Mark Twain famously said, “I never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” Now that the internet has ended the correlation between barrels of ink and reach of audience, companies are more inclined to “quarrel” with the media. In the old days, if a company took issue with a critical article, it …more
Communications debacle after debacle have riddled the Trump administration, the latest involving the firing of FBI Director James Comey. TIME Magazine called the Comey firing “a gross miscalculation, like reaching for the gasoline can in order to extinguish a grease fire.” Naturally, Trump’s knee-jerk reaction was to throw press secretary Sean Spicer under the bus. …more
The United States houses roughly 5 percent of the world’s population. It stands to reason that many ideas for recasting technology to improve our daily lives and business operations will come from those born outside the U.S. That’s why the hoopla around President Trump’s immigration policy is so threatening to Silicon Valley. I’m surprised his …more
It’s only a matter of time. Once President Trump tires of telling us how many jobs he’s kept in America and discovers the difficulty in building a wall that stretches 1,000 miles, he’s going to take shots at China. Past behavior suggests that these shots will come in a different forms. He will claim that …more
The Columbia Journalism Review published an open letter to President Trump earlier this week before the official inauguration which of course takes place later today.We already know what Trump thinks of journalists. Let’s put it this way. His campaign rhetoric never included the slogan, “Make journalism great again.” And we now know what journalists think …more
Today’s celebration of Martin Luther King has me thinking about persuasive language, specifically his “I Have a Dream” speech (video below) and President’s farewell address last week. Let’s step back for a moment and consider the meaning of “persuasive language.” This doesn’t mean winning over 100 percent of the target audience. There will be …more
That’s the point from last week’s Wall Street Journal column, “The Way Trump Talks,” by Daniel Henninger. Henninger believes that language, specifically conversational language, could turn the election in Trump’s favor and that people have responded to Trump’s blunt language to the point of being oblivious to the content. “Many people today think food isn’t …more
I don’t think Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, is going to be happy. Rieder penned a viewpoint piece for USA Today last year that spanked the Obama administration for bypassing the media for its own channels of communications: “The Obama administration is deep-freezing the news media because it can. It’s nothing new …more
The White House has gone all in with owned media, recently adding Tumblr to its arsenal of 17 social media properties. It’s only a matter of time before Team Obama starts poaching talent from BuzzFeed. By studying the trajectory of the White House’s investment in owned media, we can predict what such a property would …more
