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger. It's an excerpt from an April 2008 episode of Costas Now in which Bissinger rips Will Leitch, the founding editor of sports blog Deadspin.
“I really think you’re full of sh**,” Bissinger says, “because I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty; they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty; they’re dedicated to speed.”
(Bissinger was elected to the Deadspin Hall of Fame on August 26, 2008.)
The young and handsome Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, who is running for Obama’s former senate seat, is fighting for his political life.
He bought a $26,000 Ford hybrid with money from a college investment fund that he oversees, a fund that lost $85 million last year. Giannoulias claims the car was a marketing expense.
“This is a vehicle that is used for Bright Star marketers to travel the state, to talk about the program,” Giannoulias told the press.
Uh-huh, sure they do. Just like my friend “works” during his vacations (ahem, tax write off).
But that’s not the point of this post.
Giannoulias is pals with President Obama; they play basketball together. If you watch Giannoulias answer questions about the college fund scandal, he sounds and acts exactly like his buddy, Barack Obama.
The timing, mannerisms, phraseology—all of it—mirrors the president.
If his political career doesn’t work out—and let’s be honest, it’s Illinois, of course he’ll get out of this one, (he’s already squirmed out of one scandal involving organized crime), but just in case—he could replace Fred Armisen, another Chicagoan, as Saturday Night Live’s resident Obama impersonator.
Here’s the video of the Obama impersonator, sorry, I mean Giannoulias. He starts his Obama impersonation—sorry, he starts talking—at the 35 second mark, then the 56 second mark and finally at 1:35 into the video.
If only editors had paid more attention to this video in 1981
TechCrunch pointed out a provocative TV news piece from 1981 that—with 20/20 hindsight—reveals the dangers facing print journalism, namely, the Internet. The piece is about an emerging technology: Electronic journalism on your home computer.
“We’re not in it to make money,” David Cole, of the San Francisco Examiner, says in the video. “We’re probably not going to lose a lot, but we’re not going to make much either.”
New trend in hospital marketing: More YouTube, less gloss
The New York Times is reporting this morning of a new trend in hospital advertising: more YouTube, less gloss. For instance, an ad for Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio features a 14-year-old boy talking about his plans of life after cancer.
The Times said this TV commercial is “emblematic of a new approach to advertising by hospitals—an industry that, despite the recession, is not slashing ad spending.”
The campaign, by the Marcus Thomas agency in Cleveland and running on about 20 cable channels and network stations in Ohio, is entirely unscripted. Other spots feature more patients and their young siblings, who talk about how their families are coping.
Patients in ads usually are success stories, survivors crediting hospitals with saving their lives. But the Akron campaign features patients in the throes of crises, with no inkling of their outcomes (which, considering that the footage was shot within the last few months, may still be unknown).
Are you more persuaded by the ad about Austin, or a more traditional commercial like this one for Community General Hospital in Syracuse, New York?
You’ve probably read Where the Wild Things Are, the beautifully illustrated children’s book by Maurice Sendak. Well, there’s a live-action film adaption coming soon—and I can’t wait to see it.
Here’s the trailer; don't be afraid to watch it more than once.
Tell us how you manage unrealistic expectations, meet reporter needs, churn out news when there is none, deal with a client you can't stand, and what you say to people that slam PR. Or anything else that's on your mind.
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