Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal included an article that caught my attention.

Titled “New Google Hire Takes Aim at Apple,” the piece - can’t bring myself to call it a story - recounts how a Google employee ( Tim Bray) recently poached from Sun used his personal blog to say nasty things about Apple’s mobile phone strategy.

“It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers,” Mr. Bray wrote on his personal Web site. “I hate it.”

Can you imagine?

A company criticizing a competitor.

Perhaps with Madoff fading into the background, The Journal has a surplus of investigative bandwidth.

Let’s put it this way, John Letzing’s digging wasn’t exactly Woodward and Bernstein.

Because a proper investigation would have showed that on December 3, 2007 the said Tim Bray wrote a post on his blog called “Hate Apple Day.”

That’s right.

His hate for Apple has nothing to do with joining the Google gang. The emotional torment has been going on for some time.

But it gets better.

It turns out Mr. Bray hates other things as shared on February 9, 2007:

I so hate Aeroplan, Air Canada’s frequent-flyer program. I have many hundreds of thousands of points, but in recent years it became increasingly impossible to use them.

I could go on, but I don’t want to show up Mr. Letzing.

Maybe there’s now a beat at The Journal called raking blogs.

After all, Mr. Letizing wrote an article last week that started:

The former chief executive of Sun Microsystems Inc. wrote on his personal blog Tuesday that Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs once threatened to sue the company in 2003.

When we last addressed Mr. Jobs he was taking a pass on Macworld.

More recently, unless you’ve spent the last week in the proverbial cave, you’ve seen the cavalcade of stories on Steve Jobs taking a leave of absence from Apple.

The common denominator in the stories revolves around understanding his replacement, Tim Cook.

It’s revealing to contrast a blog posting from The Wall Street Journal by Nick Wingfield with a story in the San Jose Mercury News penned by Brandon Bailey ”Iron Reporter”-style (further proof that I’m spending way too much time on the Food Network).

Let’s start with the headlines.

“When Steve Jobs Met Tim Cook” (Journal) versus “Tim Cook – Jobs’ temporary replacement at Apple – seen as strong manger” (Merc).

No contest.

The Journal story promises to put me in the room for the first Jobs-Cook interaction, with instant drama coming from the question “what happened?”  

Was it “like” at first sight?  

Did Cook wear a “Vote for Ike” button as an icebreaker?  

On the other hand, the Merc header indicates that we’re likely going to read a rehash of what’s already known by even pedestrian Apple watchers. 

And that’s about how it plays out. 

Wingfield deserves credit for tracking down the recruiter at Heidrick & Struggles who served as the matchmaker back in 1998. (The fact that the recruiter no longer works for Heidrick tells me that Heidrick PR did not pitch the story angle.) While the walk down memory lane won’t evoke foreshadowing like F. Scott Fitzgerald, at least it’s different from the thousands of Cook-knows-how-to-make-the-trains-run-on-time stories. The anecdote that Steve isn’t big on collecting barber chairs adds some levity. 

The Merc story kicks off with the premise that Cook is the right man for the short-term gig, supported by “scintillating” quotes from two sources: 

“He’s the guy that makes sure everything gets executed properly. He’s excellent at getting things done.” (Tim Bajarin from Creative Strategies) 

The 48-year-old Cook is “not a product innovator. But he runs a very tight ship.” (Brian Marshall from Broadpoint AmTech) 

Needless to say, we won’t be adding these quotes to our art of storytelling curriculum … which isn’t to diss the two sources. We know Bajarin, who is absolutely clued into Apple and often communicates with a compelling bent. But what shows up in this particular article from the sources interviewed doesn’t make for an enlightening read. 

It turns out that the best color in the Merc piece gets borrowed from Fortune’s profile on Cook last year: 

A recent article in Fortune magazine described a management meeting in which Cook was discussing a problem with Apple’s Asian operations. “This is really a problem,” Cook reportedly said. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes later, Cook turned to a subordinate and calmly inquired: “Why are you still here?” The man immediately left the meeting, the magazine said; he drove straight to the airport and flew to China without a change of clothes.

Even with the limitations of a 24-hour news cycle, you would think the paper in Apple’s backyard could do a little better on the original reporting front (although finding a tidbit in the Cook family’s hometown paper, the Robertsdale Independent was a nice touch).

I do recognize that both the Journal and the Merc have published multiple stories on this topic. It’s plausible that with a little more initiative on my part, I could have found a dull Journal piece and a Merc story with panache. 

It’s also not lost on me that the blog as a medium for reporting offers the latitude to capture vignettes that otherwise wouldn’t be substantial enough to make the printed page. 

Still, I think this exercise sheds light on how to create – or suffocate – drama in business communications.

I’ve been thinking about the headline of the Scoble post I addressed last week: “What do the freaking tech bloggers want?”

Specifically, does the periodic cuss word (or derivative) enhance storytelling or at the very least command attention?

I think the power of a cuss word can come from the element of surprise. If Martha Stewart drops an f-bomb while she’s baking brownies that’s going to grab your attention.

But the words “freakin” and “freaking” tend to be so overused today that they’ve lost their ability to jar. Rather than depend on gut feel, I turned to the wonders of the Factiva database to chart usage over the past five years.

You can see the two words have been gaining traction to the point that we’re projecting - I know the polls haven’t closed but go with me on this one - 7,122 articles will carry them in 2008. For context, Steve Jobs, who can hold his own with the likes of Britney Spears when it comes to media captivation, won’t show up in as many articles this year at the current pace.

Furthermore, I think it’s fair to say the words enjoy even greater use in the blogosphere. I couldn’t figure out how to search postings employing “freakin” or “freaking” by year, but a quick IceRocket search resulted in 122,923 hits.

Talk about overexposure.

Then again, with the right context the repetition of a cuss word can become a story in itself. For Exhibit A, look at Lee Elia’s meltdown back in 1983 when he was the manager of the Chicago Cubs. His profanity-laced tirade after the Cubs lost another game lives on in infamy thanks to the Internet.

Why?

It was so over the top for a public figure to spew expletive after expletive.

And yes, like all good stories it rang with authenticity.

Robert Scoble, the poster child for escaping corporate cubedom for the virtual pulpit, penned a post titled “What do the freaking tech bloggers want?”

It’s a convincing view.

A bit longwinded perhaps, but if “Scobleizer” is etched in your masthead, you get a pass to periodically pontificate.

An earlier Scoble quasi-rant emphasized that through customers, not the PR function, is the best way to share the latest cool thing with the rest of the world. This predictably led to praise and lambasts across the blogosphere, which caused Scoble to revisit the topic. The following line captures the gist of his latest take:

“Bloggers are being commoditized.”

He goes on to say:

“If we just go to press conferences, or only deal with embargoed news, and report on the same news everyone else is reporting on, well, then, just what reason is there for our business to exist? How will we build an audience that’s any different, than, say, TechCrunch or Fortune’s or ZDNet’s efforts? How will we justify to our sponsors that they should sponsor us as we are doing the same thing as everyone else? Especially if we have a smaller audience? Yeah, advertisers really love getting THOSE kinds of sales pitches. Imagine walking into a big company and putting up a Powerpoint that says ‘we’re the same as Techcrunch, but smaller.’ What’s the chances you’ll walk out with a sponsorship?”

Hard to disagree.

In short, great blogging depends on information not in the public domain.

This is a tough one for smokestack PR which revolves around public-domain content, a one-to-many model also known by that scientific term “mass blast.” The news release is the best example of information earmarked for the public domain.

I’m not saying the news release doesn’t have a place in outbound communications. For a range of reasons, not the least being public disclosure, the news release can be the right tool for the job.

But public-domain information doesn’t work for bloggers.

Back to Scoble’s point about being commoditized, bloggers need fresh stories, unique access and turf to navigate on their own; otherwise, how do they differentiate their offerings?

Which poses a problem for smokestack PR.

Storytelling takes time. 

And it’s not a one-to-many approach in the blogosphere. Instead, it’s about pulling together the right content and sources for a single blogger.

The ROI can’t be predicated on quantity (multiple bloggers).

The ROI comes from forming a genuine relationship with the blogger and one-off stories with the potential of being flung to the far reaches of the Net via the viral effect.

Scoble wrapped up his dissertation on what bloggers want from PR with an anecdote about powwows put on by Microsoft and EA:

“… That was really great because there wasn’t any pressure to report on anything, just a chance to get to know you, your team, and see some of the things you are working on. Same thing at EA last week. By providing experiences where we can get our hands on your products, meet your team, etc, we’ll discover new story ideas together. I found a few at EA that I would never have known about if they didn’t have an event where we could hang out for a day.”

We’ll discover new story ideas together. What a concept. 

One last point -

Tom Foremski from Silicon Valley Watcher spoke to our company about his transition from Financial Times journalist to independent blogger during one of our lunch-bucket sessions. When he opened the floor to questions, I asked about the volume of traffic on his blog.

Wrong question.

He didn’t exactly call me stupid, but with overstated calm explained that a blog’s audience should be measured by the quality of its readers. If 15,000 people with juice read his blog, that reflects a certain value in the content and justifies companies such as Intel ponying up sponsorship fees.

The blogosphere is a different world from traditional media.

As long as smokestack PR exists, we’re going to see the periodic dustups from Scoble and his brethren.