Inside PR 517: Did the NY Times decision on Sarah Jeong mark a turning point?

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Inside PR 517 has been posted – and it covers a lot of ground.

On Inside PR 517, we talk about the Sarah Jeong controversy that erupted last week. If you aren’t familiar with this, I have included links to key articles that will provide the background in the Linkworthy section below. Here’s a quick recap. Last week, the New York Times announced that Sarah Jeong would be leaving the Verge to join the NY Times as lead writer on technology. And then a Twitter storm erupted as attention was drawn to tweets authored by Jeong that were derogatory of white people. The Times quickly reaffirmed its decision, pointing to the context in which Jeong wrote those tweets and indicating that they would not be acceptable in future now that she has joined the Times. Coming in the wake of the James Gunn and Les Moonves controversies, could we indeed be seeing the a restoration of the balance between nuance and absolutism? As Martin asks, could we be back to a time in which we can admit to a mistake, own it, show contrition, and move on? We can only hope so.

Also, in this episode, we know that many listeners to this podcast speak about their area of practice to conferences and at professional development events. If you do this even once a year, you’ll be interested in a post that Gini Dietrich wrote on the SpinSucks blog, Six ways to generate leads from a speaking engagement. Martin and I both thought it offered practical advice that we would put to work – and we asked Gini to discuss it with us.

Finally, a couple #IPRMustKnows, things worth noting and acting upon:

  • WordPress is one more step closer to the full rollout of Project Gutenberg. This week, WordPress pushed out a maintenance update that included a prompt to all users to turn on the Gutenberg update. Gini did this for SpinSucks – and she raves about how great the new experience is. This may be the final release before WordPress 5.0 is pushed out to all users. And with WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg 5.0 will be turned on by default for all users. So, if you publish on WordPress and you haven’t turned on Gutenberg yet, now is your time to try it out.
  • Feedly is, in Joe’s opinion, the best newsreader available for people who want to curate their online information sources via RSS feeds. When Google closed down Google Reader, a substantial part of the Reader community migrated their reading lists to Feedly. That was a time of rocket ship growth for Feedly, which enabled users to access, read and curate their news sources on every device – desktop, tablet and mobile phone. Now the good folks at Feedly have initiated a major rewrite of the Feedly iOS app – and they have invited their community of users to test the app as it is being developed and provide their feedback. The Feedly team have set up a dedicated Slack Workspace for the beta phase, to announce the new features introduced or refined with each week’s release and asking for feedback on these features. And to enable participants in the beta to see that their input is being incorporated in the development team’s work, they’ve gone a step further, setting up a Trello workspace and posting links to it so that the participant community can see the state of work. The Beta program is just about to hit its midpoint. But new users still are joining. So, if you use Feedly and want to make it better, you too can still sign up to participate in the beta. Kudos to Feedly for building their app the right way, co-creating with their community will yield a much better product that meets both mainstream and specialized needs.

Linkworthy

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Inside PR 513: It’s about disclosure, stupid!

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On this week’s episode of the Inside PR podcast: The biggest change to WordPress in ten years; the Guardian decides good enough video really is good enough; and a teachable moment in marketing ethics. It’s about disclosure, stupid!

WordPress 5 with Gutenberg

WordPress users have something big to look forward to – the release of WordPress 5. WordPress published an updateforecasting that WordPress 5 will be released as early as August. Why is WordPress 5 such a big deal? Because it will incorporate the new Gutenberg editing system.

Gutenberg will be the first significant change in WordPress’ core editing dashboard in ten years. And when it is introduced, WordPress users will have, for the first time, a true WYSIWYG interface that will enable them to create, format and arrange their content as they create it, seeing the results as they make the changes. As long time WordPress users, this is something that we have been looking forward to. August can’t come soon enough.

Sometime good enough video is good enough

We know that video is the most engaging of social objects. But we also know that it takes a lot of work to produce highly polished “professional-looking” videos. Digiday reports that The Guardian has adjusted their approachto video on Instagram. They concluded that the uptake of their videos does not justify the high cost of production of highly polished videos. On the other hand, they also noticed that less polished videos were being viewed as often as higher quality, higher cost of production videos. So, from now on, the Guardian is producing less polished videos such as 12 to 15 screen “explainers.”

We think there is a lesson here for all of us – sometimes it makes sense to aim for “good enough” to achieve your objectives. If you can achieve your objective at lower cost, doesn’t it just make sense to do this?

If you fail to disclose, this could be you

A few weeks ago we talked about the less-than-transparent disclosure made by matte story distributors and publishers. This week, Buzzfeed threw daylight on another lapse in disclosure. They highlighted the behaviour of one marketing company that routinely places bylined articles in online news outlets such as Forbes and Entrepreneur without disclosing that references to their clients within the articles are in fact references to clients of the marketing firm.

Nobody is served well by this practice. Not the client. Not the publisher. And not the marketing firm. Just one more reminder to us all that trust is built over time, but can be lost with a single action. Let’s remember, when in doubt, disclose.

Linkworthy

This post originally appeared on the Inside PR Podcast blog.