Charles on… anything that comes along

I met a PR person the other day who wanted to know what things I’m writing about, and what her clients might be able to supply. I pointed out that predicting precisely what I’ll be writing about from day to day, or week to week, is difficult; something to do with technology and consumers? Or just about people and how we live our lives today?

“What your clients really need to have,” I said, “is to supply information about their new stuff on RSS feeds. Then I could see what they were thinking and doing. Also, if a topic came up and I needed an opinion, I could see what theirs was right away - no need to even call first. And it would be quick, and wouldn’t require lots of pre-approving of emails, and everyone would get your client’s reaction at the same time. Even if it’s a special class of information - say, analyst commentary - you can do that through a password-protected feed. Then only selected people will get to see it.”

“What’s RSS?” she asked. Not unreasonably, actually. While many people may have heard of a blog now, very few have heard of stuff like RSS (or Atom). I explained that RSS - or Atom - is like the website with the water taken out. (I guess RSS:websites as MP3:CDs.)

You can already get feeds for the Jupiter analysts such as Michael Gartenberg. I know just what he thinks about what’s happened in the past two weeks in consumer electronics without having had to send an email or pick up the phone. It’s even quotable, and if I lift from his blog I can be certain I’m not misquoting him. As can everyone else.

That trend is going to continue. Many journalists haven’t heard of RSS; many PR people haven’t. But I think both should - and will be amazed at how much easier it makes the nuts and bolts of their lives in future. Press releases by RSS? Why not? I could choose which ones to receive, and to read, a hell of a lot more easily.

Give it a few years. After all, how many PR companies sent out press releases by email in 1995? And how many don’t in 2005? RSS has so many benefits to both sides of this dialogue that it deserves rapid adoption. Journalists are pulling; PR people should push.

This doesn’t obviate the need for journalism of the sort that (at its pinnacle) Seymour Hersh practises (here’s his latest, on the US operating covertly against Iran) - the sort where you talk to people and pull details together. Doc Searls says “markets are conversations”. (As in, the trade of one thing for another, discussion, negotiation.) Well, journalism is conversation too. As is PR. All that varies is the subject. Anything else is just hackwork.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Must get more RSS feeds... must get more.. (17 January 2006; score: 38.01%)
• How to decide in less than 5 seconds whether to keep or kill a feed (15 February 2008; score: 32.64%)
• Incomplete web feeds, the bane of aggregated life (18 November 2005; score: 32.63%)

Over at NevOn, a guide to how language leads us astray, especially in business: What you say may not be what others think you mean.

If I said to you ‘You must come over for dinner sometime,’ what would you think I meant?

You’d probably think, ‘That’s nice, he’s inviting me to dinner.’ Unless you’re British, that is. And then you’d know that I was just being polite and have no intention of inviting you to dinner. Ever.

This is a good example of the type of expression the British use to politely say something that is often not what the words being spoken actually mean. I’m a Brit, by the way, just to establish my credentials up front.

Very entertaining, especially the big table of “You say/ you mean / they hear”. It’s one of those really irregular verbs.

(Via NevOn.)

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• None

Dave Winer had a grumble the other day (I know, I’ll narrow it down in a moment) about how you can’t trust the pros (the “pros” being employed journalists): “If it weren’t for the callous lack of credibility of the pros, there never would have been a need for blogs. At the time I started blogging, the pros were reporting that there was no new Macintosh software. I would call these reporters and point out that there was lots of new Mac software, they were using it, they knew about it. They would respond by saying Everyone knows there’s no new Mac software.

“I don’t think knew they were being dishonest, by then reporting wasn’t about facts, it was about conventional wisdom. If CW said there was no new Mac software then the reporters would report that.”

Personally, I had an important experience fairly early on - 1995 - at The Independent when I wrote an article about Linux, most of which was pretty clueless, and wasn’t based on actually using it. There was a firestorm of responses. So I wrote a followup piece on the technology page, which tried to acknowledge I’d got stuff wrong. Which seemed to salve people. Or maybe just stunned them. Because it’s very rare for newspapers to admit their mistakes. American publications do it far more than British ones, which generally only do it when forced to at the point of a lawyer.

I have to applaud The Guardian’s “Corrections and Clarifications” column, which has an allocated space on the letters page (a high-traffic page) that the editor cannot touch; the readers’ editor, who is answerable to the board of the organisation, holds sway there.

Yes, many of the corrections are trivial, but they’re an important first step to honesty. It won’t take you as far forward as Dave Winer would like, because you’re never going to see an item in the Corrections column saying “We recognise that our treatment of Gordon Brown has been truly shocking and that we should instead have been focussing on his policies rather than a relatively trivial personal difference with Tony Blair”. But at least you get an idea that what’s factually wrong will get fixed. (Dave Winer would disagree on this one too, having gone round the houses over an article Ben Hammersley wrote about RSS vs Atom, which he - Winer - felt was biased against RSS [which he - Winer - backs] in favour of Atom which Hammersley helped develop. The row is best viewed through this Google lens.) The Independent on Sunday runs a corrections column too. It’s time more newspapers did it. Being corrected by your readers turns out not to be a bad thing. They begin to feel good about what they’re reading.

Imagine though what it would be like if the Daily Mail had to publish a corrections column; and the person editing it, responding to readers’ complaints and investigating and adjudicating them, couldn’t be fired. And the column had to be on the letters page. Would it improve the readers’ trust in the paper? Not to begin with. But that would be the first step.

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• Latest Tech Weekly podcast is up... and a word for PR folk (23 January 2008; score: 33.37%)
• So long, and thanks for all the fish: last Independent column (23 November 2005; score: 30.46%)
• In The Independent: why we're all reading slower than 10 years ago (9 November 2005; score: 28.71%)