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Showing posts from April, 2010

Reuters Opinion 2.0

Reuters waded into the waters of opinion and analysis against a very strong tide: An iron-clad policy of doing nothing that could conceivably open the 150-year-old news agency to the charge it was not absolutely free from bias. In the not-yet three years since Reuters columnists began taking sides on stories Reuters reporters were covering, a breakthrough I called " Reuters Opinion 1.0 ," its global reporting power has only grown. But Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer seemed to complicate the question of institutional ambivalence with a post on his personal blog in which he inveighed against a "rush to judgment" concerning financial giant Goldman Sachs and a civil complaint by the SEC which accuses the Wall Street behemoth of fraud. Glocer states an obvious fact: Goldman is guilty of nothing until the company is found guilty of something, or agrees that it broke a rule or regulation. But now comes an object lesson into why this may not have been the best

Conan Says He Wouldn't Have Pulled a Leno

Conan O'Brien tells 60 Minutes that, had their rolls been reversed, he would not have returned to The Tonight Show if it meant pushing out Jay Leno. I thought as much three months ago . "He went and took that show back and I think in a similar situation, if roles had been reversed, I know -- I know me, I wouldn't have done that," O'Brien tells 60 Minutes interviewer Steve Kroft, as reported by TV Newser . "If I had surrendered The Tonight Show and handed it over to somebody publicly and wished them well -- and then...six months later. But that's me. Everyone's got their own, you know, way of doing things."

Twitter Goes Mad (Men)

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Twitter started selling ads -- sort of -- in a modest attempt to get the Twitterati used to the idea that the start-up, valued at $1 billion based on private placements, is entitled to make serious money. So far, the sky hasn't fallen. Twitter doesn't need to make a lot, operationally. The company has fewer than 200 employees and manages a sea of servers. Tech support, marketing and maybe one HR person. In an interview with BBC radio, I talked about what Twitter is doing, what they aren't doing, and what they might do. I might have used the "dip their beak" metaphor instead, if I had thought of it. But on second thought, I'm glad I didn't. Hate those forced metaphors.

Tiger's Crucible

Donny Deutch says it's "Brilliant" and since he's pretty brilliant himself that means more than a little something. The new Nike ad with Tiger Woods can be described in a number of other ways — "Jarring," "Attention-getting," "Bold," as well as "Crass," "Manipulative" and "Unfortunate." Five of those adjectives, even the pejoratives, are probably fine with the Mad Men crowd, who dispassionately craft immersive messages that target our passions. The more difficult the message (Cigarettes are cool, Cars you can't drive as fast as they go on TV are cool, The Jonas Brothers are cool) the bigger the challenge and, when successful, the sweeter the victory. Woods has re-entered the real world via the unreal world that is the Masters Tournament. This makes perfect sense to me, as do all of the things that deliver us to the place where we can drop the subject. I am not sure who the audience is for this, though, an

Get Unvarnished? Get Real.

A new site still in beta is getting a lot of attention as the next place you will want to protect your reputation — and put someone else's in "perspective." But does free-flowing anonymous snark, the internet's second most vibrant activity (after porn) really need another enabler?