Boomerang

Growing up, the fatherly voices of Walter Cronkite, Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings mesmerized and warmed me. No matter how shocking, sad or maddening the news of the day was, their polished, trusted delivery made everything okay. It felt good to know they were on it: uncovering every detail and source, asking hard questions, and reporting the story fairly and accurately.

As the mass media landscape continues to shift, the good old days of a mass audience glued to national nightly newscasts have been replaced by a wild west of “Dot TV” channels — a handful of which now reach audiences that rival those of national news broadcasts.

But in the famous words of the great Webmaster himself, Spider-Man: “With great power also comes great responsibility.” These new dot TVs have some big shoes to fill. Journalism is a pillar of our free and democratic society, and I’m not convinced that all newcomers feel they are beholden to a shared code of ethics, and the same level of rigorous reporting of the Jennings era.

I know there are many who share my concern and excitement about the new rules of engagement that are emerging. My friend Tom Foremski has been tracking the topic on his blog for some time now. For instance, several months ago he suggested that media sites should provide a way for sources to comment back on posts – which came to life last week on Google News.

There have been other compelling experiments lately, such as the recent CNN-Citizen Tube presidential debate. Many media pundits commented that some of the most hard-hitting, relevant questions for presidential candidates came from citizens’ video questions. Our client Friction.tv has also recently formed partnerships with Channel Five and Al Jazeera. If an informed citizenry at large can collectively rise to the challenge, the honorable profession of journalism can prevail in a new form.

Facebook, like many social media sites, is complex. There are one-to-one relationships, there are one-to-many, and there are many-to-many, not to mention the varying degrees in between. I love it (and some might even call me addicted), because it’s in my nature to be social and to express myself. I want a place to unleash my creativity in a social forum. What’s so cool about all these emerging networks is that human behavior is actually driving the development of technologies. We’re constantly tweaking technology to better fit our social communication and productivity needs, which makes me think that Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, Digg and Del.icio.us are only the beginning of what’s to come.

For example, the number of APIs from various companies is driving innovation of new applications. A couple I like are Twittervision, a real-time geographic visualization of Twitter posts anywhere in the world, and Twittermap, which allows you to search a location (or Twitter user) to get a quick view of what people are doing in that area. The next thing I’d like to see is the ability to search for a phrase (e.g., basketball or the movie “The Departed”) so you could get a real-time snapshot of what people are doing or saying about a particular topic.

I just received an email titled, “Magazine Editor Shares Six Common PR Pet Peeves to Avoid” so I decided to test myself. After 15 years as a PR person (and 4 years as a journalist), could I guess what those pet peeves might be?

Alas, I could. One, be familiar with the publication and the reporter before making the pitch. Two, don’t follow up with “did you get my email?” and preferably don’t follow up at all – the reporter will call you if he/she is interested. Three, call with something of value like news, controversy, sources, research. Four, avoid overused jargon…

This is not headline-worthy information. It’s old news and does little to foster symbiotic relationships between PR pros and media. More than that, I suspect that PR people don’t like generic advice about how to do business any more than a good journalist likes a generic pitch on some “paradigm shift” in technology.

Like most businesses, both PR people and media – for some reason, pitted against each other – benefit from personal relationships based on history and success. Let’s stop making lists for each other and just start talking.