The media has questions for Tesla. After eliminating its PR department last year, Tesla doesn’t appear to have answers. The Los Angeles Times story “Tesla’s Handling of Breaking Bug in Public Self-Driving Test Raises Alarms” reflects the latest missives aimed at the auto maker: Tesla pushed out a new version of the experimental software suite …more
What a weird year. Being the mug-is-half-full type, I believe 2021 will (eventually) bring us some semblance of normalcy. As for the past year, I could have devoted every post to the antics from the White House. Exercising restraint that would have made my mom proud, I found plenty of other topics to parachute into. …more
After touching on this question in my newsletter, I decided the topic deserves a deeper dive. First, some stage setting. Electrek broke the news on Oct. 6 that Tesla eliminated its internal PR team: “If you’re a reporter who isn’t getting a response from Tesla, don’t take it personally, because it’s due to the automaker …more
Correcting a statistic in a media story is easy. If a company reduces its workforce by 100, but the journalist accidentally added a zero so the number reads 1,000, you reach out to the publication and they run a correction. Unfortunately, inaccuracies in media stories are often not so black and white. Context, nuance, history, …more
The news release was born on Oct. 28, 1906. Fast forwarding to 2015, organizations distributed roughly 762,000 news releases on wire services. Our back-of-the-envelope math figures 30 hours went into each news release at $200 per hour. The punch line — Organizations spent around $4.5B on the creation of news release back in 2015, a …more
Elon Musk kicked up a Twitter storm last week, essentially saying (among other things) that the media unfairly picks on Tesla because Tesla doesn’t advertise. He went on to infer that the makers of gas guzzlers and fossil fuel companies get more favorable media attention because they pump millions of advertising dollars into the media’s …more
