Obama Has Gas Problem

I'm been mildly dumbfounded at Barak Obama's insistence that we need to open the strategic oil reserves to lower the cost of gas in the US. First, in case he hadn't noticed, the price of gas has been dropping, because oil prices are the lowest they've been in three months. Why? Because all the people who had been speculating on the price of oil are getting less sure of unrestrained prices and profits as the economy slumps.

Also, how much did he really think that the price would drop? A nickle? Maybe the 18 cents that he said would be a useless nudge when McCain and Clinton were suggesting dropping the federal gas tax until labor day? I think he was right not to go along with an productive scheme to curry voter favor back then. Now that he's caving in, I'm guessing that we're seeing more of the real man, willing, as so many politicians are, to say anything at times to get elected.

IOC Stands for Freedom -- in Moderation

After all those detailed negotiations to ensure freedom of information access for journalists during the games, the International Olympic Committee now admits that it cut deals with China, which is blocking web sites that it finds offensive:

China had committed to providing media with the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, but journalists have this week complained of finding access to sites deemed sensitive to its communist leadership blocked.

Reporters Without Borders says it's increasingly concerned that there will be censorship during the games. How small minded. I'm sure the Chinese are just trying to help reporters be more efficient by keeping them from anything that would be a distraction.

Her Parents Called Her What?

We've all had moments, on hearing what could only kindly be called unusual names, where we've wondered about what a child's parents were thinking. Here's a name that makes other oddities pale in comparison: Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. The New Zealand girl went before a judge, who granted her a name change. Some of the other odd children names from down under:

• Number 16 Bus Shelter
• Midnight Chardonnay
• Violence
• Benson and Hedges
• Fish and Chips

Children in one family were all named after six-cylinder Ford cars.

Television News Product Placement

It's the end of the journalistic world as we've known it: a Las Vegas television station, owned by Meredith, is taking money from McDonalds to display two cups of iced coffee, logos squarely facing the camera.

The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.

“If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.

The station claims that it will continue to report about McDonald's, removing the cups if there is a negative story, just as it would remove a commercial spot. But the problem here is that the advertising is no longer contained to identifiable segments. Product placement works on the theory of an implied endorsement by the people who are in the program in question. This is the line between sponsorship and ownership. I wonder if the contract with the station called for a payment of 30 pieces of silver. Probably not - the going rate for integrity is somewhat higher these days.

Print While You Wait: Bookstores and Print-On-Demand

Blackwell's, a so-called high-street bookseller in London, will be installing book printing machines throughout its 60 stores in the UK, according to the Guardian. The current speed is 40 pages per minute, but a new model expected later this year should double the speed. Imagine wanting any of a million books and waiting 7 to 10 minutes to get what you want. It sure beats express shipping.

Great American Think-Off

An Oregon man won this year's Great American Think-Off. Craig Allen, a "retail instructor," came out first in a debate over the question: "Does immigration strengthen or threaten the United States?" The other contestants included a student from Minnesota, another from Minnesota who just got out of grad school, and a Tennessee alumni director. The statements by each of the participants can be found at the link. And just think - not a word about wearing a flag pin on your label.

Reporters May Be Getting China-Tibet Story Wrong

It's tough to cover a story of unrest when you can't get into the country in which it's happening. So far as I know, only one western journalist - an Economist correspondent - was officially in Tibet, and, paradoxically, he was pretty much left alone. But everyone seems to be falling into the biggest form of bias that journalists have: the desire for a neat and compelling narrative that simply explains what they are seeing. I think that may be why everything about the protests in Tibet are framed in a little-guy-versus-big-guy politics. But that may be only a small part of the story.

I'm on a mailing list run by a risk management consultancy, and someone well versed in how geopolitics, policy, and economics interact, who just returned from China, had a different view. This person said that the driving cause was inflation in China making it difficult for people to buy food, including monks. Also, the actions are supposedly spreading from the provinces to Tibet. Although Tibet gets a lot of attention, there have allegedly been food riots across China, most of which go unreported.

The expert then went on to say that food inflation had sparked not only the actions in Tibet and, apparently, people killed in Chinese grocery stores as they tried to buy cooking oil, but there have been food riots in "West Africa, Mexico, Morocco, Yemen, Guinea, Uzbekistan, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Cambodia and Burma." Good lord, that is a scary thought. There have been crop problems in a number of important food producing countries, and the economics of oil and the financial markets is driving up inflation and diverting crops to create ethanol.

If inflation, and the skyrocketing food prices that results, are becoming such a problem, you'd hope that journalists would start to cover the issue. So long as we're hearing only the tidy "political unrest" story, we don't learn what might actually suggest a solution, or at least a real explanation.

Fake News on Local Television

Farhad Manjoo is promoting a new book: "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." Aside from being a witty and intriguing title, the topic of how companies and special interests feed stories that news outlets use verbatim is an important tone.

It's not that being a channel for commercial interests is usual. Many people who have written press releases have the experience of seeing them turned directly into stories without a single change in wording. But corporations are becoming ever more clever in this undertaking:

Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she'd once written a magazine column called "Internet Mom"). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.
...
Nine stations aired Raskin's warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.

But Raskin went on further, suggesting "safe" products as gifts - from companies that hired her as a shill. This is also done on a national level. When you see someone touting round-ups of products, often - although not always - that person is paid by the manufacturers to include their products.

But the use of spoon-fed news feeds, whether print, audio, or video, has become a real problem. News outlets use them because it's "free" content, and the audience never knows that it's just been sold down the river.

St. Pete Times Campaign Truth-O-Meter

Congratulations to the St. Petersburg Times and its "Truth-O-Meter" analysis of attacks in the presidential campaign. Instead of letting things slide into a metaphorical freeway pile-up, the paper is keeping a record of candidates accusing each other about this, that, or the other thing. The ratings of factual veracity go from True to Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

Open Source Attempt to End Internet Stupidity

This seems like a real grasp at the impossible, but some people have started something called StupidFilter.org. They hope that with the right combination of filters and rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines, that sites allowing user participation will be able to catch human stupidity in the process and stop it before it gets posted. I don't know whether this is inspired, or an example of the evolutionary nature of stupidity and its ability to avoid deterrence.

Google as Publisher

I ran this on my business blog, BizBlast, but thought it might be of interest here - as I'm convinced that Google is out to become the world's largest publisher.

Gioogle Gives Sources Talk-Back Ability

Google is letting sources quoted in stories that appear on Google News Service the ability to comment on the coverage. My, what a thorny issue this has opened. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

In an experimental project, Google this week began soliciting comments from individuals and groups cited in stories it carries, working to verify the identities of those commenting and displaying the comments alongside links to the original stories.

One big question is how does Google know whether those commenting are actually who they claim to be. This is going to be far more time consuming and expensive than I think they realize.

Some in the news industry are concerned about the chance that Google could become ombudsman to the world. But one good thing - not only will the sources be allowed to respond, but so will the reporters and editors. Also, I don't see why it's necessarily bad for sources and journalists to mix it up. Mistakes are more rampant in the news than I think many insiders realize - or want to know. Some months back I interviewed someone from an educational institution and, in the process, asked out of curiosity how often reporters got things wrong. What I heard back was, in major stories, only one out of five don't have significant mistakes. Granted, her view of mistakes included mischaracterizing the institution, which would seem a PR matter, but, really, if you can't correctly identify what an entity does, what else in the story is questionable?

The other possibilty here is that this could become a way of annotating stories to give fuller context. Here's the last paragraph from the Wall Street Journal story:

Vic Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, said Google asked him by email to comment on an Associated Press article about a fast-food study in which he'd been quoted. Dr. Strasburger submitted a comment expanding on what he was cited as saying in the article. "I'll do a 15- to 20-minute interview, and two sentences will appear about what I've said," he said in an interview. "So the Google feature is really a chance to flesh out those two sentences and to include some more of what I ordinarily talk about in a 15- to 20-minute interview."

Coudl it be that this is a key ingredient news outlets have been missing in attracting younger readers, who are used to the back and forth debate that happens on the web?