Bernaisesource

I find it amusing and somewhat ironic to have discovered a couple of innovative online news management tools in a recent print supplement of the Wall Street Journal.  But to the Journal’s Jessica Mintz, I am most grateful. 

At the risk of sounding old school, I like reading my stack of newspapers in the morning at my desk and going through a separate stack of magazines in my crammed coach seat on Delta or on a couch at Joe’s coffee house in East Atlanta.  

I call these publications my hydra’s head -- piles of newsprint and magazines seeming to multiply despite my Herculean efforts to stay one step ahead of the good folks at Business Week, Business 2.0, the Economist, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Time, and Wired (but necessarily not in that order).  I can be obsessive about it, afraid of missing out on that one new idea, buried in that one story in one section in one newspaper on one day. 

A magnificent obsession, no, but I am an Internet immigrant, coming of age in a print and video world.  I concentrate better by looking down at a printed page than up at a computer monitor.  I like relying on an informed editor to transform a flood of events into news, and news into analysis and trends.  I enjoy browsing through articles on topics unrelated to my profession that have triggered ideas that have been.

Yet still, I am trying to break my old ways.  I am reading more news online, but candidly, it is a little slow going -- embracing new media bit by bit so to speak.

Bloglines is one of my most recent efforts to personalize and organize my news gathering experience.  Now relevant blogs scattered across the blogosphere are still not getting the full attention they deserve, but at least I have organized them on a single site. 

The volume is overwhelming.  But as Jessica Mintz, point out, there are several new companies coming to our rescue.  More than news aggregators, these companies offer new tools that function as personalized editors.  They serve up content based on your reading habits as well as the collective news judgment and rankings of the community.

Inspired, I went online, registered and bookmarked several of the sites that Ms. Mintz highlighted including:  Reddit.com,  Digg.com,   Feedster.com,   Memeorandum.com, and Rojo.com 

Now there are far more tech savvy users out there who can better evaluate these sites, but I found my initial investigation hard going and less user-friendly than I had hoped.  I will need more time to sift through them, organize them and take advantage of them.  Clearly these sites are examples of how new media is challenging the orthodoxy of what is news, who decides news, who reports news and how news is distributed.

Meanwhile my stack of publications continues to pile up.  In the end, these sites may provide a better news experience and enable me to reference more articles at more meetings and in more conversations, but my dry cleaner won’t be any happier.  Off to wash the ink off my hands.  

Let me get back to you.

Flip-flops like iPods and MySpace are indicators of what is coming to the workplace.  New rules, new attitudes, and new technology are forcing us old folk like myself to sit up and take notice.  And the pace of this change will only accelerate. 

It used to be that older generations told the newer ones about the ways of the world.  And it used to be that technology in the office shaped technology in the home.  Today those conventions are being turned on their head.

So as we sit around discussing how to “leverage” new media and whether our clients and senior management are really ready for bottom up, customer-driven online conversations, the young are living it. 
  

Certainly user generated PR cedes controlling the message, but it does give users with passion a forum to discuss your products. It enhances the user experience and enables customers to engage in a conversation with your company and fellow customers.

I am not sure whether I am ready to embrace this user experiment, but it does make me want to pose a final question to the larger PR community.  What is our role in this brave new PR world?   Controller of the message?  Facilitator?  Or something not yet defined.

As always, let me get back to you.

Still a little reluctant to launch, wide scale, but I have been discreetly showing my site to friends and sympathetic colleagues.  Of course one brutally honest reviewer told me, "It looked like I used a template."  Full disclosure.  I did, and I am certainly all right with that.  I am sure that I tested the patience of my dear friend who helped with its creation.  The choices were infinite.  Do I use wordpress, typepad, blog.com, blogger.com?  Should it be two columns or three?  What colors should it be?  You get the point.

"All this could prove risky. As companies provide real services inside virtual worlds, such as employment and investment opportunities, they could draw attention -- and regulation -- from real-world authorities like the courts and legislatures. And more than in any other medium, companies don't make the rules inside virtual worlds -- the participants do. Too much reality, especially the commercial kind, could scare away the very people that companies are trying to reach."

Received this from some colleagues and friends. It is an article that ran in The Boston Globe in April.

The article,  "Blogs 'Essential' to a Good Career; Having a Philosophy and Focus to Your Topics Will Help You Stand Out in Your Field", is by Penelope Trunk.

You have to go to the Globe's website and pay for the article

Do you think my friends are trying to tell me something? If I wanted to maintain a competitive advantage I would keep this to myself, but in the open spirit of the blogsphere, I have included some tips from the article:

1. Blogging creates a network.
2. Blogging can get you a job.
3. Blogging is great training.
4. Blogging helps you move up quickly.
5. Blogging makes self-employment easier.
6. Blogging provides more opportunities.
7. Blogging could be your big break.
8. Blogging makes the world a better place.
   

Why bernaisesource? – a play on words so to speak. It is a nod to the grand daddy of PR – Edward Bernays (whose name may or may not be in the public domain. Last thing I want is a legal battle with the heir(s) to my profession) and the sauce -- something that is rich, tastes good and may be bad for you – kind of like blogs. Not sure if they are agents of good or bad, but blogs are certainly enriching the lives of journalists, PR professionals, citizen pundits and the public at large. Whatever their ultimate form, blogs are challenging the top down orthodoxy of mainstream media (MSM), creating new channels of communications, and undermining the predictability of my profession.

Finally if I do my job right, bernaisesource will be a useful source for discussions on new media.

I am a PR professional. I make my living maximizing positive exposure and minimizing negative. I try to keep my executives happy, my company in the news, and my legal department out of court. And I have until this moment been an armchair blogger. Time to change that and hit the high seas. I felt this map was good place to start.