Chris Hedges is Wrong – Objectivity Makes Journalism Better, Not Worse

By David M. Bresnahan

Columnist Chris Hedges is wrong. He claims that objectivity and balance in journalism was “formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers,” and goes on to say that such a practice “disarms and cripples the press.”

Hedges is a frustrated journalist. His distinguished career, I hope, is far from over. He has received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer. I respect his work, but I disagree with his assessment. » read more

PR Tips: Getting Attention in Local, Traditional Media

By David M. Bresnahan

When it comes to getting press coverage in the traditional, local media outlets it is absolutely critical that your PR strategy must include a way to get past the gatekeeper. Even if you go around the gatekeeper by going directly to a reporter, that reporter cannot do a story about you without permission from the gatekeeper.

Get to know who the gatekeeper is at the target media. It may be an editor, assignment editor, or even the publisher. If you are going after the local radio and television outlets you will need to find out who is the producer and news director. Talk shows have both a host and producer who need to be impressed by whatever you are trying to publicize.

Many small business owners decide to write their own news release and just send it to the reporters themselves, but very few home-made releases get any results.

However, if you want to try, here is a list of the things that turn reporters off… » read more

Online Publicity Using Press Releases

Press releases can be optimized and used to strategically obtain significant online publicity and targeted traffic to a web site, if they are crated correctly and distributed to the right people and publications.

Search Engines

All the search engines, including Google and Yahoo, rank web pages in various ways to determine which ones score higher than others. In general, current news is ranked higher than web sites, but news gets old and those rankings drop quickly.

Search engines give the highest ranking to government sites, followed by news articles, then commercial web sites, blogs, and personal web sites. This means that a site that is not getting good results can benefit from press releases and news articles because the search engines will rank the news higher, and a link in the news story to the desired site brings the traffic to that site.

When you send out a press release that is optimized with the right key words and key word phrases, it will be published on thousands of news publication sites through syndication. Google and other search engines will see these news stories and rank them highly for the given keywords and phrases. If the resulting news story also contains a hot link to your web site, the search engines will follow that link and give a higher ranking to the web site as well. » read more

The Evolution of Journalism

By David M. Bresnahan

Journalism has always been an evolving craft, and those who pursue it have always evolved as their media for expression has changed, until now. The old crumudgeons out there have been slow to recognize that the world moved on without them, but many in the world of journalism have only been slow to respond. Change is inevitable, but it is underway.

Unfortunately some very fine papers have put a large number of excellent journalists out on the street, and some have even closed their doors for good. Fortunately other papers are starting to figure out the “new” media and are in the process of getting on board.

Ancient writings on cave walls, hieroglyphics on Egyptian burial chamber walls, ancient Dead Sea Scrolls were all a form of the ever-changing world of journalism and communication. Perhaps the biggest evolution came with the advent of moveable type, bringing about books and printed newspapers and enabling large populations to read as well as write. » read more

Lack of Educated Readers Kills Journalism

By David M. Bresnahan

We have no one to blame for the demise of “traditional” journalism other than ourselves.  (I think Pogo would agree.) Educated readers can save journalism and prevent it from inevitable collapse, but as the number of educated readers continues to decline it seems that journalism will not survive.

There really is no difference between print, broadcast, or online journalism in terms of what it is supposed to be. Journalism through any media outlet is the reporting of facts to the public. Journalists are the eyes and ears of the public who cannot attend every event, every political meeting, every incident, or research every topic of interest.

Journalists exist to keep the public informed, and their job remains the same regardless of the method of news delivery.

However, journalists cannot convey information to an audience that is insufficiently educated to understand the news, nor can they inform a public that is so poorly educated that they cannot even read the news. Too many people just do not understand the world around them and consequently make the statement that they do not read or watch the news because it is boring, or that they just do not care. » read more