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Game-changer in communications isn't Apple slate or Google phone. It's Skype on TV.

To me, the big news these days isn't the announcement of the new Google phone, or the hubbub over Apple's impending announcement, perhaps, of the iSlate.

Yes, the rise of the mobile screen is news, but also old news. What's interesting is also the rise of the big screen because of the announcement this week that Skype is going to be incorporated into new television sets.

The introduction of streaming video from the Internet onto television sets has already changed my house. I now stream Netflix movies onto my laptop, and even more importantly, via my blu-ray disc player onto an HD monitor.

Yesterday, I read in the New York Times that Skype is working to bring streaming video calls onto televisions from Panasonic and LG, with the minor additions of webcams and microphones suitable for the living room.

Remember the Western Electric Picturephones from the 1964-65 Worlds Fair in Queens, N.Y., or the videophone from 2001? (Refresh your memories here and here.) Skype is finally bringing it home — more specifically, to my home.

That's a communication change.

Gannett Buys Blog Syndication Services; Will TDW be Blogging Next Door to Rayagn Swan?

Could Hoosier bloggers day find ourselves quoted in the Indianapolis Star, the Louisville Courier-Journal, or in Gannett's Indiana newspapers in Richmond, Lafayette, Fishers, Noblesville, Muncie, and Marion -- and sooner rather than later?

Blogs (at least the best of them) are about to take another leap into respectability and social acceptance.

Jennifer LeClaire of TechNewsWorld reported this morning that Gannett is among the customers for a syndication service for 600 of the best bloggers. Pluck, maker of RSS readers and other fine software, is releasing the service on Tuesday. (I cannot tell if that means today -- probably does -- or next Tuesday, April 18th.)

Besides Gannett, the Washington Post Co., the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Antonio Express, and the Austin American-Statesman are among the launch clients for the new service.

As for Indiana, imagine Doug Masson, Joshua Claybourn of Indiana Barrister, Mike Kole, Gary Welsh, TDW, and the  Bilerico gang going head-to-head on the pages of your local paper? We'll need the Indiana Law Blog and the Indiana Blog Review to mediate.
 

More Crummy Ethics When $$ Involved

Thanks to Daily 'Dog relaying word from the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, we see another case of crummy ethics. The hits -- hits to the public relations profession -- just keep on coming.

The political news show Fox News Sunday paid $14,000 to former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, for an interview four days after his indictment for alleged violations of Texas campaign finance law.

Good gracious, Fox. Do we need to review simple rules of media relations ethics? Try these:

• No self-respecting journalist should ever pay someone for an interview. I know it happens occasionally, and I have here some of the Barbara Walters interviews in mind. As for Fox, the $14K payment only reinforces the common belief that Fox is the right-wing cable news network.
• It's OK for media -- especially media fixed in one location such as a talk show wedded to its set -- to pay expenses for people to come to a studio for an interview. But paying for private jets ought to be very rare. And whatever happened to live remotes? Most local TV stations use them often.
• There are rare cases -- primarily in trade journals and among travel writers -- in which the product (resort, car rollout, new products) will pay for small but significant trade journals and newsletters to cover the launch of a product. I don't particularly like this practice, but as long as it is very limited to that segment -- and the payment is disclosed by the writer -- I can look the other way.

To sum up: Money paid by media to interviewees? No. Money paid for usual and customary travel expenses? OK, but better the media go to the interviewee. Money paid to journalists for interviews or travel to trade shows and product launches? Not good in vast number of cases, sometimes overlooked in cases of smaller newsletter or trade publications in which the travel budget can barely fund one trip. Should be disclosed.

UPDATE: Jan. 31, 2:37 p.m.
With ethics showing up so much in the recent news, I just added an "Ethics" category to this blog. I wonder how I got along without it for so long.

Technorati Tags: money payment pay interview media "Tom DeLay"

'Media Multitasking' Revealed in Ball State Study

When it comes to communications, there's no better campus than Ball State University, 90 minutes away from Indianapolis in Muncie, Ind.

BSU proves it again today.

On the heels of studies identifying the trend toward media multi-tasking (my favorite is the study on teenage media multitasking by the Kaiser Family Foundation), Ball State takes a look at a nuts-and-bolts approach to an important question: How does concurrent media use affect advertising-supported media?

According Ball State's Jan. 27 news release, written by Marc Ransford of BSU media relations:

The typical consumer often uses more than one type of media at any given time, preferring to work on the computer while the radio plays or surf the Web as the television blares in the background, says new research by Ball State University. However, not all ad-supported media are multitasked, also known as concurrent media use (CME), in the same way or to the same extent, according to the university's latest white paper, "Engaging the Ad-Supported Media."

The new research produced by Ball State's Center for Media Design (CMD), compares and contrasts elements of media experiences for the major advertising-based media, including magazines, newspapers, television, radio and the Internet. The findings are based on data collected from about 400 people in Muncie and Indianapolis for 2005's Middletown Media Studies 2 (MMS2), producing information on more than 5,000 hours of media use.

"We know Americans spend about nine hours daily with radio, television, magazine, newspaper, computer and other media, but looking at media use solely in accumulated total minutes barely scratches the surface of how we use various media," said Michael Holmes, CMD faculty research fellow and communication studies professor.

"We dug deeper, looking at a variety of issues related to spending time with the media," he said. "Our findings for concurrent media exposure — what others call media multitasking — varied depending on the media, time of day, day of week and a person's location."

-- snip --

The white paper's principal researchers include several faculty from Ball State's College of Communication, Information, and Media, including Holmes, telecommunications professor Robert Papper and journalism professor Mark Popovich. Mike Bloxham, CMD's testing center director, is also a research team member. Findings from the research will be used to create a series of reports and white papers in the coming months.

More information about the free white paper and other CMD research is available at www.bsu.edu/cmd/insightresearch.

-- snip --

The Center for Media Design (CMD) is a research and development facility focused on the creation, testing and practical application of digital technologies for business, classroom, home and community.

Middletown Media Studies 2 (MMS2) builds upon Muncie's reputation as "Middletown America," a typical community in the United States. Muncie earned this distinction as a result of the Middletown Studies of the 1920s and '30s by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. MMS2 is a follow-up to a 2004 study that found people consume much more media than they say they do.

I'm not sure if this study definitively answers the advertising question. And I'm not sure of its implications for public relations and marketing. I think I'll read the report and find out!

Technorati Tags: "Center for Media Design" Middletown ad-supported advertising communications "Ball State" Muncie "concurrent media use" "media multi-tasking" advertising magazines radio television TV computer music

Web + TV = P.R. Opportunities For Just About Anyone

The convergence of television and the Web just keeps on coming. Public relations opportunities open up, too, and no more so than for smaller companies, not-for-profits, and political candidates. Perhaps even bloggers can benefit.

Today's Wall Street Journal reports [subscription required] that during the new year, TV sets with improved capabilities to access content on the Web will hit the market. The new products are on show at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

For smaller companies (and political candidates), the ability to put a message on the Web, including audio or video content, and then have it viewed or heard on a consumer's TV set presents an oppotunity that was hitherto reserved only big companies with top-dollar advertising budgets.

The Newsroom Mindset: Nose for News vs. Gotcha Journalism

I've been impressed lately with the blogs operated by one of my favorite American newspapers, the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. This post, and the post immediately before this one, both concern recent blog entries from editors of that newspaper.

A blog entry today by Melanie Sill, executive editor of the N&O, discusses the disconnect between the wider world's perception of what goes on in a newsroom and the reality of newsrooms day to day.

Perception (more in my view than Ms. Sills' view, to be fair): Bigtime newspaper journalists sit around all day trying to figure out how to "get" people in power. "Gotcha" journalism is the norm, not the exception.

Reality: In many city newsrooms, like Raleigh and like many cities and towns in Indiana, much attention is simply focused on this pursuit: finding the news. Even the friendliest of sources doesn't always drop word of the big news in town, and all of us -- as consumers of news, regardless of whether we are or advise makers of news -- pay good money to subscribe to a newspaper because we want to know what is going on in the world immediately around us, and even in the world that is distant from us.

BIG AD = HUGE PR BENEFITS!

If you have not seen the "BIG AD" by Australian beer brewery Carlton Draught, you are missing one of the treats of television advertising this year. And it won't be appearing on U.S. television sets.

The BIG AD -- you can watch it here -- isn't just about grandiose advertising.

It's also very much about public relations.

Jet Blue Shows the Way to 21st Century Crisis Communications

For years, one of my favorite pieces of humor was Tom Lehrer's That Was the Year That Was: 1965, a hilarious send-up of public affairs that year, pressed onto a 33 rpm LP record in the years before the satire and comedy troupes of Second City, Capitol Steps, Saturday Night Live, and even Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. And my all time favorite song from the album was the song in which a fighter pilot, figuring World War III would be very short indeed, suggested his mom just watch the whole thing on TV.

Well, last week, it wasn't war -- but it was a crisis involving flying machines. And when the Jet Blue airliner skidded to a stop at LAX in a shower of sparks, you can be sure that across the nation, Mom, Dad, spouses, co-workers, and the simply curious were watching in real time.

What was most remarkable, perhaps, as Scott McCartney explores in his "Middle Seat" column in the Wall Street Journal [paid subscription required], was the situation in which passengers on the aircraft found that they were able to watch themselves on the on-board TV.