Dana Blankenhorn

The Extended Warranty

The distrust of our economy and our high-tech lives from the media is unrelenting.

This Halloween, a little Christmas. A bit of good news you probably haven't noticed before.

Turn on your TV. Chances are you're going to see adds from outfits like Mogi, Carchex, EasyCare, or  StopRepairBills. 

The ads are basic. Customers getting new transmissions who aren't troubled because the bills are covered. Customers moaning over the cost of a needed repair. Customers on both sides of the divide sitting side-by-side.

I'm not telling you to buy this stuff. Just notice how such companies have suddenly become a big feature in your broadcast day. And ask why.

The reason is, of course, that it's good for the companies offering this service. They may claim it's insurance. But it's really an extended warranty.

Trolls

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 44 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One of the most annoying features of online life is the troll.

Most have experienced it. Many have done some trolling themselves. I won't pretend to be 100% innocent in it.

But I had thought I'd gotten over it.

I first experienced this phenomenon in the late 1980s. I had been covering the online world for three years then and felt pretty comfortable there. Most of those who spent time online then were educated, erudite, looking for sincere give-and-take. Being online was an elite activity.

Then I entered into a political discussion. Under my own name.

Squeal Like a Pig

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The recent dust-up between the Obama Administration and Fox News deserves a proper response from someone who knows a little political history.

Squeal like a pig! (This is a family blog. Those who wish to can learn why actor Bill McKinney is smiling at y'all on his Web site.)

Regular readers will know I've been pushing this quite some time. I have actually been looking forward to comparing someone like Joe Biden to Spiro Agnew. And for good historical reason.

The most important thing a Thesis must do, not for validation but just to get its program through, is to change the formula of what is acceptable.

The boundaries were pretty easy to set in our nation's first generational crisis, the Civil War. Supporting the South was treason, supporting peace giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The job was done most subtly by FDR. Many people think of the Hays Code as having been about sex. But has anyone asked why the Roosevelt Administration endorsed it? It was because the Code demanded that movies support the government, saying that "Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed."

PR in the Time of Blogging

I have been making money blogging for five years  now.

My success is based on 25 years of professional business journalism preceding my entry into the game, and 10 years of journalism education before that.

No brag. I know what I'm doing.

I still get a ton of PR pitches, but they are worse than ever before. PR people had little enough clue how to help journalists before the time of blogging. Now they are completely Clueless.

So here are some Clues.

What is a blog post? If you can visualize a news story as an inverted pyramid, and a magazine article as a circle, because you enter and exit the story at the same point, think of a blog post as being more like a horseshoe.

How big is the horseshoe? Its size is defined by the audience that reads and responds to it. Some posts, like this one, will be very small horseshoes. Others can be giant-sized. 

I have no idea, when I start in on a blog post, how big its horseshoe will be. I want it to be as big as possible. More readers and more talk about my post means more money for me. The economic model is just that simple.

The shape of a horseshoe is incomplete. The inverted pyramid tells the whole story in every paragraph, so the editor can cut it at any point without fear. The circle is also complete -- you give people a kicker reason to come in, lead them around, and give them a present at the end that delivers the meaning of the experience.

A horseshoe isn't like that. It starts, it ends, it holds readers, but it is open to interpretation. The meaning of the story is created by the feedback, by the urge to provide feedback, and pass-along readership is a form of feedback.

So don't tell me a story. Don't spin me. Tell me, in 25 words or less (preferably a lot less), why people want to hear about this post you want me to write. Why is it important, why is it worth passing on to others, why should people care? Don't tell me the lesson, but do give me a hook, something I can start with. If I'm good I'll take it from there. Sometimes I'm good, sometimes I'm not.

No PR people I know right now have this skill. They remain devoted to their clients. They don't push back, and explain to those clients the difference between a story and a blog post. Maybe because they don't know themselves.

A good blog post isn't about your client. It's about your client's take on something. The take, their contribution to some controversy of the day, may represent what the company does, the proposition they offer the market. But that's not the post, that's not the story.

The best thing a source can give me is a good quote, so if a PR person has some good quotes to offer on a topic of serious interest, sourced to the client, we may (unfortunately) not even need an interview. That's because the deadline on a blog post is now. Not later today, not a week from now, now. Right now. I'm writing right now. We're in this virtual office together, I'm on deadline right now, so you better give me something I can type as I hear it, something really useful. Or you're useless to me.

Oh, and if you've got a press release I should add to the post, give me the address where it lives on the Web. I like links. Links are vital. Be a link.

Where are the jobs?

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It's the question every journalist is asking. Where are the jobs?

By this point in the economic cycle unemployment should be falling, not rising. People who have jobs, like my dear wife, are incredibly productive and highly profitable. Many are being pressed to the limit, forced into free overtime for fear they will join the ranks of the unemployed.

But put yourself in an employer's place a moment. You want to hire someone. How much will it cost?

Right now you don't know. The salary is not at issue here. The question is what will you have to pay for health care?

Until there is visibility on health care costs, which is not a question of how much you pay but knowing what that how much is, it's impossible to justify a new hire. Once a health care bill passes (or fails) you will know and be able to make a decision. Until then, no. 

The good news is that the economy is on the mend, thanks to the radical interventions of the last year. Sure, those interventions have increased the deficit, but look at it, again, from an employer's perspective.

The business is failing, and a new machine might increase production and productivity, but it will take debt to buy. If you don't buy you fail, but if you do buy you take a risk. So you buy. You're incorporated and thus protected from the personal consequences of failure to an extent. 

Fox Jr.

One neat trick the Right perfected over the last generation has been the manipulation of the media.

A founding principle of the Nixon Thesis is  "the liberal media." Any criticism, on anything from any quarter gets this immediate response from the conservative grassroots. "You're part of the liberal media," followed by a prompt dismissal of the critic.

It's a great dodge, this victim game. It means you never need answer a critic. They're biased. They're the enemy. And you can spread this word among your acolytes, so they too are inoculated.

Once inoculated in this way people become sheep. Nothing that contradicts you can ever get to them.

To this has been added the control and ownership of the media. The best know conservative media baron is Rupert Murdoch, who now has immense sway over the politics of Australia, Britain and the U.S. through his ownership of newspapers, magazines, TV and cable, and Web sites. A better example might be Silvio Berlusconi, who used his control of Italy's media to make himself ruler of all Italy.

To these conservatives the equation is pretty simple. Own the media and you control the people. Grab them by the clickers and their hearts and minds will follow. Politics is not a contest of ideas. It is a contest of wills, and money. With enough of both you can make people believe anything you want.

Liberals have never really gotten their heads around this. It's one thing to deal with a media that is owned by people who vote conservative. It's another thing entirely to face a conservative media, a media where no voices other than conservatives ones get a hearing, where no facts other than those conservatives approve of can be known.

Murdoch is not alone. Pat Robertson controls a large hunk of the media. Sun Myung Moon controls another hunk. There have long been regional conservative barons in various parts of the country -- Freedom Newspapers in California, Morris Communications in Georgia. The dominance of these companies within their markets mean liberal causes, liberal politicians, and liberal organizations start off with an immense disadvantage.

But at least these organizations pretend to exist in the market.

The New Madden

No tech today. No business. No politics. It's Columbus Day so we'll pretend it's your day off.

Instead it's something completely different. American football. Specifically its analysis, and the best guy working in that field. Tony Dungy (right).

In his first year Dungy has taken over NBC's Sunday Night football show with his quiet authority, with his knowledge and with his humanity. The network found a perfect sidekick for him in the recently-retired Rodney Harrison, but this is Dungy's show and we're all the better for it.

Football needed a new face when John Madden quit, and while it's a surprise to find it in a studio show host you take what you can get. Everyone on the set defers to Dungy, and it's easy to see why. Everything he says is letter-perfect for the moment. He knows the people, he knows the game as very few do (which he's proven) but there's something about his air of calm, reflective authority I find fascinating.

The Limits of Tolerance

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 41 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most important task we face, in moving from a Thesis of Conflict to a Thesis of Consensus, is defining and enforcing the limits of tolerance.

In a Thesis of Conflict there are no limits. Spiro Agnew began the development of the  Nixon Thesis under the baton of William Safire  with personal invective. He belittled critics  as "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the insults have only escalated from there.

This achieved its ultimate expression during the George W. Bush Administration, where 9-11 ushered in a second era of McCarthyism, an echo of hate as profound in its way as the Second Rising of the Klan during the first years of the last century.

It's important to remember that the Second Rising succeeded for a generation. It legitimized violence against blacks. It transformed the past, turning the Civil War into the Birth of a Nation. It countenanced lynching of anyone who, like Leo Frank, seemed different or even tolerant. It created Jim Crow, leaving blacks little better than serfs not just in the South, but in the North as well.

The Birth of a Nation premiered 50 years after the Civil War ended. The Bush-inspired Second Era of McCarthyism debuted 50 years after the height of the first McCarthy era, the time of the blacklist.

It's no accident.

Liberal Patriotism

The recessions of the recent past could be "cured" with a variety of conservative nostrums -- lower government spending and tax cuts being among the most common.

The current one will only end with liberal solutions.

The reason can be found in employment, a lagging indicator in any recession. It's high and getting higher. Conservative policies won't bring it down.

The good news is that rising unemployment is defying real economic growth. The economy is on track to grow at a 3% annual rate this quarter and to keep growing. Productivity among all sorts of workers is enormous and growing. Few have suffered pay cuts, which helped keep the Great Recession going so long. We work hard for the money and we earn it.

The problem is a disconnect between what business needs and what the labor market can provide:

• Low-skill businesses want to pay low-end wages only "illegal aliens" can live on, because they're not raising American families but trying to create them. 
• High-skill businesses can't find the skills they need right away, at the point of demand, so they're hiring immigrants on H1-B visas as fast as they can.

The jobs are out there. They're just going to Mexican dishwashers and Indian computer technicians.

The only possible solution is policies that let Americans get these jobs. Kicking the foreigners out at this point only means the jobs don't get done.

• Dirty jobs need to pay a wage Americans will work for, and can live on. And employers can't afford a 40% tax on top of those wages for health insurance. That's a cost that needs to be shared.
• Clean jobs will go to Americans only if Americans are educated and trained to do them. We need to work with business and educators to increase the supply of qualified labor so imports can decline.

The Simple Party, the Complicated Party

The current division between America's political parties does not lie in their view of government. (Both like it if they have it.) It's not, as the sketch above shows, between silly and sensible.

It's more basic than that. It's in their attitude toward problem-solving.

Conservatives think it's simple. Liberals insist it's complicated.