Wine, Roses, and Oil: PR and the Truth

Last night I happened to watch  Days of Wine and Roses, a Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie from 1962 that, perhaps because of the overexposed theme song, I had resisted for years.

My mistake.  It is a powerful, compelling story of an alcoholic couple whose refusal to acknowledge their alcoholism destroys their relationship. For a movie made [...]

Ethics: Transparency Is Not All

In a comment today on a recent B2B Memes blog post, “Content Marketing’s PR Problem,”  a reader by the dubious name of Ant Miles raises an interesting point about content marketing and journalism. As Miles notes, journalism is often biased in hidden ways by PR and marketing. In content marketing, that bias tends to be [...]

Advice to the Re-Employed: Think Freelance

Imagine for a moment (and this may not be a stretch for many readers) that you’ve been self-employed for a year or so after a layoff put you out on the streets. You’ve put a decent freelance or consulting career together, gotten hip to the value of personal branding, and learned or relearned the enormous [...]

The Great Ghost-Blogging Debate

As he does so often and so well, Mark Schaeffer has sparked yet another fascinating debate on his blog today. Reviving a topic addressed last March by Jon Buscall and Mitch Joel, he argues against their position that CEOs should not use ghost writers for their blogs. While Schaeffer agrees with them in theory, in [...]

The Coming Content Marketing-Publishing Continuum

Writing on Foliomag.com earlier this month, blogger Josh Gordon spun a comment heard at the Folio: show into a bullish prediction for print magazines. Although the grounds for his optimism might be questioned, I’ll leave that to prophet of print doom Private Frazer and others. What interested me most in Gordon’s premise was a point [...]

Should Journalists Learn to Code?

A thoughtful article on MediaShift today by Roland Legrand makes a compelling case for journalists learning programming.  Though he starts by reciting a long list of reasons not to code, he ends up fairly adamantly arguing the case for making it mandatory. The only exception he admits is any journalist who plans to quit the [...]