The National Press Club has decided to go forward with plans to feature controversial former "correspondent/escort" Jeff Gannon at a panel discussion on the topic of journalism and blogging, called "Who is a Journalist?"

Many bloggers, many journalists, and many blogger-journalists would rather not be represented by Gannon at this point. But, as Gannon might say, these whiners have "lost touch with reality." The truth is, we're moving into a new era where individuals, not organizations, will decide who is a journalist and who's not. The days of Walter Cronkite telling us "the way it is" are long gone. For good or ill, there are people who would still read Gannon's Talon News as the gospel truth each day if he were to resurrect it. So I respect the Press Club for not backing down on this one.

I do agree with those who say that Gannon should not have received White House press credentials. However, I say that based on the relatively small size of his Web audience, rather than his political views or sexual proclivities. Pick the journalists who reach the largest audiences -- whether on air, in print or online.

Dallas-based Blockbuster has closed the book on the "no late fees" crisis in Texas and 46 other states. The New Jersey attorney general's office, which announced the first state investigation, is still pursuing its own lawsuit. The Dallas Morning News reports today:

Blockbuster Inc. agreed to pay $630,000 and refund customers as part of an agreement with 47 states including Texas and the District of Columbia investigating the company's "no late fees" promotion.

The Dallas-based company's ads failed to clearly disclose that a customer could be charged a $1.25 re-stocking fee or the retail price of a movie or game if it's kept longer than the seven day-grace period that runs after the due date.

The ads also failed to disclose that the "no late fees" offer wasn't available at all stores because not all franchise stores are participating.

Blockbuster must make refunds to customers who submit written claims that they were charged the fee and felt misled by the national television campaign in January.

"Advertisers may not use catchy slogans if those slogans are misleading," said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said during a press conference in Dallas Tuesday.

The settlement, which was brokered by Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers on behalf of the other states, also requires Blockbuster to make the existence of these fees clear in future ads.

Blockbuster senior vice president Karen Raskopf said the company "wants everyone to understand this program and to use it." Most customers bring the movie back within two days of the due date, she said.

The $630,000 fine will be distributed to all states from the Oregon Attorney General's office and amounts to about $13,000 per state to cover the costs of the investigations.

Two states didn't participate, Vermont and New Hampshire. New Jersey is pursuing its own lawsuit filed in February, said spokesman Jeff Lamm for Attorney General Peter C. Harvey. "Our case is still active."

Unfortunately for Blockbuster, the negative attention has undoubtedly caused more than $630,000 in damage to sales. Here's hoping they can turn this mistake into a positive.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports on a freelance Florida television reporter who also runs his own PR firm -- a firm that has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the state government. The reporter appears to have put some safeguards in place to avoid conflicts of interest, but it does raise red flags. It's not easy to straddle the worlds of journalism and PR without raising ethical issues. With blogs, politicized cable news, and other factors now muddling the mix, such ethical questions will become increasingly common -- and difficult.

Yes, indeed. I love my job. Even if I can't get love from anyone else -- even in Singapore.

The Electric New Paper of Singapore has published an article headlined: "CONFESSION OF A PR CONSULTANT." The subhead reads: "IT'S NOT EASY BEING A PUBLIC RELATION MAN. HE MUST WEAR A FAKE SMILE, SUCK UP AND TRY TO PLEASE EVERYONE." (sic)

In the expose, Jason Tan (not his real name) reveals that he must throw parties to "entertain people that I don't like," and confides that "I have to be nice to all reporters, even though there are a few that I personally don't like. I will give them a hug or a peck on their cheeks when I bump into them at social events."

He adds, "It's very tiring when you have to deal with people relationships every day. Sometimes it can get to the stage of being pretentious to one another."

(sic -- and I think I'm getting a little queasy, too.)

A recent front-page article in The Washington Post about corporate/CEO blogging describes the emerging phenomenon this way:

The soul-baring, anything-goes, free-for-all phenomenon called the Web log has come to this:

"This is the first of many commentaries I will make on this forum," wrote General Motors Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz in January when he first started his blog, fastlane.gmblogs.com, "and I'd like to begin with, surprise, some product talk -- specifically, Saturn products."

Web logs -- or blogs -- started as a way to talk about new technologies, vent about life and interact in a no-holds-barred forum. Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle -- a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.

But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained -- and painful.

"Looking back before the dust settles on 2004, it was a great year of building momentum for BCA [Boeing Commercial Airplanes]. Our orders went up, with 272 in '04 compared to 239 in '03. It was a super year for widebodies for us," wrote Randolph S. Baseler, Boeing Co.'s vice president of marketing, on Jan. 17 in his first entry at boeing.com/randy.

With blogs like that, who needs news releases? Some Internet watchers wonder if a blog that sounds like nothing more than a corporate press room is worth the effort.

"Repositing marketing materials on a blog is a waste of time," said Rebecca Blood, author of "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog." "I would advise them to just stop right now. Those materials already exist. The blog that is powerful is when it is real."

Ken Deutsch, a D.C.-based consultant, added his two cents in a subsequent letter to the editor:

Companies that use the traditional command-and-control approach to public relations and brand protection will fail to take advantage of the power of the Internet. Blogs are a reaction to the controlled world of media and PR. They embrace practices that PR departments fear -- linking to competitors, open-ended dialogue and a leveling of communication hierarchies. Posting news releases on blogs or sending them to bloggers may be using blog technology, but not blog philosophy.

I can't fully disagree with the criticisms; I've made similar points myself. However, the tone of the criticisms is starting to sound a little too familiar. These are the same arguments used in the mid-90s by those who said the World Wide Web itself would always be fundamentally "hip," "nonhierarchical" and "un-commercial" -- and today, 10 years later, is it any of those things? Guess what: once everybody and their Aunt Edna start doing something, it's no longer hip.

In fact, I think that's Aunt Edna signing up on Blogger.com as we speak.

Today's Chicago Sun-Times has a nice profile of Bacon's Information Inc.,which is based there. The article says Bacon's helps "a swollen army of 350,000 PR professionals inhabiting more than 7,000 consulting agencies and more than 20,000 corporate, government and institutional departments" keep track of "over 160,000 publications, broadcasters and blogs." Kind of makes one feel special, doesn't it? :)

A friend rented Sweet Smell of Success after reading an earlier blog entry and suggested I recommend other great films that tackle the worlds of journalism and public relations.

Here are my Top 10, with my favorite ranked first.

1. Citizen Kane
2. All the President's Men
3. Broadcast News
4. Sweet Smell of Success
5. Network
6. His Girl Friday
7. The Insider
8. Teacher's Pet
9. The Paper
10. Wag the Dog

As for the worst? I'll go with I Love Trouble.

As I compiled this list, I got a little depressed that I couldn't think of a single good film that made us PR types look anything other than despicable. Time and again, PR and advertising folks are depicted as two-faced, unethical hotshots who will do anything for a client. Lawyers get this kind of treatment in the movies as well -- but they get almost equal time as the good guy.

Maybe PoweR Girls is good for the industry's reputation after all.:)

Last week, a woman in San Jose found part of a human finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili. The Web jokesters are already on the case -- Adrants cites a spoof that says the incident is part of a new promotional campaign offering customers "a bit of (founder) Dave (Thomas) in every bite."

The reality is that a crisis of some kind happens to all companies from time to time. Whether the crisis becomes a PR nightmare or a minor bump in the road is generally determined not by the incident itself, but by the company's response to it. A company that handles a crisis with openness and honesty can actually build a stronger relationship with its customers than it had before.

I think it's too early to tell in the Wendy's case, but the San Jose Mercury News (registration required) has a nice article on this topic. The article cites some well-known crisis management cases of the recent past, "handled well or poorly." Here's an excerpt from the article; I've added links for those who'd like to learn more about each of these incidents:

More than 60 people got sick and one child died in an E. coli outbreak in 1996 that stemmed from bacteria in unpasteurized apple juice produced in Dinuba by Half Moon Bay-based Odwalla. The company recalled all suspect products, brought in outside experts to investigate, sent executives to meet with the parents of the child who died, and created a Web page for customers.

After some of its restaurants served hamburgers tainted with E. coli bacteria in 1993, Jack in the Box denied responsibility and tried to blame another company and government health officials. Bad strategy. Eventually, the company paid $55 million in legal settlements and fees, along with $44 million to franchisees and $8 million to shareholders.

Following the crash of a ValuJet plane in Florida in 1996, the company was so badly tarnished by its poor safety record that it changed its name to AirTran Airways.

Bridgestone/Firestone recalled millions of tires in 2001 after reports of 62 deaths and more than 100 injuries after the tires suddenly lost their tread. Ford's president and chief executive, Jac Nasser, appeared in two Ford television ads, giving customers his ``personal guarantee'' that the automaker was working around the clock on the recall.

After the Exxon Valdez oil-spill accident in 1989, company executives' two-week delay in visiting Prince William Sound, Alaska, damaged the public's perception of Exxon, feeding the impressions of an unfeeling corporate giant.

In 1982, seven people died in the Chicago area from taking cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. That scare led to the introduction of new tamper-resistant packaging for non-prescription pain relievers, and Tylenol, made by Johnson & Johnson, soon regained its lost market share.

Even a marketing campaign can create a PR crisis. Blockbuster, based in Dallas, had a crisis on its hands recently when it launched its "End of Late Fees" program -- which had too much fine print attached for many of its customers, as well as the attorney general of New Jersey, who filed suit over the campaign. More than 30 other states subsequently began their own investigations.

It sounds like a mess....but so did "New Coke" until it led to the creation of "Classic Coke," and even more shelf space and profits for Coca-Cola. So it's not too late for Blockbuster to turn this one around.

Bruce Lowry of Novell told The Economist that he can imagine blogs "completely replacing press releases within 10 years." It's a bold thought; does it hold water?

No doubt, the Web has tranformed public relations and changed the nature of the press release. Releases now have to be written with the assumption that everyone will read them. So a company's messages must be consistent -- which, frankly, hasn't always been the case in the past.

For example, before the late 90s, I can point to many examples where CEOs spoke to their Wall Street investors (through news releases as well as conference calls) in a very different way than they spoke to employees and customers. A layoff, for example, is often a positive for a company's stock price, while it's obviously anything but positive for employees. And investors love to hear that a company's products are earning higher margins than those of the competition; but a customer might see or hear the same message and think, "I'm getting ripped off!"

The Internet era has had the effect of forcing companies to integrate their messages more tightly, so they're saying the same thing to everybody. This is a good thing. But is the next step to move away from press releases altogether and on to blogs?

I can't imagine it anytime soon. I think more and more companies will add blogs as a new channel of communication. Some early corporate-affiliated blogs, like those of Robert Scoble (Microsoft) and Jonathan Schwartz (Sun), are excellent; they have the frankness and intimacy that a good blog requires. But I'm afraid many corporations will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into this new arena. Most large corporations are accustomed to top-down leadership and tight control of messages, and blogging runs counter to this.

Time will tell. Whatever happens, I look forward to being part of it.

Someone e-mailed me this morning to ask if Dallas had any other blogs like mine. My blog has a particular focus on the evolving relationship between journalism and public relations, which I haven't seen elsewhere. But Dallas does have some nice blogs.

My favorite Dallas blogs are probably those of journalist Virginia Postrel (though I often disagree with her opinions) and D Magazine (though I'm not a fan of its sometimes gratuitous bashing of Belo, a great media company -- and my former employer.)

Speaking of Belo, I applaud Keven Ann Willey for launching a blog by the editorial page team at The Dallas Morning News. She wanted the public to see how the soup's made -- to see the real people and real debate that go into deciding what positions to take on various issues. As she put it:

The entries on the blog represent the individual views of board members, for example, not necessarily the board's collaborative view. But it's those individual views that are so important to shaping the collaborative view that you read on the editorial page of the newspaper each day.

I read Mark Cuban's blog, too. For those of you who don't know, Cuban also backs IceRocket, an upstart search engine based in Dallas that includes a blog search function. It's only a matter of time before Google, Yahoo and MSN offer the same.

Steve Rubel of the New York public relations firm CooperKatz is a leading evangelist for blogging in the PR world. He wrote yesterday about how the rising influence of blogs will enable companies to talk directly to their audiences without relying on traditional media. He also references an excellent article on this topic in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

One implication of the trend is that PR pros will need to become more like journalists in their ability to communicate to the public. Rubel recommends PR pros start blogging now, even if only on internal agency or corporate blogs, to get the experience they will need. He writes:

My feeling is that the best way to teach PR pros to think like journalists is to encourage them to become bloggers. I have learned more about journalism through one year of blogging than perhaps anything else over my entire career in this business.

I've always believed that the best training for a PR pro is to be a newspaper or television reporter first. But blogging is a great way to develop some of the same skills while working full-time for an agency or corporation. It's a good idea.

It's not news to anyone that we are bombarded by media images today. Many parents, in particular, believe they are at the mercy of the shallow messages of popular entertainment and advertising, and that as a result, their children are increasingly worshipping at the altar of consumerism.

While the decline of religion and many other factors have been blamed for this phenomenon, two interesting documentaries, last year's The Corporation (which arrives on DVD this month) and an older PBS special, Affluenza, argue that the deregulation of markets and rise of giant corporate conglomerates over the past 25 years (under both Republican and Democratic administrations) have also played a role in our current media bombardment.

Both are worth watching, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum. Personally, they've helped me to reassess what I do for a living, why and for whom. They've also made me reexamine some of my views on public policy issues. It's always good to take stock now and then.

Beginning with the Armstrong Williams fiasco earlier this year, much attention has been given to the Bush Administration's alleged manipulation of the news media.

The controversy recently extended to the use of video news releases (VNRs) -- pre-packaged television news stories, generally created by PR firms, for use by broadcast media outlets. The Bush Administration has defended the practice, but many editorial pages, such as that of USA Today, have suggested that they are unethical and should be banned.

This is silly. There's a fundamental difference between a "payola" case like that of Armstrong Williams and the PR tactic of VNRs. Williams spoke directly to a large media audience, and by not acknowledging that he was paid for his endorsement of "No Child Left Behind," he betrayed his audience and his profession.

The VNR, on the other hand, is no different from any other press release. It is given to the news media, who can use it, alter it, or not use it as they see fit. I've sent out many of them in my career; some have gotten great pickup -- airing on dozens of television stations -- and some have never seen the light of day. It was up to the news judgment of the individual media outlet whether and how they used the release.

If you are interested in learning more about VNRs, one Dallas company that does a nice job with them is VNR-1. Here's one of their case studies.

So why all the hubbub over VNRs? Here's my five-cent analysis of the situation:

1. Large segments of the U.S. media are embarrassed by their coverage of the run-up to the Iraq conflict. They took what they were told about the existence of weapons of mass destruction at face value, rather than doing their own reporting. The famous mea culpa of The New York Times reflects the feelings on news desks nationwide. This has made segments of the media more sensitive to manipulation by the Bush Administration.

2. With the explosion of television news outlets, and particularly 24-hour cable channels, the demand for packaged video content has increased dramatically. As a result, the media standards for when, where and how VNRs are aired have relaxed considerably.

These are media industry issues, not PR industry issues. And because of the First Amendment, VNRs will never be banned.

Instead, television news directors should simply tell their staffs the following:

1. "If you don't think a VNR is newsworthy, don't air it."

2. "If the VNR is accurate and contains information that will benefit your viewers, do air it."

3. "If you want to use video or audio content from a VNR as raw material for creating a news story with an entirely different angle, you can do that, too. You control what goes out over the air, remember?"

Personally, when I make and distribute a VNR, I expect the media to think carefully about what information their audience should receive and in what context. That's their job. And, despite the recent controversy, the media generally does this very well.

For this reason, I don't send out VNRs willy-nilly. I only send them out when I believe the VNR is a real story; if the VNR is unprofessional or inaccurate, it typically won't get airtime, even in today's looser environment.

One nice thing about blogs is that they represent an actual dialogue between people, or in the case of corporate blogs, between companies and their customers. They are NOT advertising. Marketing and PR firms that don't get this will make fools of themselves. Want an example? Check this one out for Captain Morgan's Rum.

Are party girls -- and parties, for that matter -- really this dull? If so, kill me now...there's no point in going on with life.

PoweR Girls, a new MTV series that highlights Lizzie Grubman's New York PR agency, has been hotly criticized by the industry for its depiction of publicists as vapid babes more focused on dressing up for parties and meeting Paris Hilton than providing counsel to their clients. It plays to stereotypes that the industry has fought against for years, and as such has touched more than a few nerves.

Personally, I was OK with that part of the show. Guess what -- they call them stereotypes because people fit them. And PoweR Girls is extremely positive in its portrayal of the relationship between celebrity publicists and gossip columnists compared to, say, the dark classic Sweet Smell of Success.

So really, my only complaint is that the show is dull. Not much happens. In particular, the so-called exclusive celebrity parties these girls throw will make you want to stay home on Saturday night. And the show mostly depicts the girls as whiny rather than fun.

For those who are interested in watching a program with a more real-world (as opposed to "Real World") take on PR, Taking Care of Business on TLC is (or was) a nice show. It's on hiatus.

In any case, the PR industry needn't worry about PoweR Girls. The plug will be pulled soon enough. And if it's not...girls, could you hand me that velvet rope so I can sling it over the nearest tree branch? ;)

Orchards, compared to other places where trees grow, are distinguished by their orderliness. Orchards have no undergrowth. The trees are evenly spaced in rows and columns, and are of uniform purpose, bearing either fruit or nuts.

All of which would suggest that the word "orchard" may be the worst possible name for a blog that covers the news media and public relations. Not since the 19th century has the work of the news media been such a messy, politically charged topic, and never before has the public had access to so many sources of (often conflicting) information.

Public relations, for its part, is looked upon with more skepticism than ever -- not so much because the practice of PR has fundamentally changed, but because consumers increasingly have the tools and sophistication to look behind the curtain and see how the worlds of PR and media interact. They're finding out how the soup's made, and realizing that a lot of fingers are trying to get into the pot every day.

The public -- finally -- has come to understand that the newspaper that plops on the front porch each morning is not some pure, objective "truth" on stone tablets. It is an imperfect product created through imperfect processes, where often the loudest voice -- inside or outside the news organization -- gets disproportionate attention. The media has always been a "squeaky wheel gets the grease" business, and PR firms squeak for a living.

See, listen: SQUEAK, SQUEAK! It's what we do.

Personally, I'm glad the public is figuring out how all of this works. And so we get back to the name of this blog. Though the media world will never be orderly, Media Orchard attempts to cultivate fresh thinking about journalism and public relations at a time when the line between the two is increasingly blurred -- thereby creating a bit more order in how we THINK about these topics, at least.

I invite you to participate.