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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-06d
We now return you to the news, already in progress
Newstips Web site has news
Http://Newstips.com has word of some new additions to the things
we can do for those of you who crew the media; see the For Press
tab. We have downloadable print, radio & TV versions of a new PSA
that asks businesses to advertise again; check it out & if you
feel comfortable doing so, please ask TPTB at your place to
consider running it. We added some new advice that we can all
hope vendors will follow (under For PR Pros). Oh yeah, we also
finally caught up with our back issues. Happy Interdependence
Day!
Laptop cool gets cooler with new Massive23 ST
This is very cool for 10-17" notebook users: Thermaltake has a
new, library-quiet (17dBA) cooler that's also very cool to look
at. The new Massive23 ST spins a 230mm (23cm, as in the 23 in its
name) fan at 600rpm so that even summer air streams in a cool
flow, even looking cool in the glow of the fan's cool blue LED.
It does a massive amount of cooling in a lightweight plastic
housing, USB can power it & users can adjust the fan speed across
a 200-600RPM range, enjoying 57CFM airflow at top speed. Also
look for its upscale sibling, the Massive23 CS, in an aluminum
housing & offering the 6 color-changing patterns of Thermaltake
Color-Shift fans. Check with Ramsom for details on when these
will be available & on US-market pricing. Contact: Ramsom Koay,
Thermaltake Technology USA (City of Industry, CA)
626-968-9189x127 ramsom.koay@thermaltakeusa.com
http://ThermaltakeUSA.com
Tripping versus the light's fantastic
See http://www.lowel.com/edu/ for an online quick course in how
to light better - these days, extremely relevant to the
burgeoning crowd of people getting into producing videos for
their small businesses. The examples, of course, use Lowel
lights, which retailers now carry through Tiffen. We should also
add that this may interest many local amateurs who are stepping
in for families not quite able to afford portraits by the pros.
For those of you at TV stations, you (or your ops guy) may find
that some of these alternatives can reduce both replacement &
utility costs. Ask Hilary. Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen Company
(Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x1216 haraujo@tiffen.com
http:/.tiffen.com
How flash cards fit your coverage after all
You may not think of SD or Micro SD cards as being on your beat
these days, but you're still doing stories involving cameras,
pocket camcorders, media players, navigators, PDAs, mobile phones
& plenty of other gear that uses them. There may be a little too
much "forget" to the "Install & forget" side of these things as
they fill up, putting any important next event (snapshot, video,
tune, etc.) in jeopardy of having no place to go. PNY is all over
retail with products in this category, so ask Sue to help you get
any info, pix or reviewables you need. Contact: Susan Bartolucci,
PNY (Parsippany, NJ) 973-560-5592 sbartolucci@pny.com
http://PNY.com
Special Report: Social realities meet social necessities
If we regard economic recovery & more complete employment as a
social necessity, beyond the political debates, where in the
rubble are the transplanted seedlings of job-orphaned workers
most likely to take root? From the same schools of thought that
say that people don't buy drills, they buy holes, or that you
won't sell an aspirin until somebody gets a headache, we think
part of the resumption of fuller employment lies in seeking out
maladies that these workers can help cure. As a beginning, let's
consider our own profession, where for most of you, 2/3 or more
of your colleagues as of 2007 aren't there today. Consider among
those the writers then compare the abilities of those pros versus
the level of prose coming from just about any business. We all
recognize that there's been a decline in US education overall
from which language skills were far from spared & we all know the
value of writing as a form of communications with clarity,
directness, accuracy & truth. Major corporations recognize this
in maintaining staff positions for people who write executive
speeches or ghost-write articles on their behalf; smaller
organizations need to recognize this as a competitive necessity
in preparing their Web sites, product information, sales
literature & presentations. There is a disparity between the
levels of literacy needed to accurately understand versus those
needed to accurately present a message; a well-crafted message
can be understood by most of the public while few in the public
have the skills to craft such messages. The bosses of even
smaller or mid-size companies recognize (though only sometimes
admit) their personal shortcomings in grammar, language skills
or, beyond, finesse but internal environments make it unlikely
that such companies can define let alone advertise for a staff
position that embraces these skills. It is up to the unemployed
wordsmiths among us to seek out those companies with visibly weak
external communications yet enough revenue to be able to afford
an additional expense; even so, executive attitudes will be
hesitant, first limiting the company to freelance engagements
before addiction sets in & a salary becomes more appropriate.
Beyond advice to old friends, you may find a business story in
this if you can find a trend in local schools where people beyond
the traditional ages of college students are taking classes to
improve their language skills for any good reason. It's also
important to note that any transition from old media to new is
irrelevant in this context because the need to create &
communicate compelling messages (whether compelling purchases or
trust or interest or anything else) remains constant. There is
one important way in which today's different than past eras: the
ability to communicate in audio or video is increasingly
omnipresent. What we've just presented as relevant to print
journalists is in its own way just as valid for broadcast
journalists. Most small business owners think of themselves as
charming, authoritative & the required face in any communication;
they also think their kids are adorable, irresistible & great at
helping people believe their messages; anybody who's ever had to
make commercials for a living has worked out ways to allow doses
of either while controlling the overall quality & credulity of
the communication by presenting more polished voices & often
faces on behalf of the company. The ability to script, to
capture, to edit & to polish audio or video is just as
significant an asset to a company's presence on YouTube or its
podcasts as it was to a newsroom. Our focus here has been on our
own niches but extends to others: teachers can be trainers,
industrial managers can become hospital managers, retail clerks
can work customer service phones, etc. To best address the
recovery, spend a few minutes ignoring the need for it, consider
all the little shortcomings in the ways so many companies do
business, find ways to cure those then consider how to address
those needs with the native or adapted skill sets of unemployed
people. If this exercise can find one worker in four or five a
new job, it alone can be an extremely significant catalyst for
recovery.
Special Report Bonus Review: CuteSendIt
We decided it's appropriate for us to originate & share more
video from here, which opens a hornets' nest of questions about
how to get those big files from here to there. Most stations
don't have (or don't know they have or how to use) FTP, but FTP
is the obvious freight handler for big files, way over the size
limits for e-mail attachments. In talking to Globalscape about
CuteFTP, they mentioned CuteSendIt, which we hadn't investigated
at the time, but now have, much to our delight. From the sender's
perspective, the upload happens through a Web form; you tell it
the e-mail address of at least one recipient, browse your
computer for the file or files you want to send & it pretty much
takes it from there. (They also offer a Wizard you can download
to do all this from your desktop without opening up a browser).
Each recipient gets an e-mail message with a link to the
downloaded file, or to a Web page with a selection of available
downloaded files. Depending on how big a file you send & how many
you send, how often, you may even get away with their Lite
version, which is free. They set us up with a Business version
account so we could distribute our "Advertise" public service
announcements. Bottom line: CuteSendIt provides an easy,
intuitive, flexible & capable alternative for getting huge files
delivered without disrupting the way people & their tools
normally work or making either sender or receiver learn new
skills.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: MS Office support
When we built our Core-i7 project systems, Microsoft provided
fresh copies of Vista Ultimate (we did a 64-bit install) & Office
2007 Ultimate, as we reported & reviewed earlier; also as we
reported, the Windows Easy Transfer utility failed us miserably.
With a new Office installation instead of a transfer, it was up
to us to migrate everything; specifically in terms of Outlook,
that includes safe senders & blocked senders lists, rules,
configuration specifics for our accounts & the massive PST file
that stores our messages, contacts, schedule info, etc. One
specific part of Outlook still isn't working (it was fine on our
old installation): the ability to right-click an address in the
message preview pane & look up its record in Contacts; we should
note that address book searches from the toolbar work fine & the
most relevant KB on the subject (meaning, of course, we're not
actually the only report ever of this problem) suggests plucking
an address from Properties & pasting it there as a workaround.
Since this copy of Office Ultimate 2007 is a new package, newly
installed, we are entitled to tech support on that issue &
decided to let them try. We could have had better instructions
from a cereal box: run diagnostics, run ScanPST, pluck &
reinstall, etc. The exercise did uncover that ADR files are also
missing from this installation (used in exporting folder contents
to specific data file types). We don't yet have a resolution, in
part because our assigned tech is resisting our many requests to
escalate the matter. We could, of course, make this an issue for
the PR firm & get an immediate US-based top-tech call, but then
we'd never be able to experience what less privileged users
encounter. As a bottom line to date: We imagine the tech on the
other side reading through a yellowed copy of
things-that-often-work-in-general, an approach that's inexcusable
even if our time was worthless, compounded by some suggestions
that, had we followed them, could have put all of our Outlook
assets in peril; if we had to grade it to date, we'd give it a D
for barely passing.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Plain Dealer ranks #17 in circulation & we regard it as, if
there is such a thing, a fairly typical example of the plight &
promise of newspapers. They just went through a design change,
making this an opportune moment to make the Plain Dealer a
subject for one of our reviews. Before the design change, they
had a tendency to occupy a lot of their shrinking column inches
with really big photos; the new look somewhat reins in those
photos & adds a right-side column of briefs that either stand
alone or point within. The Business section runs 4 pages Tuesday
through Saturday, 6 pages on Sunday, with a mix of staff-prepared
& outside materials; most but not all of the coverage has local
hooks. The other traditional sections are all similarly thin, but
remain their own sections, with the most notable long-term
shrinkage in classifieds (thanks in part to craigslist & in part
to the newspaper's own Cleveland.com presence). We heard that
most upper-floor staff is moving downstairs (sports, for example,
is relocating to unused desks in the Business section) & surmise
that the newspaper intends playing landlord with its upper square
footage. Management has not been successful in migrating any
significant levels of revenue to its online property (beyond some
classifieds); like many of the ilk, it is free throughout & to
date, lacks separate premium content to draw paying subscribers.
We see no evidence of new techniques or approaches to gaining
advertisers (if indeed any new outreach exists) showing any signs
of success. We don't see any enterprising efforts to create
revenue opportunities through category-specific ad-supported
inserts. We don't see any compelling new external programs (just
the old-hat stuff) to gain either new subscribers or new
advertisers. From the outside, it looks like a lot more efforts
to help the balance sheet are focused on cutting costs (including
staff cuts & sacrifices, like unpaid time off) than on restoring
or creating revenue. (At this point, many of you will recognize
why we regard the Plain Dealer as fairly typical). As a reader,
it still delivers value. Its redesign has made it a more
compelling read & we find it is doing a much better job of
drawing us to inside pages. Bottom line: We believe the recession
for newspapers is past its bottom & that the Plain Dealer has an
excellent chance at survival & recovery, but we think that the
people who are proving to be the most instrumental in helping
that happen are the people who are most being hurt in the
process, so we regard the Plain Dealer overall as an improving
product in the hands of unimaginative top management.
Any trade shows?
Last year & so far this year, how many of the trade shows that
you used to attend fairly regularly had to make do without you?
How much will that still be the case for the end of this year &
into next year? We're asking for several reasons. When companies
ask us whether trade shows are still good places to go for press
coverage, we've been telling them no, not for now; we need to
know if that's still true. Also, while a lot of your decisions
not to go are driven by budget cuts, we suspect that some are
driven by fewer places to run any coverage that might result,
making them a bad value in terms of the various resources they
consume. Has the result been good for you personally; while we
recognize that even in general, austerity is good for the figure,
we also know that most of us come back from trade shows a few
pounds heavier than when we left. Finally, there's the whole
question of how stupid it is for companies to hold their news
until the trade show, since coverage just before can do more to
draw curious attendees to their booths. (They'll counter with the
importance of a hands-on demo - most of the timing meaning that
they think they're charming enough to polarize your coverage
regardless of what the product is or isn't showing; we'll
counter-counter by telling them how little time we have per
booth, how infrequently appointments ever happen on time & how
much more favorable it is to ship a product to us for hands-on
without the surrounding hubbub of a trade show floor). If indeed
you are going to have to miss these trade shows for the next year
or so (give or take), would you like us to try to orchestrate
something with the major shows to arrange a proactive outreach to
non-attending but nonetheless "participating" press? Or maybe
you're hearing more than enough from them anyway; let Marty know.
Contact: Martin Winston, Newstips (Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400;
marty@Newstips.com http://Newstips.com
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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