My Thursday afternoons this summer are spoken for: I’ll be hosting mediabistro’s weekly online conference and workshop on entrepreneurial journalism. Here’s the description:
Learn what to consider when launching your start-up. Draft your business plan over eight weeks with the help of your peers. Participants will vote on the most viable business plans in the group and the winner will have the chance to hear feedback from entrepreneur and venture capitalist Larry Kramer, who will also answer questions from the group. We’ll discuss viable business models for media start-ups and address key questions related to content distribution and monetization.
Very excited. Not only a new method of teaching for me and mediabistro but also looking forward to getting to know participants with big (or small) media ideas…
See the full program and speakers list here. Join us.
If you are a parent or live in an overheated apartment building, you’ve probably struggled with the humidifier conundrum. You need one to breath during that winter months but can’t deal with changing the filters, or the red scum buildup, or how often they just inexplicably die without warning.
I thought I’d found the answer with my Air-O-Swiss. I liked it so much, I raved on the BoCoCa Parents Message Board about it. I even bought my mom one. Which died after being used 3 times. The Air-O-Swiss return policy? You pay to send them their defective product. Uh, hello, anyone read “Delivering Happiness” by the Zappos CEO? (Actually I haven’t- but it’s lessons from Tony Hsieh on building a business in the “new” economy.)
So I got my free return by writing Air-O-Swiss’s parent company with just the threat suggestion of a little social media….
From: manoush zomorodi Sent: Fri 3/18/2011 7:37 PM To: inquiries@plaston.com Cc: Subject: customer service
Hello,
My humidifier ( Air-O-Swiss AOS Ultrasonic Humidifier – 7135) stopped working and I tried all the troubleshooting suggestions from your Air-O-Swiss call center.
None of them work and now I’d like to return my defective product and have it repaired or replaced.
But according to one of your customer service managers, you do not pay for return shipping. As a business reporter, I do not understand this customer service model. Why should I have to pay for return shipping when the product is defective and I already paid for a supposedly working item to be delivered to me?
Please let me know whether this policy is negotiable. I’m very interested in blogging and tweeting about your service and would like to include your side of the return and warranty policy.
The website OneMinuteNews.com launched last week. It offers, obviously, a one minute video wrap up of news (mostly AP footage, as far as I can tell) and claims: “You might notice news is different here. We give it to you straight up.”
They don’t seem to have quite got their footing yet but the idea of a minute of video news has been tested. Successes, for example, include the BBC’s One-Minute of World News and its “60 Seconds” on BBC3.
Obviously, as an ex-BBC reporter/producer I’m partial to my roots but here’s the thing: to get people to believe everything they see in 1 minute, I think you need to have established cred. I’m curious to see if OneMinuteNews will be able to establish itself as anything than just another news aggregator that recuts wire service video. Am I soooo Generation X? Here’s Fast Company’s take on the new venture. Short and interesting read if you are a news nerd.
Last week, with CSpan cameras rolling away, I kicked off Mediabistro’s Digital Privacy Forum by asking audience members (mostly marketers and brand managers) if they worried that more internet regulation will spell trouble for their business. Almost everyone raised their hand. And yet the main message of several of the speakers was that regulation is the only way forward for American growth. Take Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in DC. This man talks, Congress listens. And the guy makes a gripping, if terrifying speech- he told us about a congressman who referred to 2010 technology as Web 2.0 at government hearings. Later Marc mentioned to me that the US government understanding of the digital world is really lagging by about 20 years. They could use some field trips to the Mac store down there.
On a more personal note, I loved the philosophical bust-up between anti-put-your-life-on-the web thinker Andrew Keen vs. I’m-all-out-there-even-about-my-prostate Professor Jeff Jarvis. The best conferences are when speakers are yelling at each other across the room. So I wrestled their large brains to the ground and we found common ground on whether or not the more we share digitally, the better we are. Just kidding- no detente was reached. Watch the conversation continue in person at Mediabistro’s mega conference on social media on March 31-April 1.
I’m fascinated by the fact that the shopping channel QVC continues to not only do well, but attract high quality and prestige brands. The image I used to have was of porcelain dolls and collectors coins being hawked incessantly. But somehow, in the past several years, the products have changed and expanded. Now you see makeup from Estee Lauder, clothes from the Mad Men costume designer, and even Birkenstocks being sold. I’ve been working with a client who is bringing his brand to QVC and it’s made me wonder: when did QVC become “cool”? Ok, maybe not cool, but desirable enough that ‘prestige’ brands are anxious to be on-air? My theory is that when wealth became more showy and was no longer considered distasteful (ie during the boom years of the 2000′s) brands were happy to cash in on the cache they had built with more discreet and discerning customers. Remember Coach handbags? Only fancy ladies had them when I was growing up. Now the hoards snap up the much flashier mid-level prices totes and the company’s latest annual revenue was $3.6B. But it’s not just the mainstream masses- apparently the highest number of QVC orders come from zip codes on NYC’s Upper East Side.
From a media trainer’s perspective, savvier audiences mean defining your company/product’s narrative and delivering a succinct and sincere message is paramount.
This morning I joined Mayor Bloomberg and about 20 other Persian-Americans for a breakfast celebration of Noruz, or Persian New Year.
I expected a bit of chit-chat over eggs but the Mayor really held court, calling out to everyone at the table, “Ok, what’s the next question? What else do you want to know?” He brought up Bloomberg Media almost immediately, saying one could tell the city’s economy, particularly Wall Street, is back on track by the number of Bloomberg terminals being bought. I asked if this meant he had new customers, rather than just big finance firms, and mentioned that I work for his competition, Reuters. ”A Bloomberg terminal will beat a Reuters terminal every time,” he intoned. Once a media mogul, always a media mogul, I guess! And with that, he spread some peanut butter on a piece of toast, sprinkled salt on it (oddly), and took a crunch. The conversation turned to the building of Brooklyn Bridge (yes, it will get built but will require private housing built on it to get it paid for), harnessing the newly organized Persian NYC community for other city purposes, and his thoughts on immigration reform (doubts it will happen).
Thanks to the Mayor’s office and my cousin, immigration rights lawyer Bitta Mostofi, for including me today. Afterwards, I headed to Just Wee Two, my 2 year-olds playgroup for a little contrast. March and lions were the topics for discussion there.
Ben and the Reuters team save NBC's Brian Williams, Ann Curry, & the Nightly Newscast from Port-au-Prince
My colleague Ben Gruber is back from Haiti and in the Reuters TV newsroom looking skinny and tan. You’d never guess that he’d just returned from covering the horrendous situation in Port-au-Prince. Ben was on the first charter flight into Haiti after the earthquake. Read his first person account and what happened after they landed at the aiport (without any radar) here:
MY HAITI EXPERIENCE – BEN GRUBER
It was to be my first field assignment since the birth of my second child, Isabella. Quick and easy, three spot features about the latest innovative research at the University of Miami, leave on Tuesday, back to Isabella by Thursday night. It didn’t turn out to be that kind of trip. Reports of the earthquake in Haiti started coming in about 45 minutes before I landed in Miami. The second we hit the tarmac in Miami, I called my editor in DC and offered myself up. After twelve hours of frantic coordination with TV Latin Editor, Marie Frail, I was boarding a charter flight with colleagues from text and pix and a team to operate the satellite dish that would allow us to go live from the scene.
When we took off from Fort Lauderdale Executive airport, we didn’t know where we would land. The pilot said there was no radar coverage at the Port-au-Prince airport and no one was answering at the tower. Just when the pilot was starting to make the turn towards Santo Domingo, he finally received an answer to his hails. We were clear to land in Port-au-Prince at our own risk. No radar cover to be had, so the pilot had to land blindly – something neither he or we were happy about. When the wheels touched down on the runway we all breathed a sigh of relief and applauded. We were the first charter flight to land in Haiti.
We unloaded our television equipment as fast as possible. I tasked the satellite engineers to find the nearest flat roof and start setting up our gear. I grabbed the camera and found a motorcycle driver to drive me around for a short tour of the city while the team set up for transmission at the airport.
Five minutes into the tour the nightmare that was Haiti hit me like a bullet between the eyes. My brain had a hard time registering what my eyes were seeing. I saw entire neighborhoods flattened like pancakes. I saw a boy that couldn’t have been more than six-years-old standing on top of a pile of rubble. I asked my driver to ask the child what he was doing. The little boy answered that he was waiting for his mom and dad to come out of the flattened building.
I saw hundreds of dead bodies, men, women, children, and infants, lining the streets. I remember thinking that this must have resembled the scene in 17th century plague-ridden England. The only difference is that in Haiti the bodies weren’t laid out in front of homes because the homes were all gone.
I saw and heard people attempting to claw out of rubble while others tried to help them. There were tens of thousands of people aimlessly walking the streets.. all in shock…all afraid…all homeless. What I didn’t hear was a single siren to indicate the presence of first responders, emergency workers, police or ambulances. That, I think, shocked me more than anything else. The quake had hit 18 hours ago; where were the people to help amid this chaos?
As I made my way back to the airport, I noticed that across the street, thousands of people had gathered in a soccer field. I asked several people why they were gathering there and the answer was always the same - there were no buildings close enough to fall on them if the ground started shaking again.
Finally back at the airport, I found that my crew was well on their way to being set up. Two hours later we were transmitting the video I shot. We transmitted the first live signal from Haiti. It was of the soccer field turned homeless ground I described above. We also transmitted a live signal from the airport which was quickly becoming a fully operational U.S. military base.
That first evening, I received a frantic call from my DC desk asking me to please find NBC’s Brain Williams and get him to our live position so he can broadcast NBC’s Nightly News. Amid U.S. military aircraft landing, in the pitch dark, my fixer and I borrowed a pickup truck and started driving along the tarmac screaming out Brain’s name. We found him. Everyone piled into the truck and we raced back to the live spot with just minutes until the Nightly News broadcast. Playing a part in getting NBC’s prime news show on the air to broadcast the devastation out of Haiti was rewarding, especially after seeing how relieved the NBC colleagues were to get on the air. The following night we saved their live coverage again with just minutes to air when a C-130 blocked there satellite dish just minutes before their broadcast.
The rest of the TV team arrived the following day from the DR. We worked and worked with little to no sleep and very little food, but we kept on going. We dominated the news coverage bringing the world the story of what was left of Port-au-Prince. We reminded our clients and our viewership that we are the very best at what we do.
Six days later I flew out of Haiti on a military flight to Miami. I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to abandon the team or the story. But I also knew that if I kept at it, I may very well start making decisions that would put my team in danger.
That night in Miami, in a bed for the first time in a week, I cried myself to sleep. I wept for the boy waiting for his family to come out of the rubble and the thousands of others like him.
I recently hosted a special broadcast from the brokerage floor of the GFI Group. They basically put together a morning show and invited injured service men and women to visit…the idea was to highlight GFI’s work with The Bob Woodruff Foundation (the foundation founded by the family of journalist Bob Woodruff who was injured in Iraq). Bob and his wife Lee were there. And we heard lots of really moving and disturbing stories from service people just returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The webcast also really goes to show that businesses can now put out their own media, including a very high-quality “tv show”, and take their message directly to clients. Check out the show here.
(GFI should really be posting the video to YouTube etc. to make it searchable)
Monday officially marks the first anniversary since Lehman Brothers failed and the world’s financial system threatened to collapse. Doesn’t it feel like more than a year? To bring back the memories of the chaos, watch this piece I did recapping those crazy months of 2008.[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.871428&w=425&h=350&fv=]
On one of the parenting message boards I read, a mommy posted a thought-provoking e-mail from her pediatrician.
The doctor warned parents not to take media reports about the swine flu too seriously. He also advised that parents consider not giving their children the (regular) flu shot this Fall and to wait and see what happens with the H1N1 shot before deciding to administer it as well. Here is an excerpt:
“What is not reassuring is the media coverage of this flu and some of the warnings from major health institutions. Could this flu become more virulent and turn into a major pandemic? It’s hard to predict, but let’s recall the bird flu scare from a couple of years ago. Media-mongers were raising the spectre of that illness migrating to humans and becoming a major worldwide health concern. That never happened: Bird flu is still around, but it’s confined to birds, with only very exceptional transmissions to humans. When was the last time you heard someone worrying about bird flu?”
The physician goes on to say that a child should build immunity and being exposed to the flu is certainly the best way. That’s why older people, having been exposed decades ago to H1N1, seem to handle the virus better.
As a mommy who does not want to expose her child unnecessarily to unneeded vaccines, I completely see his point. But as a “media monger” who has been covering the US government’s preparation for the coming Flu season, I feel conflicted. In my most recent piece (see below) I simply reported what the President’s advisory committee said and where the vaccine trials stand as of now. Surely one of the reasons bird flu was contained was because of media coverage and caution on the part of travelers, airlines, etc.?
On one of the parenting message boards I read, a mommy posted a thought-provoking e-mail from her pediatrician.
