Bad PR

The city of Fort Wayne, Indiana (pop. 250,000) is handling public affairs more like a village of 50. Until this week, the city's image was handled by the same guy who owns and edits the weekly paper, and owns a PR firm.

Public Information Director Vince Robinson stepped down from his city job this week, after he and his girlfriend filed protective orders against each other. The two allegedly brawled during two separate incidents in October.

Robinson held the same position for the city in 2000-2001 under a different mayor, and started Diversity Media after leaving the first time. His company owns the INK weekly, and co-publishes the Fort Wayne Reader. It also bills itself as a PR firm with clients including...the city of Fort Wayne. Until re-taking the job with the city, Robinson personally edited INK.

We hope the incident will precipitate a clearer division of church and state.

Once RLM PR CEO Richard Laermer started Tweeting, he couldn't stop. He currently Tweets as @Laermer, as well as on @HowToFame, @badpitch and @punkmarketing, and these are just the ones that stuck.

Now he has two more to worry about, the "upside down" Laermer @Raermer, and the rather vicious @EvilLaermer. The former mainly pokes fun with constant misspellings--a Laermer pet peeve. EvilLaermer is clearly someone who currently works at RLM or did in the past--the feed is peppered with nasty comments about RLM staffers (above), and attempts to communicate with other former staffers. Both take issue with Laermer's big personality and sometimes harsh online demeanor .

So far EvilLaermer has not responded to PRNewser, and Raermer won't confirm ever working at RLM though admits to once working in PR. The only other clue is that he/she is currently on living on the west coast. Raermer went as far as emailing me directly, and inviting me to chat on Gtalk. Raermer didn't confirm any goal in all of this except to poke fun of Laermer's emails and annoy him, "he atalks abotu takin time to rite, time to reed, 'takin time' but his emaisl and effort adn attention but u shld reed hsi emails."

Richard Laermer told us that he knows exactly who it is: an Account Executive who walked off the job after twice being denied a raise. Laermer referenced her behavior in an MSNBC.com trend story and received a nasty, anonymous email shortly after: "F*** you, pay more."

One former staffer told us they wouldn't be surprised if it was Laermer himself running these feeds. A quick look at LinkedIn doesn't immediately reveal a female AE who left sometime in the spring or early summer of this year.

Unlike the situation where one Detroit firm successfully sued another for Twitter impersonation, these feeds are parodies, and are likely to go away once the impersonator becomes bored with the effort.

Miss (conservative) California Carrie Prejean's 15 minutes have been extended due largely to the unearthing of a sex tape, and to the publication of her book "Still Standing."

The over-coached beauty queen botched an attempt to "draw the foul" from Larry King on CNN last night. From the looks of it, she was relying on a handler to guide her through what she expected to be a contentious interview. No one told either party that King is the place to go when you need a long time to sell your side of a controversy.

King asked Prejean a simple question about what motivated both parties to settle the suit and counter-suit over her lost crown.

Notice at 1:15 in to the interview, Prejean nods offscreen, presumably to her publicist. She repeatedly calls the befuddled King "inappropriate" before removing her mic. "Who are you talking to?" asks King after he tries to apologize and continue the interview.

[via Air America]

Last week we blogged about Scientology Spokesman Tommy Davis's combative interview with Nightline's Martin Bashir which ended in a walk off. According to Page 6 today, Davis returned to ABC shortly before airtime, and tried to get package pulled. The walk-off could have been planned, but storming ABC News studios shows the Church's inability to understand the basics of broadcast. And it looks like someone at ABC dropped a dime on Davis and called in the tip.

[hat tip TVNewser]

Perhaps Nightline is honing a new style by airing tussles with PR people. Three days after airing footage of Ronn Torossian attempting to steer an interview with his client Benny Hinn, Nightline ran in its entirety a contentious interview last night ending with Scientology Spokesman Tommy Davis tearing off his mic and walking off the set.

If this is PR's best two out of three, Scientology loses. Footage of Tom Cruise helping and high-fiving 9/11 firemen cleanse their bodies using Church methods? Yayyyy. Interview with a former Church member who says the same regimen is also used to punish its members? Boooo. Church Spokesman not understanding the concept of spokesmanship by not gracefully handling questions about ancient humans buried in volcanoes and instead taking it as a personal attack, sorry, game over.

The interview with Davis begins at 3:40. Hat tip to TVNewser:

Market Street Partners, a small investor relations firm in San Francisco is caught up in an FBI investigation of insider trading of at the Galleon Group hedge fund. The Reuters story cites SEC documents that tell of an unnamed agency staffer selling insider information about its client Google to Galleon for between $100-$150k per quarter. Galleon shorted the stock (NASDAQ: GOOG) to the tune of $9 million in profits. Remarkably, this is the largest hedge fund insider trading case in history.

Unlike the "Golden Goose" scandal involving Brunswick Group partner Nina Devlin's husband Matthew, this one should result in the arrest of PR firm employee. According to all media reports, Matthew Devlin stole the secrets from his wife.

No one at Market Street has responded to media inquiries, except when visited at their offices:

"As we've said publicly we were not given any advance notice," said one Market Street employee who declined to give her name when a reporter visited on Monday. "We have not been contacted by any law enforcement agencies. We are very willing and open to cooperating with any investigation but that's really all we can say at this point."

David Bass, founder of D.C. firm Raptor Strategies faces up to 20 years in jail for disrupting a flight in progress, and intimidating a crew member and attendant. Under the Patriot Act, Bass's drunken behavior is a felony.

The Washington Examiner reports that Bass became belligerent and aggressive during the flight from Houston to Washington, crawling over another passenger to stand in the aisle despite an attendant's order not to. He was still drunk and aggressive when authorities questioned him at Regan airport, according to the FBI's affidavit.

Bass launched Raptor less than three months ago, after holding big titles at Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research, and Qorvis Communications before that. Prior to working at agencies, Bass held jobs at The Weekly Standard, National Journal, Campaigns & Elections, The Hill and the Washington Times.

The St. Petersburg Times PolitiFact site figured out that the photo of the 9/12 anti-reform FreedomWorks taxpayer rally today (above), circulated by conservative bloggers and memed on Twitter, is in fact, a fake. They used a source who should know, Pete Piringer, a public affairs officer with the Washington, D.C. Fire and Emergency Department who estimated that 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up. Estimates online varied wildly from thousands to 2 million.

Politifact sealed the deal with this:

It doesn't include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth Street and Independence Avenue that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn't show the "tea party" crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.

Based on reader response to the St. Pete piece, it appears the photo is actually from a 1997 Promise Keepers event. Piringer noted that local government no longer issues official estimates of crowds on the Mall for good reason.

[via HuffPo]

First on PRNewser:: According to HelpaReporter.com (HARO) founder Peter Shankman, 25 journalists have reported that a competitor ExpertClick.com pitched them their source-to-journalist matching service right after their queries went live on HARO. I saw a number of the emails myself.

ExpertClick founder Mitchell P. Davis admitted via email (the same gmail address used in the 25 emails reference above) to PRNewser that his company is making a big push to increase journalist subscribership, but didn't completely deny scraping from HARO either, characterized by Shankman as a "massive bush league move".

Davis's email chalked it up to their recent purchase of 400,000 names from MediaContactPro and that he "can only assume that e-mails once published are in the public domain". Except, unlike what Bulldog is doing with Broadlook, journalists on HARO are on an email listserv only, and the people who use them are subject to Shankman's strict Karma-based terms of service. He bans people swiftly when caught abusing the system.

After thanking Davis for the information I asked him again to address the specific issue with HARO. He hasn't responded at the time of this post, and his company has been banned from HARO (presumably the same Gmail address).

I thought the coincidence feasible since the database ExpertClick is using is so huge (are there really 400,000 working journalists out there?), until I saw an email to Shankman from Irene Diamond from DiamondWellness.com explaining she only uses an unpublished, personal email address when posting on HARO.

More after the jump:

continued...

Barack Obama made history last night as the first sitting President to appear on a late night talk show. Jay Leno and he covered a lot of ground including the AIG bonuses, the defense of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the coolness of Air Force One, and the his dismal bowling skills.

Obama made an uncharacteristic gaffe, likening his bowling score to something from the Special Olympics.

Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton has already responded: "The president made an off-hand remark making fun of his own bowling that was in no way intended to disparage the Special Olympics. He thinks the Special Olympics is a wonderful program that gives an opportunity for people with disabilities from around the world."

There are a few options for the Special Olympics to get a publicity kick out of this one. The first and most likely is to respond with some outrage, and use the platform to discuss the organization, solicit support, and ask the government to reaffirm its commitment to disability issues. The second--and more endearing and powerful--can be combined with the first: respond with humor.

In my email to Ryan Eades, Global Branding and Marketing Coordinator for the Special Olympics, I asked him to see if one of their athletes has topped Obama's score of 129 in competition.

Eades didn't respond to that question, though he said SE Chairman Tim Shriver responded this morning on Good Morning America
at the top of the show. A statement and transcript of the appearance will be on SpecialOlympics.org within the hour.

Related: Special Olympics and 130 Organizations Band Together to Promote Tropic Thunder