OMGWTF

Earlier this week, Wall Street Journal workplace columnist Sue Shellenbarger tackled an issue nobody was wondering about: whether you should shake hands, fist-bump, or otherwise greet people in your workplace.

The answer (surprise!) is: it varies depending on the company culture.

“Ashley M. Harris worked for a San Antonio, Texas, public-relations agency that was very ‘huggy,’ she says. ‘You would walk into a meeting and give your client a kiss on the cheek and a hug, saying, ‘How good to see you,’ while holding onto their arm,’ she says. ‘It took a lot for me personally to get used to the hugging.’

“But at a university where she later worked, she threw her arms around a former professor of hers, and ‘he literally did a step back’ and tensed, she says.”

In case it’s all too confusing, the article came with a clip-and-save guide to interacting with your coworkers, sorted by industry. As you can see, in “entertainment, media” an appropriate greeting would be a kiss or hug, while in manufacturing you still shake hands. If you work in PR and your coworker wins the Super Bowl office pool, you are permitted to give a bro-hug. Not sure how? The guide comes with an illustrated diagram.

What more can we say?

A journalist working for Papua New Guinea’s Post-Courier has won an award for “best scoop” after he had to undergo a ritual circumcision to get the story, Britain’s The Telegraph reports.

Simon Eroro had to “cross rivers and jungles to reach a group of rebels, only to be told he must first agree to the circumcision as part of a cleansing ceremony.” He agreed, and wrote a story exposing the cross-border movements of rebels moving from Indonesia to Papua New Guinea. The report led to a police operation to tighten the borders.

The Post-Courier is owned by News Limited, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm, and Mr. Murdoch, attending the ceremony for the in-house award, said that that night, he had “witnessed many examples of great journalism.”

Eroro, for his part, thanked his editors for “trusting me and engaging me on that assignment.”

Journalists are rarely granted access to Papua and West Papua, the Telegraph reports, adding that “[s]ome of the rebels still closely observe traditional customs, including wearing penis gourds, with the sizes varying according to status.”

Here’s a letter sent to a PR firm that is a lesson in what not to do:

I am a student from XXX State University I plan on graduating this spring and was very interested in applying at your firm. My major is public but I have had experience in advertisement, campaign management, and social media. I will of course sent you a portfolio and resume upon my graduation I just find it appropriate to contact you early. I extremely respect your business and I feel I have the ability to add to your already sterling reputation.
Thank You
XXX XXX
Sent from my iPhone

The recipient of this email, Gil Rudawsky, said that it “shows laziness” to send a letter from an iPhone and that it’s the “ultimate insult.” Really? The genericness of the letter, the terrible spelling and grammar, and the lack of research weren’t insulting, but the fact that the student sends emails from his phone is an insult?

We’re gonna go out there and say that sending an email from your iPhone to apply for a job isn’t inherently bad. Hell, perhaps it will make you look even more interested (“I just saw this job posting and couldn’t wait to get to my computer to apply!”). This letter wouldn’t improve any by having been sent from a computer, we promise you that much.

One thing to keep in mind: Obviously, the Autocorrect features on iPhones and other smartphones do lend themselves to some hilarious typos. And it can be harder to proofread on such a small screen. Know your own limitations. If the emails you send to family are riddled with mistakes because your fingers can’t hit those tiny virtual keys, as ours often cannot, think twice about using the smartphone to apply for a job, obviously. But you could always draft an email (delete any addresses in the To: field to make sure you don’t accidentally send it) and save it for review later, or let a friend look over it.

Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan says that yesterday he was approached by a marketing firm and asked to insert links to clients into otherwise normal blog posts, for a “generous” payment.

The agency is called 43a (“It’s named after the apartment we started out of,” the emailer told Nolan), and they say they have “some of the biggest clients in the world.”

That said, this understandably seemed like a strange arrangement. Nolan dug deeper and received the following response:

We work with bloggers mainly. That’s not to say we don’t have editors working for us (we work with editors at the Huffington Post, Business Insider and Technorati — to name a few). We generally meet with resistance when dealing with editors, but bloggers aren’t paid as well and most are willing to make some extra money.

What we suggest (as long as you think it won’t get you into any trouble — we don’t want anything that isn’t beneficial for both parties) is trying to drop a link in the article, and seeing if the editor mentions it. If he does, remove the link, and we’ll go our separate ways. If he doesn’t, we’ll pay you handsomely, and we can continue if you want to. We don’t do this for every article, and there is a certain “under the radar” element to it, so you don’t want to over do it.

That said, I also don’t want you in trouble with your editor. So if it can’t be done, just let me know and we’re totally cool with that.

HuffPost, through a spokesperson, and Business Insider, through CEO Henry Blodget, denied the practice.

This is totally ridiculous. If true, it destroys, as Nolan says, “the fundamental (this is a corny and dramatic word, but accurate) sanctity of honest writing in exchange for money.” But it’s so ridiculous we wonder if somebody isn’t being punked. Who on earth would pay for this, and what writer would jeopardize their job by accepting money for ads under the table?

You know what they say in journalism: when a dog bites a man, that’s not news. But when a blog buys a newspaper….Tom Knighton, owner of Albany, Ga.-based political blog Laws N’ Sausages, has formed a company to purchase community weekly The Albany Journal.

Local TV station WALB reports:

“Since Knighton was young, he has wanted to be a newspaper man.

“‘Being a journalist is just something I have always wanted to do, and when an opportunity like that drops in your lap, you do not turn it down,’ says Knighton.

“‘This paper has not been dying, this paper is not dying at all, it is doing very well, and it turns out there is a trend throughout the country for community papers,’ says Knighton.”

Knighton plans to add a book review section to the paper but won’t be changing “for the sake of change,” WALB reports.

As far as he (and we) know, this is the first time a blog has bought a newspaper.

The paper’s circulation is not tracked by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, nor would Knighton disclose how much he paid for the newspaper.

Another sad-but-true piece of advice for jobseekers.
Apparently some jobseekers have damaged their chances for a job by wearing a big engagement ring, which some hiring managers and recruiters say could send the signal that “this person doesn’t need the job.”

In another instance, HuffPo writer Katherine Bindley says, a woman returning from maternity leave asked for a raise and was turned down because of the size of her engagement ring. (She’s now suing.)

“It’s obviously unfair,” Bindley says. “No one would ever ask a man how many carats the diamond ring he bought his wife is to determine what kind of job or salary he deserves — but the [evidence suggests] that it happens.”

We don’t have much more to add. If you’re judging applicants based on whether you decide they “need” the job or not, you’re already not doing a very good job at hiring. Because the flip side of the “this person doesn’t need the job” coin is “this person is completely desperate.” That doesn’t make them a good hire.

Apparently LinkedIn, despite its reputation as a place for professionals to hang out, still attracts some world-class bozos.

On PRDaily, Jure Klepic describes some LinkedIn goofs that he’s personally witnessed.

Among them: asking for a date (really? Match.com is too hard for you?) and asking complete strangers for recommendations.

Another don’t: asking questions like the below in LinkedIn’s Q&A section (unless, of course, you’re doing some weird performance art project, which we haven’t ruled out)

Q: “I am divorcing my wife, and I own a C-class corporation. Would you tell me how to hide the corporation so that I don’t have to give that b**** half of it?”

Don’t lie on your profile, use a profile with chest hair showing, or buy contacts. Really, we think these misuses of LinkedIn are so obvious that nobody would actually do them! Or would they?

Lee Morris was sick of how his out-of-state bosses were handling his paper.

Morris, until very recently the managing editor of the Valley City (N.D.) Times-Record, decided to tell them—and readers—exactly that.

But because he was sure a direct challenge would be spotted and removed before it made it into print, he sneaked his concerns and contempt into the paper with syndicated columnist Gene Lyons’ byline and the headline “An American pastime and politics.”

According to Romenesko….the stunt worked.

Morris then was called into the office manager’s office, and he resigned.

If the letter’s accusations are true, Morris had a decent gripe:

“[Corporate publisher] Leonard [Martin]’s policies are different. He emphasizes more news on more items, spreading our thin resources even thinner. (We only have two full-time reporters.) For instance, he wants more coverage on events such as Chamber of Commerce luncheons and ribbon-cutting ceremonies, items about which Nikki encouraged groups to submit information so we could better use our limited resources to report on issues and events that regular people can’t easily ‘submit.’…he does not understand how relevant this paper has become reporting in-depth on a variety of items. Already, he’s slashed your access to this newspaper’s Opinion Page and banned ‘criticism of the city.’ What he wants is a newsletter, not a newspaper.”

One analyst has estimated that AOL is spending $150,000 per year on each of its roughly 1,000 Patch sites, the WSJ says.

That’s insane.

We know that each Patch has a jack/jill-of-all-trades editor who makes around $40,000. Then there’s the freelance budget (roughly $26,000 a year, we hear) and the salary for each regional editor who oversees a number of individual Patch sites. Let’s estimate that each regional editor makes $100,000 and oversees five sites. That’s $20,000 a year per Patch.
Then there are the ad sales people, roughly $40k a year, but they must work on more than one Patch each; let’s be conservative and assume 3 sites per salesperson.

That’s $93,000 per Patch per year.

Someone at AOL want to tell us where the rest of the money is going?

At any rate, the $160 million per year AOL is reportedly spending on Patch pales in comparison to the $315 million it spent earlier this year to buy the Huffington Post; AOL also spent nearly $100 million last year to acquire TechCrunch, 5min Media and Thing Labs.

The Wall Street Journal argues that AOL is spending more than it can hope to make back.

“If you sell lemonade for $1 and it costs $800 to make it, that’s not a great business,” Robert Peck, managing partner at Quasar Capital Advisors, which advises Internet and technology companies, told the WSJ.

On the other hand, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said that things are looking up: AOL’s domestic display-ad business should start growing in the second half of the year.

LinkedIn has gone and done something very much unlike them (we’d have guessed): quietly turned on a feature that lets them use your face or name in advertising.

The Wall Street Journal notes that the social network posted two blog posts about the change and run banner ads on the site to educate users about the new policy, yet the network has still “drawn fire” for allowing members to unwittingly change “from ordinary career networkers into brand cheerleaders.”

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to opt out.

1: Click your name in the upper right corner of Linkedin; then click Settings.
2: Click “Account” in the lower left.
3: Choose “Manage social advertising” and uncheck the box.

Graphic via boingboing: