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.

sasquatchmedia:

grovesprof:

Summing up the debt-ceiling debacle: Great word cloud from Pew Research Center and the Washington Post, based on a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults (July 28-31, 2011).

For real …

Worth a thousand words.

Since I came to PLU, many have asked me to describe what Norwegians are like. Today, I am proud to give you my answer.

When news came in about the bombing and massacre in Norway on July 22, it looked for a while as if things just kept getting worse. First came the report that at least 80* youths had been shot dead on the island of Utøya. Then came the heart-wrenching TV pictures and the graphic stories describing a 90-minute long nightmare.

Read more

While victims tried to quietly hide from a gunman during last Friday’s massacre in Norway, their cellphones started going off. Reporters were looking for a quote.

Tore Christensen, 25, told Nettavisen.no he could hear the gunman shoot someone only 2-4 yards away from his hiding-place inside a café building. Shortly thereafter, a news reporter called his cellphone.

Luckily, the phone was set to be silent.

“I can understand that family members who may not think clearly tried to call, but I had higher hopes for the professional responsibility of the press,” he told Nettavisen.

A 32-year-old man is charged with killing at least 73 people at a youth camp on the Utøya island in Norway.

“Quite a few people I talked to afterwards had received a call from one or other form of media… I really hope none were revealed while being called by the press,” Christensen told Nettavisen.

—-

I became totally speechless when I read this story today. Is this normal? Do editors tell their staff to call hostages who are being held captive, to ask for an interview?

Early this morning, six tweets went out over one of the Twitter accounts managed by Fox News, @foxnewspolitics, which described in graphic and convincing detail how the president had been shot and killed while campaigning in Iowa. […]

It wasn’t until around noon — ten hours after the messages had been posted — that someone with access to the Twitter account, which has more than 38,000 followers, logged in and deleted them. […]

A representative from Script Kiddies, a hacking collective that is hoping to gain attention for itself and join forces with Anonymous, the group responsible for a number of widely-publicized hacks in recent months, […]

Hackers—for lack of a better word—are officially not cool anymore.

When I see newspapers latch onto a person at the beginning of a story, and drag them through paragraphs and paragraphs of social commentary as a plot device, I start to get uncomfortable.

I remember hearing about it on the news: Ali Farah had been assaulted in Oslo’s Sofienberg Park, but two paramedics refused to give him a ride to the hospital. As the ambulance drove away, the man was still bleeding on the ground. Witnesses couldn’t believe their eyes.

The media quickly cried “racism” because the man was of Middle-Eastern descent. A witness had heard the paramedics yell “you damn pig” when the man wet his pants.

News channel TV2 wrote Tuesday:

The media (had) referred to several prominent politicians and commentators who believed racial motives were behind the ambulance workers’ decision not to take Farah.

After a few days of this, paramedic Erik Schjenken appeared with a picture in the papers, denying claims of racism. In 2010 he sued Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet for what he called “a hate campaign.”

Yesterday, he won the lawsuit, TV2 reports.

District Court Judge Thorleif Waaler points out that the press’s job is to inform, reveal unacceptable conditions, and also to take a stand on various issues.

- In a case like this it is clear that the press should have taken into account that there was another weak party in the picture, namely the two ambulance men, who because of their confidentiality had no opportunity to defend himself, the verdict reads.

Dagbladet’s Editor-in-Chief claims the court only considered editorial pieces, and “turned a blind eye” to any other articles. He said the paper may appeal the decision.

“This sentence is quite impossible to relate to for the Norwegian press,” Helle told Dagbladet. “It must be allowed (for us) to promote critical comments about others.”

I have to admit, this is a tricky one for me. There was no way the media could avoid covering the racism angle. Listening to the “911 tapes,” you can hear a witness jump to the racism conclusion right away. It’s an important topic in Oslo.

On the other hand, even though I think Schjenken should’ve never be let near the driver’s seat of an ambulance, I’m not without sympathy for him. I’m starting to get more apprehensive about using human beings as characters to cover a social issue.

I employ the word using intentionally.

There’s a difference between covering an individual’s actions at an event, and covering a larger social issue. When I see newspapers latch onto a person at the beginning of a story, and drag them through paragraphs and paragraphs of social commentary as a plot device, I start to get uncomfortable.

There’s still such a thing as minimization of harm. People should be held accountable when they make a mistake, but at the same time, be allowed to make mistakes.

About a week ago, I was hired as Web Editor by our college newspaper. I kind of see myself as FEMA, coming into town after a particularly bad hurricane, to rebuild.

The Mooring Mast has been trying to “go online” ever since I came to PLU, and it has been an absolute disaster. I’ve learned two things from this whole process:

1. Surprisingly enough, college students are not professionally trained business negotiators.
2. Website providers (including WordPress and SquareSpace) have no clue how to talk to college students.

After trying to get something going with at least five different contractors, students and faculty finally gave up and decided to invest in-house. They devoted one fifth of their entire budget to hiring Lace Smith as part-time web developer for student media.

So my job for the next few months will be to haul out the debris of failed past attempts, and work with Editor-in-Chief Heather Perry to get this rag into the 21st century.

Heather sent me and Lace a Word-document with a list of requests for the new site, and I decided to draw a mockup so we could have something to look at. It’ll be interesting to see if the finished product resembles the first draft.