If you're in tech PR (or even if you're not), you may know Sam Whitmore, founder of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey, which "analyzes tech editorial for tech media pros by paid annual subscription."

Sam recently spoke with BusinessWeek deputy creative director David Sleight about multimedia content, specifically slide shows, and how PR pros can best work with the media in this area. Sam was kind enough to lend this quote from his report to PRNewser.

"If there's anything I can recommend for PR, it's to put up a section on your web site with high-res photos of products and executives so we can go up and grab them on deadline. It's a no-brainer. Make them available under Creative Commons. No one's in a better position to take a photo of your products than you are," stated BusinessWeek 's Sleight.

So there you have it folks. Get those images up, now!

Yes, you're reading that headline right. As far as mass distribution of online news content goes, newspapers are still ahead of Google News.

According to a Nielsen Online report of the "Top 30 Online Current Events & Global News Destinations," released to Editor and Publisher, "Several newspaper networks surpassed Google News in netting more "unique" traffic in May...NYTimes.com stood out with 21.3 million unique visitors -- more than Google News' 11.3 million monthly visitors. Tribune Newspapers and Gannett Newspapers, taken as groups, beat the online behemoth as well."

Yahoo! took the number one slot with, "a unique audience of 35.8 million."

Another sign of the changing times:

The Huffington Post also made the list with 4.7 million uniques edging out the Associated Press at 4.5 million.

For the complete list, click here.

Do you know Mayhill Fowler? Last week you probably didn't, but this week there is a much better chance the name may ring a bell.

Fowler is a contributor to Off the Bus, a citizen journalism section of The Huffington Post, who was able to get Bill Clinton to comment on a recent Vanity Fair article on his personal life, using the words "sleezy," "slimey," and "scumbag" to describe the writer.

Instantly, the comments were uploaded to the internet via Fowler's digital recorder and spread like wildfire.

Fowler, however, did not identify her affiliation to Clinton when she asked for comment.

Jay Rosen, NYU professor, media critic and supporter of the Huffington Post Off the Bus citizen journalism project said she should have. "In the interest of full disclosure, it would have been better if she said, 'Mr. President, I'm a blogger from Off the Bus and I have a question." He added, "I also understand the situation she's in, he's on a rope line, and it's crowded and there are people shouting at him."

Writes the New York Times' Jacques Steinberg:

The incident, widely mined on the cable news channels as fresh evidence of Mr. Clinton's volcanic temper in the waning hours of his wife's presidential campaign, has prompted an entirely different discussion - this one among political reporters, journalism teachers, public relations strategists and bloggers themselves - about the dos and don'ts of ethical reporting in the YouTube age.

Over at Huffington Post, former Newsweek Senior Bill Barol wrote "You can call Fowler's brush with Clinton anything you like. Call it 'Participatory citizenship' or 'On-scene audio-visual blogging.' You can call it 'Midge,' for all I care. But 'journalism' it ain't."

Surely, this debate won't find a resolution in the fall out from just one incident. However, from a PR perspective alone, the implications here are massive. Everything is on the record. Whether you like it or not, anyone can break news just as fast, if not faster than a "mainstream" media outlet.

And, once the words/images/video are out - there is little you can do to stop it. You can only join the conversation.

Read FishbowlNY's take here.

From the Washington Post, on Obama's big speech night:

CNN clocked more than 3.5 million viewers in prime time. That's a 34 percent lead over MSNBC's more than 2.5 million viewers. It's also a 47 percent advantage over Fox News Channel's prime-time crowd of 2.4 million viewers.

Over at the NY Times, Brian Stelter notes that CNN even beat ABC, the only network to air the Obama speech. Says Stelter, "It is extremely rare for a cable news channel to draw higher ratings than the broadcast networks, but CNN apparently managed to pull it off on Tuesday night..."

Of course, you can always hop over to our brother blog TVNewser, for complete coverage.

The New York Times published a trend story over the weekend, titled, "Starting Salaries but New York Tastes," which focused on young professionals adjusting to a NY lifestyle without big salaries.

What profession was most quoted in the story? Surprise, surprise: publicists.

The Times didn't mention any of the details of where these publicists worked, referring to broad titles, such as "communications strategist." So, PRNewser looked them up for you.

Laura Werkheiser, a Senior Account Executive at Fleishman Hillard and recent transplant from San Francisco, told the Times, "If I shop...I can't have a social life and I can't eat."

Allison Mooney used to work in book publishing, but received a 40% raise when she joined Next Great Thing (NGT), a division of Fleishman-Hillard's Youth and Mobile marketing group as Director of Trends and Research. She's also tired of being hit on. "I find in other cities guys are more apt to buy you drinks and expect nothing from it. Here, if they do buy you a drink, which is rare, you have to suffer through flirtations. It's true. It's really cheesy," she told the Times.

Adam Leibsohn makes $60,000 as a strategist at Anomaly Communications, but still keeps things simple. "It's kind of a spartan lifestyle. I eat a lot of street meat for lunch."

Ah, the things we do to live in the big city.

(image: Fleishman's Laura Werkheiser)

Earlier this week, PRNewser covered Janet Troy's departure as VP of PR for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). At the time our calls and emails into PRSA for comment had gone unreturned.

I then Twittered about the affair, saying, "interesting that PRSA ignores media requests, or at least mine!"

Within a very short time, I received an email from Michael G. Cherenson, EVP of Success Communications Group and 2008 PRSA Chair-elect, saying, "Saw your post on twitter... I'm Chair-elect of PRSA. How can I help?"

Wow, people actually do read what I post, I thought to myself, half kidding. While Michael did not comment on Troy's departure, he did send me the job posting link, and just his engagement showed the organization is listening, even if it may feel like they're not.

Groundbreaking? Certainly not. Communications evolution? Definitely.

(image cred)

We couldn't pass up this commentary from Modern Marketing. Pass it along to someone whenever they inquire about participating in social media and ask, "How do you find the time?"

My normal answer is that they do less of other stuff - including TV. But now I've got a much better answer thanks to Clay Shirky including this gem: "If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation."

A Wikipedia a weekend, spent watching ads.

The Associated Press Managing Editors released their Online Journalism Credibility Study Tuesday in conjunction with the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

According to the AP, "The study was designed to help gauge the priorities and practices newspapers should be establishing as they increasingly blend their print and Web operations."

One of the noteworthy news nuggets: "Some 70% of editors surveyed said requiring commenters to disclose their identities would support good journalism, while only 45% of the public did. Similarly, 58% of editors said letting journalists join online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism, but only 36% of the public agreed."

Romenesko has the link to the full report.

Somehow, amid all of the hubub of the last few days, we haven't yet had a chance to review PRWeek's 2008 Media Survey. Well, we still haven't looked over all of it, but we will present you with some interesting nuggets of information. You can download the full report here.

On Social Media:
Of those surveyed, 25.5% say they have a profile on MySpace, 29% are on Facebook, and 32.3% are on LinkedIn. While only 8.4% say they "always" use blogs for research, more than 36.5% say they use them "sometimes." In addition, 57.7% report using blogs to measure sentiment, 38.7% for finding subjects, and 29.5% for searching industry experts.

On the changing business:
More than two-thirds (67.3%) of respondents from newspapers anticipate print circulation declines and increased focus on the Web at their publications over the next three years, while 41.1% expect a shift in staffing from print to online. Additionally, 39.7% of print magazine journalists expect circulation declines and Web growth and 24.2% a shift in staff to online activities. Yet 38.2% of newspaper staffers expect a reduction in staff over the next three years, while only 9.4% of magazine journalists do.

Finally, a choice quote from Huffington Post columnist, and mediabistro alum Rachel Sklar:

My whole life has changed in terms of how I do things. You used to write the words and e-mail them in a story. Now it's writing it, hyperlinking it, picking an image, framing it, designing it within the parameters of the program you have, and determining if it looks OK. I'm also an editor - it's a self-generating thing where I decide what I cover.

There you have it folks. Almost all journalists are all slowly turning into web content producers. The more you can help them in that process, the better off you are.

AdweekMedia, the folks behind Adweek, Mediaweek and Brandweek have put out their annual Hot List, which honors, "the publications and creative talents that keep consumers coming back to the newsstands." Like the good bloggers we are, we adhered to today's embargo after receiving a copy of the list on Friday.

The Economist jumped to #1 on this year's list, which is judged by a variety of metrics, including, "ad page and revenue gains; performance within a magazine's competitive category; circulation gains; interviews with media buyers and consultants, and AdweekMedia's own editorial judgment." In addition, Paul Rossi and editor John Micklethwait took home the "Executive Team of the Year" award.

People.com won "Magazine Website of the Year," as traffic increased 48% in 2007 to 6.3 million monthly unique users.

Surprisingly, all publications in the top 10 had advertising revenue gains of at least 10% in 2007.

Full rankings after the jump.

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