Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn offers advice on what newspapers must add to remain relevant today: "Seven-day a week advice columns about personal technology; vastly increased coverage and criticism of other media, particularly entertainment television; a return of the old action columns in which we mediate disputes and avenge bitter consumers; more gossip and, of course, blogs, blogs, blogs." It's a interesting column; check it out.

I know what it's like to be the client of a public relations agency. As a senior corporate communications executive for more than a decade, I've led public relations campaigns of all sizes and budgets.

In some years, I managed major product launches for Fortune 1000 companies and spent half a million dollars or more with national public relations agencies such as Fleishman-Hillard and Burson-Marsteller. In other years, such as when I founded a technology startup, I operated on a shoestring -- doing virtually all the dirty work myself and using PR firms only for specific small projects.

Some of my relationships with public relations agencies have been highly successful; in other cases, I had to pull the plug when I realized I wasn't getting what I'd paid for.

If you are currently an agency client, what criteria should you use to assess your firm's performance? Or, as a potential public relations agency client, what criteria should you use when selecting a firm?

I've designed assessment tools to help answer these questions. Whether you are on the client side, with a PR agency, or in the news media, I welcome your input. I'm happy to expand on these based on your suggestions.

For graduating college seniors and others interested in joining the Idea Grove, I'm sorry to say we're not currently hiring. I do hope to bring on a new staff member within the next three to six months. I'll post the opening first on this blog, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, good luck in your job searches. For those just starting their careers, here's some background on the field and some advice on resumes and interviews. And here's a resource for seeking PR jobs in Dallas/Fort Worth.

The New York Press has named the "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers," and several bloggers are included on the list. The source of the paper's annoyance appears to be "naive bloggers holding their breath for their big breaks." Would a "big break" be getting a job with the New York Press? Someone has obviously tampered with the staff's Cheerios.

I attended a Business Wire panel this morning on the value of adding visuals -- from product photos to video clips -- to news releases through BW's "Smart News Release" offering. A news release with a photo attached, for example, is 2.5 times as likely to be viewed as a text-only release.

The panel featured Chris Wilkins, photo editor for The Dallas Morning News, and David Kent, photo editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, as well as a BW exec. They provided the following recommendations for getting your picture in print (with or without the Smart News Release service):

-- Preferred format is Photoshop jpeg, at least 300 dpi
-- Let them know if you've altered the photo beyond basic cleanup, so it can be labeled as a photo illustration rather than a news photo
-- Include a detailed caption in the Photoshop file; many photos are tossed because the cutline info can't be found on deadline
-- With decreases in staffing levels at most newspapers, more submitted photos are being used than in the past. However, so many photos are submitted by PR folks that if your ducks aren't all lined up just right, your submission will probably end up in the trash.
-- Partly as a result of reduced staffing levels, a greater portion of the paper is produced in advance than in the past. So submit your photo early whenever possible -- at least a week before you'd like it to appear in print.

Finally, a subject the politicians can all agree on: the media is bad, bad, bad!

Last month, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman joined two of the Senate's most conservative Republicans in requesting $90 million in federal funds for research on how the Internet and other electronic media "affect children's emotional and behavioral development." Clinton called sex and violence in the media a "silent epidemic."

Actually, the epidemic in values-free entertainment isn't silent -- you can hear it blasting out of every radio speaker and cineplex. It's the politicians who are periodically silent. Over the past 25 years, they have jumped on the sex-and-violence bandwagon about every five years or so. Remember V-chips and before them, Tipper Gore?

Hmmm....so why does the problem never seem to get better? Quite simply, it's because a small number of publicly traded companies control most of what our children see and hear -- and the business of these corporations is to make money, not shape our children's values.

I don't blame the media conglomerates for this. Remember, these corporations are owned by you, the public. And in a free market system, a corporation's mandate is to maximize return to its shareholders. If you held stock in Viacom, for example, how would you react if the company hired a born-again Christian CEO who announced that he was pulling the plug on MTV's sexy rap videos, vowing to make similar changes across other operating units? Well, you might be outraged or delighted -- but either way, you'd dump the stock.

So, we've established that the media can't solve this problem by itself. That leaves only two possible courses of action: (1) increase regulation, or (2) leave it to parents, churches and other private entities to come up with their own solutions.

I'm not a big fan of regulation. In particular, I don't like the fact that the content of traditional broadcasters is regulated by the FCC ("wardrobe malfunction," anyone?), while that of the media they compete against (satellite, cable, the Internet, iPods and Xboxes) is not. This unlevel playing field makes virtually all existing media legislation unfair in my mind.

However, if the pols could somehow create a regulatory structure that is fair to all media, I'd be in favor of it. Because families in both red states and blue states know that they (even with church support) are no match for the daily bombardment of the media.

The Center for Creative Voices in Media put the problem this way:

We are concerned because, for better or worse, the mass media fills many roles in our society: parent, educator, companion, babysitter, and entertainer. For example, research indicates that much of the American public receives the vast majority of its information regarding democracy, politics, values, history, and culture from television. And that's television entertainment programming, not television news. Many say television has the power to make our children obese and violent, to turn them into smokers and drug addicts. Or, put more positively, that it has the power to persuade our children not to take up cigarettes and drugs. That it has the power to turn our children into indolent couch potatoes, or the power to turn them into responsible citizens who vote without fail. In short, almost everyone now acknowledges that television and other mass media do not merely reflect our culture, they also have the power to shape our culture. And since American popular entertainment is one of our nation's most successful exports, it has the power to make us respected in the world. Or resented and reviled.

Morality, eroticism, work, and families are all social constructions. As Neil Postman pointed out in The Disappearance of Childhood, childhood is also a social construction. In the preliterate culture of the Middle Ages, children had no childhoods. They were viewed as small adults, as we can see from the way they were painted in the pictures of the times. They weren't seen as having special developmental needs, and they were used for economic and sexual purposes. They drank, smoked, and worked alongside adults.

When people began to read, a two-tiered culture formed--adults could read and children couldn't. Children came to be viewed as different from adults, defined as a protected class, and sheltered from certain experiences. From this distinction between readers and nonreaders, the walls of childhood were constructed--schools and freedom from wage-earning work. Before books, everyone had access to the same kinds of information. After books, literate adults knew things children didn’t. They knew about such things as theology, history, people in other countries, science, and philosophy. They also knew about bad things, such as murders, wars, and famines, from which they sheltered children. With the inception of print culture, then, adulthood conveyed both responsibilities and privileges.

In the last decades of our century, for the first time since the 1500s, children have access to the same information as adults. In our electronic village, the walls that protected children and elevated adulthood are coming down. In effect we are dismantling childhood...

Some argue that change is inevitable, but there are precedents for making conscious choices about which tools to accept and which to reject. The Amish make such choices. When the Japanese saw the havoc that guns wreaked on their samurai society, they threw their guns away and lived for hundreds of years without them. Before the Seneca tribe made changes, the elders would ask, “How will the change affect the next seven generations?” No new tools or customs were introduced without a thoughtful conversation about the future. We can all benefit from taking up this practice in our families, especially if we have young children...

I am often asked if I believe in censorship. In some ways I do. I don't think we should advertise to children. I think shows that brutalize children should be off the air. Instead, we need decent children's programs, as they have in Europe. But mainly I would argue for more stories, not fewer. I like to hear that extended family, neighbors, old people, people from different backgrounds, poets, teachers, and children are telling stories to each other. Everyone has stories to tell.

Now too few stories are being told by too few people with motives that are too narrow. I would prefer that children hear stories told by adults who care for them, rather than by multinational entertainment corporations. I would like more adults who care about children to have opportunities to tell their stories to children via films, tv shows, and books, and in person. For good stories can save us... We need stories that teach children empathy and accountability, how to act and how to be.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been blasted for his use of video news releases in the latest silly "fake news" flap. Jim Sanders of the Sacramento Bee has written a pretty balanced analysis of the dispute. Excerpts:

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration crafted a video news release touting proposed changes to meal-break rules as a way to "eliminate confusion" and "create a better working environment," it prompted cries of political outrage and a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, legislators have released paper news releases trumpeting their own views on hundreds of issues... Both kinds of press releases are aimed at media outlets and neither presents opposing views, but only the Schwarzenegger administration's form of public relations has come under fire.

In a state that spends millions each year to promote itself and sometimes the views of its elected officials, the dispute raises questions about the limits of government speech, the role of the media in handling such material, and whether the format of a state-made video news release makes any legal difference.

Margita Thompson, Schwarzenegger's press secretary, characterizes the administration's videos as simply a high-tech form of paper press release.

"This is just truly Public Affairs 101 or Information Dissemination 101," she said. "You're going to use all the tools at your disposal to try to get the information out."

But critics claim the administration's videos cross an ethical line into illegal propaganda, scripted and packaged to look like real news in a manner that could deceive viewers...

Video news releases, though increasingly sophisticated, have been around for decades. Prepackaged news segments by the Bush administration sparked controversy last year within the federal government, even though the Clinton Administration also produced them as did the administration of former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis...

State officials said they are not aware of any television station airing one of the administration's videos verbatim.

Joe Angotti, a former senior vice president at NBC News who now serves as chairman of broadcast journalism at Illinois' Medill School of Journalism, said he sees nothing sinister about video news releases.

"To be very candid, I don't blame the government for trying to use television news organizations to get their point across," he said. "The blame is on the stations that use them."