SeanReadsTheNews

Motley Fool: The Last Bubble

My old pals at The Motley Fool are at it again - taking my absolute favorite business hobby horse - reporters who call every appreciating asset class a bubble - and beating it further to death.

Their April 1 story includes all the staples of the genre, an obscure analyst who is trying to make a name for himself with an outlandish call, the rush to the internet, obscure charts you won't read, a branded index that explains the problem, apocalyptic third-party quotes and more!

Also, as someone who reads Zero Hedge every day, this one was perfect:

You'd better take a seat...

A quick Google search confirmed that the VIX is calculated by the Chicago Board Options Exchange, a subsidiary of CBOE Holdings,

And who owns CBOE Holdings? You guessed it: Wall Street.

CBOE's largest shareholders are big names like T. Rowe Price, Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street Global Advisors, Fidelity, and the infamous quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. A member of CBOE's board of directors even held senior management roles at Morgan Stanley for more than three decades!

In short, the so-called "Wall Street fear index" is just that -- a fear index of, by, and for Wall Street.

And Wall Street has billions of dollars in profits at stake. Do you really think they wouldn't hide an impending catastrophe from Main Street? These guys manipulate the VIX numbers for fun and profit every day -- just like LIBOR and the CPI.

Even though they are shamelessly stealing my bit, I love it. Have a great day guys. Love to the familes.

Panic In the Streets? CNNMoney Gets One Right...

This blog frequently mocks business reporters for announcing crisises that have no victims, such as the non-scourge of people's homes being targeted for burglary based on their social media updates.

My rule is that you need at least one or two victims before you can report a problem like that or you're just making stuff up (probably at the behest of a consultant looking to use the media to build a service line).

That long introduction is to an admirably compact article by Steve Hargreaves of CNNMoney.com who reported today on risks to U.S. infrastructure from hacker attacks. He opens with a screen shot of a phishing e-mail sent to employees of a powerplant, which proves the risk is real.

Targeting third parties is something Petersen has experience with himself: His own firm was the subject of a so-called "spear phishing" attempt last year. In that attack, a crafty cyberthief fashioned an email to Digital Bond employees that seemed to come from Petersen himself (see graphic at top). It contained a link that, if clicked on, could have granted the perpetrator access to sensitive client data held by Digital Bond. The plan was only thwarted when an auto-forward function sent Petersen a copy.

The article is pegged to a security firm survey on Chinese attacks on U.S. systems and does engage in some of the usual listing of what "could" happen as a result instead of reporting what actually has - but at least the attacks are verified and we are seeing actual victims step up to discuss the risk, not just the consultants who stand to benefit from waving the resulting article around.

It was also a nice touch by Hargreaves to note that the only successful hacker attack on infrastructure so far was conducted by the U.S. and Israel on Iran, which is comforting on some level.

To be clear, the report from U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant did not say the Chinese government has actively tampered with these systems. The only two counties thought to have actually altered industrial processes in another country are the United States and Israel, which are suspected of infecting an Iranian uranium enrichment plant with malicious software that caused the centrifuges to spin out of control and self-destruct.

TIME on Anti-Valentine's Day Pitch

In general, I resent gimicky, holiday-driven opportunistic pitches because they almost always lead to vapid, content-free journalism.

That said, when they work, they are awesome and such is the case with this TIME story by Brad Tuttle on a couple of retail sites pitching anti-romance on Valentines day.

At the specialty resale sites NeverLikedItAnyway and ExBoyfriendJewelry, sellers are encouraged not only to get rid of gifts from their ex-lovers, but also to explain what went wrong with the relationship. “You MUST share your story,” the rules at ExBoyfriendJewelry stipulate. “We want to keep things fun and cathartic so get it off your chest and tell why you’re selling.”

Clearly, the PR teams behind these sites hit just the right notes in reaching out to Tuttle and finding an angle for the "holiday" that breaks out from the crowd with a useful, and funny, approach.

That's worth a salute on a day when every PR pro lacking imagination is jamming the media channels with same-old, same-old pitches.

Fortune: There is No Try, There is Only Do...

I don't usually blog articles that aren't by journalists but Brad Hoover, CEO Grammarly, had a guest post on Fortune.com this afternoon that was so true - and something I've been guilty of- that I am forced to act.

The article is about why the word "try" is poison to managers and why it should be banished from our vocabulary. 

If you contact a company and request action on an issue, hearing "I'll try" isn't going to alleviate your frustration; as a matter of fact, it's more likely to exacerbate the problem. Likewise, when I hear employees say they will "try to meet a deadline," "try to close a deal," or "try to handle a customer issue," my next question is what we need to do to ensure their success. When asked to complete a task that you do not feel is realistic, it's better to suggest a more feasible goal. Managers appreciate problem solvers and employees who come to the table with solutions rather than problems.

PR people by nature level set, manage expections, add context and many other verbal actions to make it clear to clients that we can't always deliver everything they ask for. That said, being straightforward about the validity and attainability of objectives doesn't mean you have to sound like a weasel.

"Your story is kind of weak but we'll try to get it placed anyway," is a horrible way to set expectations. "Reporters and editors want to see a higher market cap or more specific information about your current revenue and projections before they will take a meeting, what else about your story can we discuss to make you relevant?" is much better.

My personal policy - for better or worse - has always been to provide the straight answer of whether or not a specific strategy will work to achieve an objective and wait to be over-ruled. Key to surviving with this management strategy is always to have a suggestion for what will work to achieve an objective, otherwise you sound lke the guy who just complains all the time.

When you're in that unfortunate situation where someone else is calling the shots and you have to, well, try to do something that doesn't make a lot of sense, the word can slip in. Fight the urge.

NYT: Wal-Mart Announces Drive to Hire Veterans

James Dao of The New York Times reports today that Wal-Mart intends to offer a job to any veteran who wants one for at least two years up to a total of 100,000 positions.

I blog this story not because it's particularly groundbreaking journalism - its certainly well written and all but is basically announcement coverage - but because it shows what you can get away with if you have more money than Croesus.

In a statement, the first lady, Michelle Obama, who has led a campaign by the White House to encourage businesses to hire veterans, called the Wal-Mart plan “historic,” adding that she planned to urge other corporations to follow suit.

Wal-Mart's last coverage of note in The New York Times was a multi-part series about their unforgivable bribery of Mexican officials to grow that basically showed at best willful disregard for American laws against bribing foreign officials as well as utter contempt for Mexico's right to manage its development and growth.

Today, they have feature coverage of a hiring initiative with the blessing of First Lady Obama. The story gives extensive lip service to how much Wal-Mart likes have employees with military experience but it's nakedly a PR coup for a company that really needed one.

Most companies who get caught committing fraud on the level Wal-Mart did are stuck with the consequences. This story is a tremendous example of how you fix problems that can be fixed with money if you are the nation's second largest employer (the biggest is the U.S. Postal Service).

ABC: Cell Phone Locator App Keeps Pointing People to the Same Wrong Address

Susanna Kim of ABC News pens an instant classic today that only goes in the SRTN entertainment file because it didn't happen to me.

In the two years that Dobson has lived in his one-story home with his wife, five people--all missing their Sprint cell phones--have come knocking on his door, demanding that he return their handsets.

If a GPS tracker for your lost cell phone leads you to Dobson's home, you'll find a sign outside his door in North Las Vegas, Nev., that reads, "No lost cell phones!! This location gives a false 'phone locator' position due to a cell tower behind this home. Please contact the North Las Vegas Police and file a report."

The GPS trackers are basically putting this guy's life in danger, also sending cops to his door tracking 911 calls that actually came from somewhere else. Further down, it also reports that he sleeps by the door on the weekends because it's easier to answer the door when drunks start banging on it in the middle of the night.

Normally, we'd dismiss this kind of reporting as artificially creating a trend out of an anecdote but Kim doesn't do that - she just reports it as a crazy thing that happened to this one guy and the article never raises the question of why there isn't a federal commission or a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all people who live near towers against the GPS manufacturer.

Sprint didn't make a spokesperson avaialble on the record (or if they did, he or she didn't say enough to warrent being identified) and the company's leadership could have been a lot more aggressive in responding to the problem and provided more information to readers about its cause. 

People already have enough reasons to hate their cell phone service providers, this seems like a further example of making it too easy.

A Victimless Settlement - Forbes on Mortgage Fraud Payouts

Dan Fisher, Forbes' legal reporter, doesn't break a lot of new ground in his take-down today of the "mortgage fraud" settlement announced yesterday but he does repeat a central fact of the story that can't be repeated often enough:

The outcome shouldn’t come as a surprise. After I wrote a piece critical of the parallel mortgage settlement  with state attorneys general last year,comparing it to the deeply flawed tobacco settlement,  I was barraged with comments from critics accusing me of downplaying foreclosure fraud. I responded with one simple question: Has there been a single case in the past five years of a homeowner who was current on his mortgage being foreclosed through fraud?

The answer was silence, he reports. Banks don't want to own foreclosed properties, they lose money on them. What people getting checks from the banks today are getting is the equivalent of drawing the "bank error in your favor" card in Monopoly - and come to think of it the checks are for about $200.

Sure, the banks broke paperwork rules but at the end of the day, nobody who was actually paying his or her mortgage was harmed. And the people who weren't, well, if you borrow money and you don't pay it back, shouldn't you expect something bad to happen?

 

NYT's Carr: If Old Media Are Dinosaurs, Then New Media Was Wayne Knight in 2012

A long-term interest of this blog has been the transition from old to new media and cord cutting. The first interest is professional as it affects what tactics and activity are most effective at supporting client goals. The second is personal because I hate how much I pay my local cable provider.

David Carr of The New York Times today delivers a typically insightful column on why the dinosaurs of old media are still performing better than their upstart digital competitors.

Why? One word - content.

The worries about insurgent threats from tech-oriented players like Netflix, Amazon and Apple turned out to be overstated. Those digital enterprises were supposed to be trouncing media companies; not only is that not happening, but they are writing checks to buy content. New players have opened windows to sell content without cannibalizing the retransmission and affiliate fees that have turned into a gold mine for media companies.

Carr isn't abandoning his long-term pessimissm about his own business, by the way, he just notes that the Entertainment companies learned in time how to prevent their downfall.

Another thing about those dinosaurs is that they aren’t really old media in the sense of, um, newspapers. When their content is digitized, it is generally monetized, not aggregated. Having learned from what happened in music and print publishing, entertainment companies, built on the still enormous riches of television, have carved their own digital route to consumers. Being big helps, because they can afford to make very large bets, as News Corporation has been recently in securing rights to sports programming all over the globe.

Typical Carr column makes you laugh, think and question conventional wisdom. Best of all, even when you assume you know where he's going you don't. Why aren't more opinion journalists like that?

In a nod to younger readers, I'll link to Wayne Knight's bio here.

Confessions of A Reformed Work-At-Home Grump

David Wessel published a column in The Wall Street Journal reporting that 47% of Aetna's employees work from home.

I have a complicated history with that issue. In the 1990s and 2000s, I was the office grump on that issue. There was nothing I hated more than a snowy day. I would get up at 4:30 a.m. so I could shovel out, change and make the white-knuckle drive to work at 15 mph.

I would then arrive at work on time to a parade of calls from people who reported to me declaring a work-at-home day because of the snow. My questions were "since when does the company owe you an easy drive to work?" and "Why am I now responsible for where you chose to live?"

The company would then make it worse by sending wishy-washy e-mails to the staff saying that while the office was open but they should use their judgment about whether or not to attempt the journey. My argument to HR was that the office should be either open or closed so people like me who sacrificed to be there on time weren't made chumps of by everyone else who decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Flash forward to now. I work at home as often as I can get away with. In fact, our noble CEO makes fun of my proclivity for taking any excuse to not get on the train in the morning (scheduling client meetings mid-afternoon on my side of the Hudson is one of my favorites). I keep scorecards of all the results I generate from the home office to rebut the idea that we are somehow sacrificing client value on the alter of me being able to sleep past 5:30 a.m. and still get in a workout.

Wessel gets at the start of the trend as well as the underlying reality driving it. Work-at-home started as a perk to keep valuable employees and has now become a corporate cost-cutting tool. Win-win!

Sometime in the mid-2000s, though, the insurer began to see working from home as more than a favor to employees. "There was a point where we realized that there was an opportunity to drive down costs, particularly real-estate costs," said Elease Wright, senior vice president for human resources, who works at Aetna's Hartford, Conn., headquarters.

Why has this worked?

The extent to which Aetna's work has moved from office to employee homes reflects a relentless drive by America's big service-sector companies to cut costs, as well the effect that the spread of cheap, reliable and fast communications, particularly the Internet, has on the economy.

When I was on the other side of this argument, we were maybe 75% effective working remotely. Now it's about 90% - very different math. My current employer switched to a Google platform last year and the ability to chat and share documents within our e-mail system probably pushed it to 95%.

We should also note that while many jouranlists like Wessell would like to write columns about working from home, what they needed was a company like Aetna that embraced it in a big way and was willing to talk about it. Aetna's PR team suffers a lot because representing a health plan means most of the media inquiries you get are about sick people denied coverage.

That's why it is important for Aetna to maximize the PR they get from soft features on their HR policies and there are few columnists more visible or influential than Wessel, making this a truly great PR hit as well as personally interesting to me.

NYT's Carr on Quote Checks

David Carr of The New York Times continues to be the most consistently interesting business news columnist covering the media industry - finding ways to make topics that should be inside news-industry baseball broadly interesting, such as today's column on the subject of quote checks.

He writes on how more sources are demanding to see their quotes prior to publication and how more journalists are giving in.  I've seen this a lot recently myself and even though I'm on the PR side, I generally don't like it.  Why?  Carr neatly gets at the truth of the situation in this paragraph.

But something else more modern and insidious is under way. In an effort to get it first, reporters sometimes cut corners, sending questions by e-mail and taking responses the same way. What is lost is the back-and-forth, the follow-up question, the possibility that something unrehearsed will make it into the article. Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth.

But the article isn't just a cranky reporter raging against change he can't control He quotes Reuters' Felix Salmon for the 'it's all PR peoples' fault perspective - but deftly goes beyond that simplistic formulation in his own writing.  He notes why sources are getting more defensive and that people who should know better are on the wrong side - including news organizations whose reporters he wanted to quote in the column or public figures like aspiring U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren.  

The other issue is that reporters do make big mistakes with quotations on a regular basis.  Not many of them work for The New York Times but I've had reporters saved from the career black eye of corrections by quote checks.  I've also had to talk irate clients who were quoted saying the direct opposite of their point off the ledge and get corrections appended to online stories.

Unfortunately, quote checks in that context are like the "easy A" college professor.  It's easy to be the professor, easy to be the student, so nobody complains about the practice - but it does degrade the institution.