Thanks, CNN, for this perfect example of confirmation bias. CNN is all riled up with the news that a French satellite has spotted what appears to be a debris field in the Indian Ocean. Great news. But the anchor keeps attempting to say that this is likely to be the plane because it is in … More Thanks, CNN, for this perfect example of confirmation bias.
Forbes has a terrific essay by Greg Satel in which he analyzes the economics of paywall models such as the one adopted fairly recently by the New York Times, vs. non-paywall models such as the Washington Post. According to Satel, while subscription revenue is up at the NYT their advertising revenue fell considerably. And at the … More Great Analysis of Newspaper Paywall Economics
It’s been a bad couple days for Lance with Nike and Budweiser dumping their sponsorships as a result of the damning evidence that he doped throughout his cycling career. But I’m going to make a prediction that there’s a larger shark circling out there for Lance. I haven’t seen this mentioned in any of the massive … More This is only the beginning of Lance Armstrong’s Tour of Pain
Terrific Op-ed in the LA Times by Neal Gabler today about the herd mentality of political reporting told by predicting that Romney will rise again in the media because that’s what the media needs. Basically, Gabler says,the media only have four stories to tell. The candidate is losing or winning, losing ground or gaining ground. … More Winning ground, losing ground, and why political reporting is always the same.
The recent outbreak of hantavirus in Yosemite National Park could have been devastating to the park and its concessionaires that run lodging facilities in the park. In brief, this mouse-turd-born disease infected at least 9 individuals who had stayed in tent cabins at the park, killing 3 of them. The tent cabins are a very … More Yosemite National Park. A+ for their handling of Hantavirus outbreak
I don’t claim to be an expert on electoral politics and, thus, generally steer clear of commentary about political communications but I’m so astonished by Paul Ryan’s convention speech that I’m going to do it anyway. One of the axioms of ALL effective communication is to never tell a provable lie. You can fudge the … More Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech Backlash
The Netflix/Flixter/whatever trainwreck just keeps getting worse. All I know is they somehow succeeded in getting me to reduce my monthly subscription from $15 per month to $7 per month. And they made me investigate further the prospect of ditching them entirely and depending on Amazon Prime for all my streaming needs. Stock down 50% … More Netflix to Customers: You are right. We are stupid. Now please do business with us.
One bit of advice I frequently give to clients is that there is a lot of value in simply owning up to your mistakes and apologizing. Humility goes a long way with the public. An excellent example of that is when Toyota’s CEO gave a heartfelt apology for product defects in the Prius. But there is … More Netflix CEO to Customers: Allow me to dig this hole even deeper!
We’re all used to private companies using search engine optimization techniques to improve visibility of news they want people to read and sometimes to bury bad news that keeps getting regurgitated. It’s not hard at all to exile bad coverage to the second page of Google results which is one more page than most people … More When Making Good News Becomes Your Bad News
Carol Bartz comes out swinging, calling the Yahoo Board “a bunch of doofuses.” Nobody is coming out of this looking good. I smell litigation.
The Original Spin 