I’ve decided that it’s dumb to just let 21st Century Media Relations wither while I write a blog over on BNET.com. On the other hand, my deal with them is that I’ll mostly blog over there instead of here. So what to do? How about a weekly digest of what I’m talking about over on BNET?

Here’s a summary of last week’s posts:

• Can You Put Limits on Social Media Coverage: The NCAA recently issued rigid and arguably laughable guidelines about exactly how much ‘credentialed’ media could blog from an NCAA game. I explored the subject of whether it is possible or even wise to place such limits.
• Deloitte & Touche’s annual “State of the Media Democracy” report: I blogged about it.
• Who and What to Watch in 2008: A review of PRWeek’s predictions of who the movers and shakers will be in PR in 2008.
• Crisis Expert’s Secrets of Success: A look at uber-crisis-expert Sam Singer’s methods, prompted by a front page story about him in the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s the PR man for the San Francisco Zoo in the tiger attack case.

I’m happy to report that I’m movin’ uptown — that is, over to CNET’s business-oriented web site, BNET.com. BNET.com is a news-you-can-use site for business people, and they’ve already got a million register users.

I’m the new blogger for their PR-oriented blog, Catching Flack. I’ll be doing the vast majority of my blogging over there.

I will keep this blog alive for now, but won’t post here very often. So if you want to keep up with my thoughts and strategies on 21st century PR and media relations, please check me out over at Catching Flack.

Poor Bancroft family (that would be poor in the pitiful sense, not in the monetary sense). Seems they couldn’t agree on who to nominate to the News Corp. board as part of their sale of Dow Jones (they were too tired to make a good decision, apparently), so they let their contractual right expire and turned over the decision to Rupert. He picked  27-year-old Natalie Bancroft, a would-be opera singer and race car enthusiast (read “rich party girl”) who lives in Europe and couldn’t be bothered to attend any of the family’s sale deliberations in person. Unbelievable.

I feel sorry for the career journalists at the Journal and other Dow Jones properties.

Good helpful piece on PR for start-ups (and most everyone else) here at BlueBlog.

Great piece this morning on CNN.com/Fortune about the current state of the newspaper industry. Despite all the bad headlines, reports Richard Siklos, newspapers are still generating $60 billion in sales and still generating “decent profits.” Yes, public stock investors are unhappy with the performance of newspaper stock prices, but that’s another issue. And for sure, the major mainstream newspaper industry has done a terrible job adapting to the changing media landscape.

But Siklos’ point, and one that I’ve made here many a time, is that newspapers are still a major medium that is going to evolve, not dry up and blow away. Savvy PR pros simply can’t afford to either ignore or dismiss newspapers in favor of online communications.

Siklos mentions a few counter-trends that support the evolution-not-extinction theory, including the rise of themed special-interest magazines like the New York Times’ “T” style mag. I would add a few other things I see:

• Healthy newspapers in fast-growing markets such as Las Vegas
• Tons of classified shoppers and other free media, such as hyper-local tabs
• Newspapers slowly adding social media features to their sites (example: the Springsteen section of NJ.com, an aggregate site for 14 New Jersey newspapers)

Bonus for PR pros: all of these are pitchable. They may be different journalists but they are still working journalists. So as they evolve, we need to as well.

This blog is called “21st Century Media Relations” — that is, how to do PR and media relations in the fast-changing Internet-enabled environment of the 21st century. Here’s an example of 20th Century media relations, or maybe 19th century if they did PR back then:

From the TV column on the web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (via Romenesko). The first chunk is an email they received from ABC’s PR department. The second is their commentary.

INDECENT PROPOSAL OF THE WEEK

ABC is broadcasting “The 41st Annual CMA Awards” Nov. 7 live from the Sommet Center in Nashville and we have some extra tickets we’d love to give away to your readers! We can offer 2-4 tickets at great viewing seating, retail value $350. It’d be great for a posting on your publication or online Web site. Requirement: a feature about the CMA Awards that mentions the giveaway and tune in to the “The 41st Annual CMA Awards” on ABC Nov. 7 (8-11 p.m.). …

– ABC Media Relations

Rob: My editor and I both received this blatant attempt at quid pro quo product placement. Needless to say, we did not respond, but, boy, the TV folks will do anything for some ink.

If you see these particular free tickets offered elsewhere, it’s not wrong to wonder what the publication had to do to get them.

Great story in yesterday’s WSJ about the subprime mess — in classic Journal fashion, they looked at the intertwined relationships of players in the mortgage business, tracing the story from the misfortunes of a single homeowner up to giant multinational financial institutions that invested in mortgage-backed securities, including securities whose returns were dependent on the homeowner continuing to pay his mortgage. If you’re at all interested in understanding the subprime situation, I recommend it.

Buried about 75% of the way into the story, though, was a media relations “teachable moment.”

The story was about the tribulations of “Colorado truck driver Roger Rodriguez,” who over-mortgaged his home in Westminster, CO. After he took out his mortgage, it was packaged into a security and sold to investors, including James C. Kelsoe Jr., a senior portfolio manager at the asset-management unit of Morgan Keegan & Co., a Memphis, Tenn., investment firm and unit of Regions Financial Corp.

When the mortgage market was riding high, so was Kelsoe’s fund. But after the crash, his returns suffered, as Rodriguez and others started defaulting on their loans. “At the end of August,” the Journal wrote, “Mr. Kelsoe’s Select High Income Fund posted a loss of nearly 28% for the month — dead last among its peers for the year and for five years as well, according to Morningstar.”

Naturally, the Journal sought comment from Kelsoe. Here’s what they got:

A Morgan Keegan spokeswoman said Mr. Kelsoe wasn’t available to comment because he was focused on managing his funds.

Every moment of the day? 24/7? Of course not. This was just a way to duck the interview, to say “no comment” without saying “no comment.” In my trainings, that’s exactly the strategy I recommend, with one additional element: your dodge needs to be plausible. As in, “Sorry, I can’t help you, that information is confidential.” That wouldn’t have worked in this case, and in fact, I’m not sure there’s any plausible dodge in this situation. So the best strategy would have been to simply say, “Sorry, Mr. Kelsoe’s not available for an interview,” and hold your ground with that.

When you use an implausible dodge like the one above, the journalist will usually find a way to embarrass you. And they did a few grafs later:

In a letter to a Memphis newspaper, Charles Reaves, an attorney who had invested in one of Mr. Kelsoe’s funds, wrote that Mr. Kelsoe was “hiding under his desk” and “should have the fortitude to face the public and explain…what he intends to do.”

Bottom line: don’t hide, and don’t use implausible dodges. But if you don’t want to talk, just say so and hold your ground. That’s your right.

Comcast hasn’t added Fox Business to my line-up yet, so I can’t really give you a first-hand take on the goings on. Needless to say, the global point for business news PR people is that a huge new mainstream media outlet just opened shop, which is very good news in the era of widespread newsroom cutbacks.

Some basic tips in this situation:

1. The paint is still drying at FBN, which means it’s a really good time to pitch them and get to know them. No matter how long they’ve been in the business, they are all anxious to get off to a good start at their new home and eager to make new friends for themselves and the network. But remember, people: smart pitches. Smart pitches. Not dumb pitches.
2.  It’s crazy over there at FBN. Going from pre-launch to running a 24-hour always-on news operation is almost unimaginably hard. So if you want to be helpful and establish a good name for yourself, get to the point, get to it fast, and get out of the way.

I could spend a lot of time compiling the mountains of stories that have already been written about FBN, but lucky for me and you, I don’t have to. You can just head over to Talking Biz News and read up on FBN to your heart’s content.

Raging debate over at and around Silicon Valley Watcher, a blog run by former Financial Times writer Tom Foremski. Tom contends that PR is a dying industry, headed down the same rat hole as the dead-tree media business.

A sampling from Tom:

I’ve long warned the PR industry that it is on borrowed time. The media industry is undergoing traumatic changes yet PR is thriving. Media and PR industry fortunes have always followed each other in lock step.

PR today reminds me of the Roadrunner cartoons. The times when Wily E. Coyote is chasing the Road Runner and notices he is running on thin air, at which point he plummets thousands of feet to a distant canyon floor. That’s how I envisage the PR industry today–about to plummet from a great height.

To summarize, Tom seems to think that because old media models are crumbling and evolving, and because business can be done on the Internet without paying PR people, that PR is dying. He later amended this to say that in-house PR people are still useful, but PR agencies are breathing their last breath.

I don’t know where to start picking this one apart.

First, I have to say I detect a strong whiff of I-hate-stupid-PR-people-itis, in which the afflicted wishes the entire sorry industry would just go away and stop bothering them. I had this condition when I was a journalist and I know it’s real. I understand where it’s coming from: the actions of clueless and poorly trained PR people who don’t know how to do effective media relations. It would be nice if the industry could get a giant dose of professionalism and training, but that’s not likely to happen any time soon (but if anyone reading this wants to make a start in that direction, click the link above titled “21st Century Spokesperson Training.” Seriously.)

Second, the media isn’t drying up and blowing away. It’s just changing. And of course, duh, PR is trying to change along with it. And of course, some will be more successful than others, and some old-line PR agencies and practitioners will fade away while strong new competitors take their place.

Tom and his correspondents also go on to argue about whether PR agencies “get” social media and its overwhelming importance. Here’s a news flash: social media still represents a microscopic part of the communications landscape. As I’ve said again and again, I’ve yet to meet a PR person who would rather have a hit on a blog post than a story in the New York Times. And that goes double for clients and companies. There’s still TONS of work out there doing media relations with professional journalists. When J-schools stop cranking out journalists, and the last printing press falls silent and the last cable news show flickers off, THEN maybe we can start talking about the end of PR. Maybe. I’d actually bet that by then, PR will have made a successful transition to working with whoever the key influencers are.

As the social media types like to say, PR is platform-neutral.

There’s a story in the new issue of the Washingtonian about the idiosyncrasies of some top DC-based journalists. This is must-reading for DC media pitchers. File it away, pull out when you next pitch these folks, use it to build rapport. It can’t hurt.