Category Archives: news

Don’t forget to be human during a crisis

Written on June 11, 2010 by Stephanie in news, public relations
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That’s a strategy BP is apparently ignoring as it fumbles through the aftermath of its massive and still uncontained oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You can read about public relations gaffes the company has made here, here and here.  And I’m sure you could find more opinions on Twitter, other blogs about public relations, in your paper’s business section — you name it.

An oil covered pelican, courtesy examiner.com

Yesterday I saw CNN’s Anderson Cooper ask some family members of the eleven workers who died when the oil rig exploded and collapsed if BP had contacted any of them. I saw one interview with a family member who said two BP representatives came to the funeral, asked if they could hug her, and offered their sympathies. A second interview with another victim’s family said there had been no contact at all from BP. I couldn’t believe it. She said they hadn’t even received a letter.

Here are three things I think BP could do immediately to be more human:

1. Significantly lower prices at all your gas stations across the country. While some boycotts are already being organized, many Americans would see lower gas prices as a help during our still-recovering economy. And do it in a way that doesn’t hurt the gas station owners. Help them be your ambassadors.

2. Reach out to all the families. Be sincere. The lawyers may tell you not to say too much due to the risk of ligitation — but you’re already facing tons of lawsuits. Be humble. Be honest.

3. Get your executives out there on the beaches where tar is washing up. Put hard hats on them and shovels in their hands. Hiring temporary workers to do the work is helpful too, especially since some Americans are cancelling their beach vacations due to fear and uncertainty around the spill. Hiring more workers to keep the beaches really clean could keep some coastal communities from hurting quite so badly.

I could make a much longer list. Take James Cameron up on his offer to help. Could it hurt? Hire all the skimmers in the world and fly them in to scoop up as much oil as you possibly can. It’s human when you make a mess to clean it up. Oh, here’s a really difficult one:

Say you’re sorry. Say it loud and say it often.

On saying goodbye

Written on April 2, 2010 by Stephanie in journalism, news
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Roy Hardee in the WNCT newsroom. Photo credit: WNCT

A good newsman from Eastern North Carolina died this week. As a matter of fact, he died in his wife’s arms. If you have never heard about Roy Hardee, you should visit Stewart Pittman’s nice post, read the Associated Press story or watch the piece WNCT-TV aired.

(Side note: Holy cow, anchor Alan Hoffman still works at WNCT?! He was newish when I worked there in ahem 1987-1988!)

When I met Roy Hardee, I was 21 or barely 22, fresh out of UNC’s School of Journalism, but with three years of broadcast news experience, all in radio. He was in his 50′s and had a gravely voice, a constant harrumphing cough and a piercing stare. WNCT-TV wasn’t a station with bells and whistles, the pay sucked and the equipment was dismal. That’s where I began my career in television news.

Since I was an assignment editor, I saw a lot of Roy Hardee during my shift. Well, I saw a lot of him in his office. His phone glued to his ear, Roy knew how to sniff out news, find a source and call in a news tip like no one’s business. He was so good at calling in tips that the Associated Press named an award after him. The Roy Hardee award was given to the person who had provided the most tips to the AP in the Carolinas. Roy Hardee won it twice.

Roy figures in a story I like to tell about my early career. One day I was riding the desk, sending my crews out on stories across a wide swath of Eastern North Carolina. Crews is a misnomer — our reporters were one-man bands. Roy came out of his office, and stood over the AP wire. In those days, pre-internet, the news stories were actually printed on flimsy paper at certain times of the day. If your printer jammed or ran out of ink, you didn’t have the news. Period.  When you figured that out, you’d have to call up the AP in Raleigh and ask them to refeed the state or national news you’d missed, and it was a Very Big Deal.

But I digress. There’s Roy Hardee, standing over the wire, watching the news come in. When he sees the item he wants, he rips the wire, rips off the story he was looking for and takes it back into his office, a little smile playing around the corner of his mouth. And Roy’s not really a smiler, you know?

During our six o’clock newscast I found that that both of our competitors had a big story that we had somehow missed. And it’s my job as assignment editor not to miss this kind of stuff. I was nervous when I went to Roy’s office to admit that I had missed a story everyone else had. Roy was the kind of boss who wouldn’t lose his temper or harangue you  exactly, but he hated to miss a story and we hated to let him down. He would just look at you, make that little cough and then rumble something about “Try harder”, “Turn up the scanners” or his favorite, “Work the phone.”

Turns out, they got it from the AP wire. From a tip Roy had called in, and then ripped off the wire for his file. Forgetting to tell me. Roy apologized about that.

He also taught me a lot about getting the story and getting it right, building on the mentoring I’d received from another Eastern NC legendary newsman, Glenn Hargett who was the news director at a little radio station in my home town. Later in my television career, a different news director told me the problem with me was that I was a “big J journalist” — someone for whom Journalism came with a capital letter. Yep, I was a big J journalist, thanks to Glenn Hargett, Roy Hardee and other seasoned news professionals.

And according to Roy, I was a “fine-lookin’ blonde” who was smart enough and talented enough to be on the news. That was one tip he didn’t forget to tell me.

Now you may be asking yourself — what does this have to do with social media? Well, I first learned of Roy Hardee’s death on Facebook. Stewart Pittman shared his memories on his blog.  A Google search brought me more links. As I follow the comments, I’ve been finding old colleagues who are posting on blogs or news websites, all sharing their favorite memories of Roy Hardee. The lives he touched are spread out, but we’re all reconnecting through a medium and a memory.

Social media: driving up award show ratings?

Written on March 12, 2010 by Stephanie in Facebook, Twitter, celebrity, news, social media
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Photo credit: Oscar.com

More than 41.3 million people tuned in to the Academy Awards Sunday night, despite advance media coverage calling the Oscar race predictable (and laying all the gold statuettes at the big blue feet of Avatar).  That’s the biggest audience since 2005. (Million Dollar Baby was the big winner that night.)

So the Oscar audience was up. Know what else?

  • The Golden Globe Awards were up 14% from the previous year.
  • The People’s Choice Awards were up 15%.
  • The Grammy Awards were up 35.8% over last year.

It’s not just awards shows. The 2010 Super Bowl garnered 106 million viewers — becoming the most-watched event in TV history. While this article quotes media experts saying the bad economy keeps more people at home and the productions have gotten better, I don’t think that has changed viewership.

While television executives have blamed the internet for fragmenting audiences, I think the internet plus laptops plus smartphones is bringing them together. Hello! Social media.  We’re connecting via portable technology.

A few years ago we put our big clunky computer desktops in a spare bedroom or a home office — a room that usually didn’t have a television. But now we’re surfing and tweeting and facebooking on our laptops or BlackBerries or iPhones in our living rooms, dens or bedrooms and it’s like being at an Oscar party, a Grammy party or a Super Bowl party.

You want to hear what your snarky friend is saying about SJP’s hair or gown, or praise Jeff Bridges’ heartfelt, yet groovy, man speech. You might have tweeted “Imma let you finish” when that redhaired woman pulled a Kanye during  the Music by Prudence documentary producer’s speech. (Turns out she produced it too.) And you might even admit that you both laughed and got a little misty during Sandra Bullock’s acceptance speech.

I did. I tweeted during many of these shows and talked about the rest of them on Facebook.  I’ve watched these shows in years past –sometimes they were on in the background while I put together an 11pm newscast that followed. (What do you MEAN the show is running over?!!!)  Other times, before kids, I had seen several nominated movies and wondered why I hadn’t seen the others — so I tuned in to see what video I should rent in the future.  (Side note: as a mom with two daughters, I can accurately predict the animated feature winner every year, having seen the entire category and then some. The one year I got it wrong: Happy Feet.)

So I suggest this pop culture crowdsourcing is driving up awards show ratings. In an age when we feel comfortable talking about every little opinion on Twitter or Facebook, check in to be the mayor of our local Starbucks on Foursquare or write blog posts like this one, being a part of the conversation in real time is almost as good as being at a party or the event itself.

Do you find yourself watching an awards show, or even your favorite series logged in to your favorite social media site to chat about the program? Do you think it’s just the bad economy keeping people glued to their TVs? Or have the productions become better? (Seriously? I mean, there was an homage to horror movies during the Academy Awards this year people!)

Tell me what you think is driving up ratings. I’d love to chat with you about it. Until Grey’s Anatomy comes on and then I’m talking about Bailey’s big date.

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Will the Olympics in Canada Make Us Forget NBC’s PR Faux Pas?

Written on January 29, 2010 by Stephanie in Olympics, PR, Technology; twitter, celebrity, news, public relations
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‘If you work really, really hard, and you’re kind… Amazing things will happen to you.’ — Conan O’Brien

With grace and dignity, Conan O’Brien left The Tonight Show after just 7 months on the air. Short enough and memorable enough to be re-tweeted, the quote at the top of the post became a trending topic on Twitter. Between speeches like this and his remarkable public statement about not accepting a later time slot, O’Brien won the hearts of many who probably wished they had watched his show more and given him the kind of ratings that could have kept him on the air. Regardless, despite being handed a bitter pill by executives at NBC, Conan either is genuinely that nice or that smart or has really good PR folks giving him advice that he actually follows.

Now, NBC on the other hand, apparently could have used more PR advice or more willingness to listen to any good advice that was given. Facing revolt from affiliates who were losing money hand over fist during their late local newscasts deprived of a good lead-in from the experimental Jay Leno show at 10:00PM, involved in a merger with Comcast, and watching The Tonight Show lose to Late Night with David Letterman, NBC had a crisis on its hands.  Wrap all this up with the new media landscape — advertising rates plummeting, profit margins dwindling and the internet further fracturing the viewership that cable cracked in the 80s — and you can see why NBC panicked. But panic never makes for a clear head or the best method to handle a tricky situation.

What happened to Conan O’Brien has been happening to local newscasters for years, and precipitously so in the last few years as media conglomerates own more and more stations. I have known some fine anchors and reporters who worked hard, did a good job and were loved by audiences. But they may have had too much longevity, too high a salary or were taken for granted by a hastily-convened focus group whose answers apparently represented the feelings of everyone in the market. Some of these fine broadcasters are still working in the biz, while others have left for greener pastures and more sane hours.

Regardless, onward come the Olympics — a few weeks of amazing accomplishments, highly-packaged athlete backstories, plus all the glitter and sequins the ice skaters and ice dancers can fit on a few yards of spandex. (Confession: I love ice skating. It’s probably a side effect of growing up in the iceless South.) I cry at least once during the Olympics. I’m just sentimental that way. But what I don’t know is if America’s heartstrings will be played so adeptly that we will forget the underdog we rooted for in Conan O’Brien, the soundbites from NBC execs who called names during the fracas or how we remembered that this wasn’t the first time Jay Leno found himself in a fight over The Tonight Show.

Does time really heal all wounds? Will watching the Olympics take over late night make you less likely to hold a grudge? Or are you just tired of the whole thing and OVER IT already?

Personalizing your news

Written on March 19, 2009 by Stephanie in alltop, journalism, news
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Through RSS feeds and good aggregators like Google Reader, you’ve long been able to send a variety of blogs, news sites and other web content to one place to read at your leisure. If you haven’t done it yet, you’re in for a treat. Unless you’re not a news junkie like me.

But a favorite aggregator source of mine just took it one better. If you’ve never heard of Alltop, it’s a place that aggregates blogs and RSS feeds under topics. I bookmarked Alltop PR, for example and even had a great shortcut on my desktop where I could scan dozens of blogs and other news about my industry.

Now there’s My Alltop. You can see mine at www.alltop.com/stephskordas. And that’s just one of the things that makes this service so timely. You can share your link with others. Alltop started the ball rolling by asking some of the well-known social media folks out there to create their My Alltop and share it. You can find your favorite guru and check out blogs and sources you might never have encountered otherwise.

As a former journalist, I find myself haunting news sites on the web the way I used to stand over the UPI and AP machines. (Oops, just dated myself!) We used to get the news by teletype, printed at certain times of the day. And if you missed a feed, you’d have to call the local AP office and ask for a refeed or just fill in your newscast with some other roundup. We called it “the wire” — as in “Did you check the wire for the state roundup?” Later, we got the wires via computer in the newsroom. And when I left the newsroom, I called the Internet, the wires, for quite some time. Fully recovered now though.

So, how do you like to get your news? In a paper, delivered in the morning? On TV scattered throughout the day? Or on the internet — where you search it out?