Media Audit

First on PRNewser: The re-designed cover of PRWeek's June issue - its first issue since going monthly - has been obtained by PRNewser.

News Editor Rose Gordon told us that the issue comes in at 62-pages, with a main feature by San Francisco bureau chief Aarti Shah that, "tracks where PR stands in the turf war over digital." The cover story focuses on Microsoft's new head of corporate communications, Simon Sproule. The print edition will arrive on subscribers' desks by the end of next week.

What do you think of the new design?

The dream assignment for many a reporter, a staff gig at the New Yorker, doesn't come easy. It took former staff writer Dan Baum seventeen years to break in.

Now, he's highlighted the story of getting hired and fired from the New Yorker, all via Twitter. One of our favorite passages, "I'd worked for The Wall Street Journal, and found that people were way more eager to return calls from Rolling Stone. A friend explained it this way: If you get quoted in The Wall Street Journal, you might get rich. If you get quoted in Rolling Stone, you might get laid."

And this little bit about the job description: "...there's no health insurance, no 401K, and most of all, no guarantee of a job beyond one year. My gig was a straight dollars-for-words arrangement: 30,000 words a year for $90,000. And the contract was year-to-year."

Read the full thing here. GalleyCat's Jason Boog gives his take here. If anything, this is good publicity for Baums' recently released book, NINE LIVES: Death and Life in New Orleans.

Edelman CEO Richard Edelman fills us in on the latest changes at Newsweek. The publication is "re-launching on May 18, moving up-market, aiming to compete with The Economist and the New Yorker for a higher end reader," he recently wrote on his 6 A.M. blog.

It seems "competing with the The Economist," is a common statement by magazine executives these days and not everyone is buying it. Writes Vanity Fair's Matt Pressman, "The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks - millions of people enjoy them, but it's not a point of pride."

[image cred]

[image cred]

Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn's latest byline for The Wall Street Journal has been picking up some buzz today, after he called professional bloggers "America's Newest Profession."

Penn says 452,000 bloggers cite it as their primary source of income and even links back to mediabistro's own GalleyCat blog. The 452k number puts bloggers ahead of computer programmers, CEOs and firefighters in terms of total jobs.

Scott Rosenberg, cofounder of Salon and author of "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters," disagrees with Penn's numbers. "The methodology of Penn's piece seems to be: gather as many numbers as you can and don't worry about the fact that they are from many different sources at different times using different methodologies and even differing definitions of what it means to "be a blogger" - just toss them all together and start drawing conclusions," he wrote in a post on his Wordyard blog today.

We all know (or should know) that the web is where journalists go first to research companies. However, not all of us are making it easy for the media to find the information they need. Jakob Nielsen, "the guru of Web page usability" according to the NY Times, reviews corporate newsrooms, and the findings aren't pretty.

For example, said one journalist to Nielsen after having a difficult time using a site:

"I would be reluctant to go back to the site. If I had a choice to write about something else, then I would write about something else."

According to Nielsen's research, the top-5 reasons journalists gave for visiting a company's website are:

1) Locate a PR contact (name and telephone number)
2) Find basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive's name, his/her age, headquarters location, and so on)
3) Discern the company's spin on events
4) Check financial information
5) Download images to use as illustrations in stories

Read the complete report here. Hat tip Steve Rubel.

We're not going to get into reporting the minutiae of media industry changes and layoffs (that's what our Revolving Door newsletter is for), however here are some highlights from the past few days that we feel are worth noting:

> NYTimes: "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will stop printing in 60 days unless the newspaper's owner, the Hearst Corporation can find a buyer by then...."

> TVNewser reports that Fox's network morning show, "The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet," will not be renewed for contract at the end of this season. From Broadcasting & Cable: "In the week ending Dec. 28, Mike and Juliet averaged a 0.9 live plus same day average national household rating, according to Nielsen Media Research. Over the show's second season, it's been averaging about a 1.0, a number that's proven to be too low to sustain first-run shows even in a healthy economy."

> Meanwhile, Fishbowl NY reports that Country Home magazine has folded, announced alongside 250 total layoffs at Meredith Corp.

We gather most PRNewser readers won't take this as a surprise, however according to the PEW Research Center, the internet has officially passed newspapers as a news source. What we do find surprising is the high numbers for television in this research.

Hat tip to Adam Zinger. Read his recent post: 10 Skills All PR Pros Need For 2009 And Beyond.

One of the "must reads" today is Simon Dumenco's story in Advertising Age on all of those crazy web 2.0 valuations we keep hearing about. Notably, the number of $200m which Dumenco himself has heard quite a few times in relation to companies from Digg to the Huffington Post.

So where do these numbers come from? In HuffPo's case, Dumenco hints it just may be PR. He cites a quote from Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, who wrote:

"I suspect the deal owes as much to [HuffPo co-founder] Kenny Lerer's behind-the-scenes dealmaking as to Arianna's election showmanship. For instance, Lerer -- a former PR man for Michael Milken who once boasted that briefing journalists was as easy as 'breastfeeding' babies -- was the one who talked up Huffpo's valuation. Where else did that $200m valuation come from?" (In a subsequent comment, it should be noted, Denton said he got that Lerer anecdote from Nina Munk's 2005 book, "Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner," and added that Munk "also ran his denial in the footnotes.")

Ok, so Dumenco can't be sure the valuation number came from PR, but he certainly didn't refrain from keeping the tidbit out of his story. What do you think?

Where are all of us "digital influencers" getting our information from? So called "traditional media," of course.

According to an MS&L study released this week and analyzed by Advertising Age's Michael Bush, "84% of digital influencers go online to find out more about something only after first reading about it in magazines and newspapers or hearing about it on TV or the radio."

"Everybody wants to talk about how it's all about digital and we certainly believe that it is the future," Renee Wilson, deputy MD of MS&L New York and director of the agency's IM MS&L practice told Bush. "But traditional media still has the capability to spark word-of-mouth. "[These] campaigns [have] to leverage both traditional and online tools to connect with consumers."

For complete study results, click here.

As you may have read by now, Jerry Yang is no longer CEO of Yahoo! While many may be concerned with the company's stock price, or just who the new CEO will be, here at PRNewser we care about - obviously - the PR tactics behind the announcement.

Specifically, Newsweek technology columnist Dan Lyons is a bit annoyed at AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, who was the first to report the news. He writes:

Just for the record, here is Kara's big scoop, which she posted today at 4:50 p.m. Pacific time. And here is the official press release from Yahoo hitting Business Wire at 5 p.m. Pacific time - a whopping ten minutes later. Kara, honey, I love you dearly, but girl-child, having a company send you a press release ten minutes before they put it on the wire isn't a scoop. That's called taking dictation.

Take that! If anything, Lyons is angered - and justifiably so - that the PR team at Yahoo! has burned him one too many times, starting with the never ending "Google deal" story and continuing with the Yang CEO news:

I'd never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators - they're really an unsavory bunch...The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever.

The lesson here: When dealing with sensitive news, sometimes it's not worth it to tip a reporter off, no matter how much you'd like to do them a favor. Just put it on the wire and let the races begin. That being said, we're not sure if the release was deliberately sent to Swisher or truly was an unapproved "leak," so we'll try to reserve some judgement.