Just be glad this guy isn’t a banker

The New York Post has an incredible review today of a Trust Me, I’m Lying, a book by an unscrupulous  pr man who uses social media to manipulate the press.  This is a must-read for journalists. Some of the ploys will feel familiar to anyone who has dealt regularly with public relations reps — both the good and the bad. But the story of Ryan Holiday is uniquely creepy, especially  his manipulation of the blogosphere and social media. Holiday preys on journalists who are either too  lazy, overwhelmed, inexperienced, or too anxious to win readers to catch his scams. Reviewer Larry Getlen writes:

Websites make their money by selling ads that are evaluated by the number of pageviews they receive, putting bloggers under constant pressure to produce as many clickable posts as possible. …

Given this environment, Holiday says that spreading one’s own agenda can be as easy as sending carefully tailored e-mails from a fake address or via some other false pretense, techniques that Holiday has used frequently.

Once, when he wanted certain legal information about American Apparel widely circulated, he alerted several bloggers, who responded with a collective yawn. So he wrote a fake internal memo and e-mailed those same bloggers posing as a low-level company employee, with the note: “memo we’d just gotten from our boss.” The same blogs that rejected the official news, he says, now covered it with a big “EXCLUSIVE!” tag across the top.

The New York Post

 Can’t see anyone in this story comes out looking particularly well.

Where shall me meet again?

It’s been an amazing time with True/Slant. The past 16 months have been intense, terrifying and wonderful.  But first things first: Thank you to the T/S crew, a gracious, supportive, and inspiring team who created a wonderful community of writers.

Thanks to Lewis D’Vorkin  for the vision; to Andrea Spiegel and Coates Bateman for bringing me in and for unfailing encouragement and patience; to Michael Roston, the headline doctor and blogosphere tutor; and to Steve McNally and David Cautin for the behind-the-scenes work that kept the site going. And a big thank-you to my colleagues, readers and commenters who took the time to keep the conversation going. Where shall we meet again?

A few thoughts before moving on.

True/Slant was born at a pretty crazy time — the economy was crumbling and news organizations were shutting down, cutting staff, looking ways to save money. In early 2009, The Atlantic published an essay that posited The New York Times could fail in only a few months — a shocking thought because it suddenly seemed possible.

That’s just about the moment I decided it was time to re-enter journalism after spending the better part of a decade caring for our two boys.

My husband thought I was nuts. He’s not wrong. If wages are generally unchanged in the past decade for most Americans, they have fallen dramatically for freelance journalists. But I believe this is a temporary stage. (I have to.) The economic model is far from finished; CraigsList, the Internet — they have done their damage. And what they left undone, the Great Recession took care of. But I don’t believe that’s the end of the story by any stretch. Newspapers were a byproduct of the industrial revolution; it was a great ride. The Digital Era has temporarily killed the economic model for journalists, but as we speak I am hopeful that in the next few years, that will change because I suspect we are only mid-revolution. Efforts like T/S are part of that. Big thinkers are throwing out new ideas all the time. If as a society we do value journalism, then I feel confident that we will solve the problem of paying for what we need.

T/S began with the notion of entrepreneurial journalism. It sounded different but as it turns out some things never change. My husband has always said that good reporters are like mini-businesspeople scoping out their beats, carving territory, trying to make a name for themselves. They aren’t particularly good at working for other people or filing things in triplicate. So true.

To me the more fundamental shift in the new journalism revolves around the relationship between reader and writer; between the news subject and the news collector; between source and reporter. We are so much more connected to one another; the competition is more intense to attract and discover one another. The Internet ups the ante on everything; now a byline is a brand. Stories or content are products. Everyone is a reporter.

I confess, sometimes the terms chafe.

But then there’s the excitement of being part of something new and changing; being part of something you can influence. Revolution, if you can survive it, is a heady time.

When I launched this blog I thought that all the upheaval of the financial crisis would bring us to a new Wall Street. I’m less inclined to believe that. It’s fitting that this phase of the blog close with the recent signing of the financial regulatory overhaul bill. It’s a lot of nothing punctuated with a something or two. All in 2300 pages.

One of my early posts focused on AIG and a confidential PowerPoint presentation begging for another round of taxpayer money. This was a few months after the terrifying final quarter of 2008– the quarter when Lehman went under and the Dow plunged more than 700 points in a single day. At the time, the regulators reasoned that the system couldn’t stand another Lehman-like shock. The handouts were unavoidable. But were they?

We’ll never know. In that AIG piece, I took a close look at the language in the PowerPoint, which was clearly designed to scare more money out of taxpayers. The language was vague, ominous, terrifying — it was the monster under the bed.

Opaque language powerfully masked horrible changes in the way we were making decisions about how we lived, invested, and spent money.  Many homebuyers didn’t understand what they were signing when they borrowed  from unscrupulous lenders; careless investors didn’t truly understand what they were buying when they put money into complex mortgage-backed assets; credit rating agencies didn’t understand what they were rating; and everyone screamed, fright-movie-style, if you don’t save us, we will all die. Because the details were so opaque, no one was really sure if that was true or not. The muddiness hid just how clueless we were. The words were muddy because so were our thoughts.

Going forward I hope to write more about the language of Wall Street and its regulators. The language they use effectively slams the door on anyone who isn’t a member of the club. A  little more plain English may prove more potent than 2300 pages of legalese in helping everyone say, hey, this isn’t what we should be doing.

T/S is coming to a close as it was first conceived but many of the basic ideas that drove the site will be re-invigorating Forbes, a venerable brand from another time. On July 31, I will be transferring this blog to NanceFinance; for most of August I will be on vacation, though expect to contribute to financial publications periodically. Please follow me on Twitter to keep tabs on my plans for the fall.

I look forward to continuing the conversation. Your digital space or mine?

Will the real Phil Gramm please claim his cash-for-clunkers voucher?

Image via Wikipedia

Ashton Kutscher, do you really think Phil Gramm drives a Porsche? Or is someone getting punked?

For sure, someone has been  having fun at Zero Hedge this weekend, masquerading as Phil Gramm, former Republican Senator from Texas and economic advisor to presidential candidate John McCain.

Zero Hedge posted a withering appraisal of the cash-for-clunkers program by Bruce Krasting, a former investment banker with a blog featuring a real bio and a real photo of himself (or at least that’s what it appears to be).

In response, one mischievous commenter channeled his inner Phil Gramm pretending to support the program on both a personal level (traded in my Porsche for a Ford because wife Wendy wanted more room for the grandkids) and an economic level (it’s a thumbs up). The post includes all kinds of inside baseball: The writer notes that trading in his sports car for a more practical one made Gramm feel like a Democrat — which Gramm once was. It also says that the program is good for alleviating the “mental recession” infecting the nation. When he served as economic advisor to McCain, Gramm defended the Republican economic platform by calling complainers “a nation of whiners” who suffered from a “mental recession.”

The post raises deeper questions about the Internet and the news: Zero Hedge is wildly popular, even though no one knows who he and his cohorts are. Anonymity is the hallmark of the financial blog which draws high-profile readers and is quoted widely in the more established press. Yet anonymity is clearly a weak point for news: Credibility is constantly at stake. For years, insiders have debated the reduced value of sources who don’t want to be identified. What about news sites with anonymous “news writers?” In some ways, the hijacked Phil Gramm identity is the next logical step in the game: from no identity to assumed.

The comment is funny; but as we work our way through the revolution in news gathering and commenting, we need to widen the debate to consider the responsibility editors and writers have to readers in managing content from all angles.

Here’s the comment in full. Your thoughts?

on Sun, 08/09/2009 – 23:31

#31308

I just traded in my 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo (http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/CarsResult1.jsp?column=1&id=16486) for a Ford Flex by using the CARS program.

Wendy said that we needed more room to haul around the grandkids. I have to say, as an everyday US Consumer, it feels good to get that rebate. It almost makes me feel like a Democrat. In fact, without the CARS program, there is no way I would have traded in my Porsche 911 for a Ford Flex!

I like the Flex because it’s big and stylish. However, it’s union made and also made in Ontario so it’s not a perfect vehicle. Those damn Canadians are nothing but leaches off our economy. The also practice socialist medicine, so if any killer diseases are to come into being, Canada is a likely place for its origin.

As an economist, what do I think about the CARS program? I think it’s a program for whiners. Even so, it seems to be helping cure our mental recession, so I am for it.

– Phil

via Keynes on Clunkers: “I Hate It” | zero hedge.

Investigative Reporting Gets a Boost from HuffPo, non-profits

Aldus Manutius, printing innovator

Investigative journalism is getting small boosts of support from the Huffington Post and the lesser-known New England First Amendment Center, good  news for a shrinking sector and another signal of the important role non-profits may play in rebuilding the costliest kinds of reporting.

The HuffPo announced Sunday that it is collaborating with Atlantic Philanthropies to create a $1.75 million fund to finance investigative reporting that will initially focus on the economy;  the effort will employ 10 journalists. As we embark on a multi-trillion-dollar bailout of our financial system, we need as many skilled people probing the public and private sectors to follow the disbursement of funds as well as to track the policy issues involved.

Meanwhile, NEFAC announced that it would be sponsoring a free all-day conference at The Boston Globe for “professional and civic journalists and for those who work in related areas, such as non-profit employees who monitor government action.”

It will kick off with a session that examines how strong newsrooms are built around a lasting awareness of FOI issues and how access to public records serves as a driving force behind quality reporting.

via NEFAC to Offer Free Investigative Reporting, FOI Workshop.

Jay Rosen, new media guru at New York University, pratically crowed on Twitter: “I TOLD you bloggers vs journalists is over. Boston workshop on investigative journalism welcomes citizen journalists.”

In its news release, HuffPo notes that its “venture is reminiscent of ProPublica, a nonprofit independent newsroom funded by The Sandler Foundation and headed by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. ProPublica works with a $10 million budget.” In a recent speech at the Society of Silurians, Steiger told the journalists there that he expected investigative and overseas reporting to find funding from a combination of non-profit models — the ballet or NPR.

Huffington Post blogger Jeff Jarvis thinks the numbers will work:

I’ve been hoping to get the resources to preform an audit of the current resource allocation in journalism: Take a town, add up all the journalistic spending there (paper, TV, radio, magazine) and then see how much is spent on investigative reporting (I’ll wager it will be tiny; a fraction of a percent of the total) as well as the beat reporting that feeds it – and judge the value of the results.

When we see that number, I predict, it will be feasible to imagine support from foundations and the public (that is, in the NPR and Spot.US models) to pay for investigative journalism. Indeed, I’ll bet that we could multiply the amount spent on and the output of investigative reporting today. This is how to subsidize news. It’s happening now, as ProPublica stories run in The New York Times. That is a form of subsidy.

I also suspect, that something else will emerge that we can’t even imagine that will reshape journalism and its sponsorship. As Clay Shirky wrote on his blog:

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius [printing innovator] of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark [Craigslist founder], or Caterina Fake [Flickr founder]. It could be [NYT's] Martin Nisenholtz, or [UK Guardian's] Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

Image via Wikipedia