Cult wanted. Will sacrifice. No Christians please.

I don’t see why—in 2012—you still have to ask for public records to gain access to them.

It made sense in the old days, when you simply couldn’t access documents without asking first. They were stored in filing cabinets, and some poor clerk had to get up and retrieve them for you before you could read them.

You’d think those days would be long gone, two decades after the Internet went mainstream. But even in an age where your grandmother has her own blog, public institutions require you to send in a request so a paid staffer can retrieve your document for you.

There’s also some lingering apprehension about things being “too accessible.” People don’t want divorce papers and FBI profile available to nosy neighbors and information brokers by the mere click of a mouse.

This is silly.

If a police blotter is public enough to let anyone read it at the station, it’s public enough to put online. If you’re worried about who reads it, don’t make it all public.

I propose an Online Public Records Accessibility standard (it comes with a free catchy acronym) for public institutions to adopt. Here’s what it might look like.

1. Any public content committed to a fixed medium shall be accessible through a website.
2. People should not need to “log in” to a website to access public records.
3. Hyperlinks leading to public records should be styled 12 pt font or higher, and should be visible without user interaction.
4. Documents should be directly available for download within 3 clicks of the website’s front page.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

What would you add to such a standard? Do you think we need one?

“The one percent,” she told me while fighting back tears, “they make all the rules.”

There’s a story behind every housing ad on craigslist. I saw one by a 42 year-old man who had a room to rent. “Just me and my 9 year-old girl,” it said. “Available immediately.” Or the one by the single 39 year-old woman whose ad included the question “Are you single?”

The one I answered looked innocent enough, apart from the price. It was close to buses and shops, which is all I really look for when browsing these ads.

Yet here I was, sitting opposite the landlady in my abode-to-be. She was crying.

Jane hasn’t worked since her car accident two years ago. She has trouble remembering things, and needs to remind herself of appointments. I already knew that—this was my second trip to see the room this week.

“I feel so useless,” she said with infinite sadness in her voice.

She rents out the rooms in her green three-story house simply to earn a living. Her mother’s house went into foreclosure recently (hence all the items in the dining room) and now she’s fighting tooth and nail to keep her home intact.

“The one percent,” she told me while fighting back tears, “they make all the rules.”

Never before had I heard the popular phrase ‘one percent’ used with such trembling anger.

I’m used to hearing it from White middle-class 20-somethings as they sip their lattes at Starbucks. Or from Facebook-friends who tirelessly post news and blog posts about the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Watching Jane dry her tears, I realized one thing. None of us know what ‘the one percent’ really means.

Only people like Jane know.

anotherfob:

Lemon aid

So bad I just can’t help but share it.

Cross-posted from my Public Relations class.

Hi, my name is Daniel and I am a tired, under-trained, over-worked reporter who is prone to making mistakes.

At least, that’s how Greg Miller of Marketcon PR describes my noble profession in a blog post on Ragan.com.

Read More

Yesterday a professor asked me if we could add a “Donate” button at the bottom of an upcoming article on LUTE Times, a classroom blog.

The article is about an organization, and the button would presumably take you to a page where you could fill in your credit card information and give them money.

“No way,” I said. “That would be advocacy.”

My professor wasn’t buying it, and challenged me to defend my claim. “Journalism has changed,” she told me. “It’s not all ‘here are the facts ma’am’ anymore.” At the very least she said we could put a link to their website in the story.

That I would be fine with.

What do you think? Would a “Donate” button comromise objectivity? Is it different in nature from a link to a website? What would you have done?

Cross-posted from my ‘PR Principles and Practices’ class.

You couldn’t shake a stick at the Internet yesterday without learning that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had passed away. Along with the iPhone and the iPad, Jobs leaves behind important lessons for PR professionals.

In his blog entry on Ragan’s PR Daily, Geoff Livingston notes:

The one thing to add beyond technological and business insights is respect for the incredible marketing machine Jobs built. From packaging and storefront design to masterful multichannel product launches and tense excitement by tightly managed PR, Apple demonstrated best practices in many areas of marketing.

Maybe you’ve seen the pictures of customers lining up for blocks and blocks outside the Apple store, waiting for days to get the new iPhone. They got to that point by realizing that PR is a planned, strategic and continuous process.

For example, Livingston highlights Apple’s use of events—one of the PR tactics we’ve read about. Rather than launch new products at annual conferences like CES, Apple began to hold its own tightly orchestrated launch events, which have since become a media sensation. To see why, take a minute to watch Jobs announce the first iPhone.



Along with each launch event, Apple would trigger a clockwork of press releases, paid advertisements and customized websites which converge into “a seamless multi-channel, multi-touch approach that demonstrates one of the very best integrated and repeatable marketing formulas the world has seen,” Livingston writes.

This is the definition of strategic communication.

But even Jobs made some fantastic PR mistakes, which Livingston ought to have mentioned. When Apple released the iPhone 4, people started complaining about poor signal quality. Having failed to anticipate the issue, the PR department found itself in a crisis management situation.

In a hilariously bad move, the PR department released a statement essentially telling customer: You’re holding it wrong. That didn’t go too well for some reason.

I encourage PR students to study Apple’s PR successes and failures alike. They are all as brilliant as the company’s late patriarch.

WHAT’S up, Times readers? Normally right now you’d be nodding off over a very thoughtful prescription for offering Qaddafi an honorable exile at a plastic surgery teaching hospital. But not today, people! Because I deleted that snoozer when I hacked my way in here.

Steve Bodow (Daily Show) and the New York Times poke fun at Anonymous and LulzSec. This is a must-read.