SeanReadsTheNews

Ryan Singel on Gmail: E-mail is Saved

Another interesting post by Wired's Ryan Singel, this time on a new feature in gmail that prioritizes your e-mail based on what you usually read first and respond to.  As Singel notes in his story, that may not seem like much but it does make the process of going through messages much more pleasant.

In the full browser version of Gmail, the priority inbox is on top, followed by the items you have starred, and then finally the rest of your messages in a stream as usual, with most recent on top. While that might sound complicated, after testing it over the weekend, I’d be angry if I had to go back. The new feature went live at midnight ET.

I love it when technology conspires to solve a problem I didn't know I had.  Singel seems to share that sense of excitement, which comes across in the blog.  Most of his best stuff comes out when he is taking apart something stupid - but this time he got to write about something smart and he has fun with that too.

 

Irish Austerity Continues to Stumble: Bloomberg

I've been following reports of the Irish attempts to respond to their burst economic bubble with austerity programs for a while now and today Matthew Lynn of Bloomberg delivers more bad news.  Despite the pain austerity causes, the Irish economy isn't doing any better than governments that continue to spend.

Last week, there was a stark reminder that Ireland is still a long way from market redemption, almost two years after the credit crunch burst the real-estate and asset bubble that had been building up in the country for most of the past decade.

Credit rater Standard & Poor’s lowered its grading on Irish debt by one level to AA-, stressing the heavy cost of rescuing a banking system struggling to cope with the collapse of the property market. S&P estimates the cost of recapitalizing the banks will be about 50 billion euros ($63 billion). That’s almost a third of the economy.

Unlike some columnists covering the story in order to argue against similar spending restrictions elsehwere, Lynn is broadly sympathetic to the Irish, and hostile to the European Union whose membership began with such promise but brought only pain to a small economy that was doing just fine on its own.

Ireland had one of the most successful economies in the world when it joined the euro in 1999. All it has got out of monetary union is massive financial and real-estate bubbles, the collapse of which will scar the country for a generation.

The European Commission and the ECB should be looking hard at the Irish experience. They should suspend the limit on budget deficits for five years until there is some sign of economic growth. There should also be exemptions from paying for the Greek bailout -- it’s crazy for the Irish to borrow money to give to a country that is in the same boat. A tactful exit from the euro should be used as a last resort.

NYT on Environmental Risk - To Reputations

How powerful is public relations?  It's powerful enough that banks are abandoning legal, profitable business during the downturn to avoid taint, reports Tom Zeller, Jr. of The New York Times.

After years of legal entanglements arising from environmental messes and increased scrutiny of banks that finance the dirtiest industries, several large commercial lenders are taking a stand on industry practices that they regard as risky to their reputations and bottom lines.

In the most recent example, the banking giant Wells Fargo noted last month what it called “considerable attention and controversy” surrounding mountaintop removal mining, and said that its involvement with companies engaged in it was “limited and declining.”

The article is a placement for an environmental advocacy group, the Rainforest Action Network, whose PR team did an admirable job of lining up real-world examples of where there activities made a measurable difference in corporate behavior.  The article is overwhelmingly supportive of the group's effectiveness in using the power of PR to change behavior at banks and other lenders.

The one note of skepticism comes from an analyst who wonders how long the list of banned activity can get before it collapses from its own weight.

“It’s one thing if your potential borrower is dumping cyanide in a river,” said Karina Litvack, the head of governance and sustainable investment with F&C Investments, an investment management firm based in London. “But if they’re dumping carbon dioxide into the air, which is not exactly illegal — what do you do? Banks are in kind of a quandary, because they are competing for business, and if they get holier-than-thou and start to play policeman, they risk allowing other banks to take that business.”

WSJ on Custom Book Printing

Dana Mattioli of The Wall Street Journal covers a push by booksellers to print books on demand at the store, a logical extension in a world where you can get any book online for less than it costs to buy it in person.

At some bookstores, customers can now get an out-of-stock book printed, just for them, within minutes—courtesy of fast digital printers.

It's part of a small but growing market for digitally printed books. Even as people embrace Kindles and other gadgets for reading, bookstores are finding a market for titles printed in small custom batches.

Oscar's Art Books in Vancouver says it has sold about 1,500 digitally printed books since it bought a special printer in March. The machine, which cost about $118,000, accesses an online library of titles and then prints, trims and binds paperbacks on demand.

What I see here is a model for other businesses in transition.  Instead of suing your customers or finding artificial ways to complicate their use of digital technology like the record, movie and TV companies have done, here the publishers are using the technology to their advantage to level the playing field with online stores that can deliver an infinite amount of titles - but need a few days to do it.

Mattioli does note in her story that this is rare, and it is hard to see a bookstore breaking even on a six-figure machine to print a $19.95 book - but clearly the prices will drop and there is a major difference between investing in making your customer experience more valuable from investing in ways to trap your customer into traditional purchase patterns.

Associated Press: Shakeup in Progress at USA Today

This Associated Press article by Michael Liedke is probably going to be inside baseballish for those who aren't actually media people but it does point to the continuing struggle that print publications are having turning their web operations in to profit drivers.  USA Today announced a 9% staff reducation along with a new emphasis on the web and restructured its management team.

In the first wave of change, USA Today, which is based in McLean, Va., will no longer have separate managing editors overseeing its News, Sports, Money and Life sections.

The newsroom instead will be broken up into a cluster of "content rings" each headed up by editors who will be appointed later this year.

Liedtke goes through the math, falling circulation figures and advertising revenues along with a plunging stock price for parent Gannett Corporation, and then closes with the information about how their new "content rings" will be organized.  Aside from an increased devotion to sports, not much of it looks that different.

USA Today thinks one of its biggest opportunities is sports, which will become "a business unto itself," Hunke said. The newly created USA Today Sports will be run by Ross Schaufelberger, a former CEO of BNQT Media Group.

The newspapers other content rings will consist of "Your Life," "Travel," "Breaking News," "Investigative," "National," "Washington/Economy," "World," Environment/Science," "Aviation," "Personal Finance," "Autos," "Entertainment" and "Tech."

 

WSJ on High Tech Marketing Tools

Minority Report wasn't exactly a box office phenomenon but it gets cited a lot as visionary by marketing reporters, today including Emily Steel of The Wall Street Journal, who writes about space age technology used to get shoppers to buy - by exploring the testing lab set up by advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group, an organization with which I have passing familiarity.

Marketing companies are experimenting with a new wave of digital technologies to pitch to consumers while they shop: interactive dressing-room mirrors, kiosks with virtual customer-service representatives, and shopping carts and digital scanners that offer personalized discounts.

These futuristic technologies are among the interactive tools on display at Interpublic Group of Cos.' new retail center at the advertising company's Media Lab in Los Angeles.

It's a PR coup when you can turn your own R&D facility into a news story - usually the bar for that sort of thing is to have someone use it successfully in the field.

Giving Steel access to the cool factor was clearly a way to get ahead of the market in suggesting new ideas - and ones where Interpublic could conceivably charge a premium.

And the cool factor is admittedly really cool.

But IPG's retail lab offers a window into what the future could hold. Among the new technologies on display is a device that transforms the front window of a store into a giant touch screen. Instead of looking at a static mannequin, consumers can interact with the screen to select outfits for an avatar. Meanwhile, kiosks allow a customer to chat with a virtual sales associate who can provide advice on such topics as how to install a new flat-screen television.

Another device is a mirror that enables a shopper to scan a dress and then project that clothing onto her body before going to the dressing room. She can also tap the mirror to view different colors, find matching shoes and send the image to her Facebook profile.

I could have sworn I blogged a similar story in The New York Times a while back but when I looked I couldn't find it.  Anyone out there remember?

Reuters: Skilled Trades Rule for College-Aged

I used to represent one of staffing firm Manpower's major competitors.  These companies live and die, at least pr-wise, by doing workplace surveys.  It was the PR equivalent of betting on the Yankees to win the AL East.  Today, Reuters reports on one survey that shows that being a skilled tradesman is now a better way to achieve middle-class status than going to college (and presumably majoring in English, like I did).

Since the 1970s, parents have been told that a university degree—and the entry it affords into the so-called knowledge economy—was the only track to a financially secure profession. But all of the skilled trades offer a career path with an almost assured income, Joerres said, and make it possible to open one's own business. (Also read: $50,000 Jobs Go Begging)

In the United States, recession and persistent high unemployment may lead parents and young people entering the workforce to reconsider their options.

The skilled trades category also includes jobs like bricklayers, cabinet makers, plumbers and butchers, jobs that typically require a specialist's certification.

I worked with my staffing client the same time the recession started, so our monthly jobs data comment was always "be an engineer or a nurse."  I was amazed at how long the media took to get tired of reporting that all the time. Now it looks like "be a plumber or an electrician" is taking over.

WSJ on Monks Building Caskets in Louisiana

As I've mentioned a few times, I've represented some fairly unsympathetic clients in my time.  Plastics manufacturers, HMOs, lawyers, arbitrators, real estate developers -- basically everyone except The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.  So I've been in situations where I've had to communicate news to an audience who didn't want to hear it.

The absolute bare minimum you have to do is at least phrase the bad news in context of why it is necessary for the audience.  "We're sorry you're health premiums had to rise 20% but somebody's got to pay for all those MRIs that are saving lives in your community,"  "Raising late fees on your credit card makes it possible to eliminate annual fees," "Arbitrators reduce costs for all parties by coming to a decision quickly even if they take the jackpot justice verdict off the table," etc.

Which brings us to Jennifer Levitz's story on Louisiana casket makers suing monks who build coffins without a license.

What's the casket manufacturers' excuse for using regulations to keep a low-cost supplier of quality coffins out of the market?

"They're cutting into our profit," says Leonard Dunn, the owner of Serenity Funeral Home, located a short drive from the abbey. He adds. "I don't think the monks are actually making the caskets—I think it's a marketing gimmick."

So the reason the monk's activity is objectionable is that they make life difficult for the competition (the customers will be really sympathetic to that argument) and oh yeah, the monks are liars.

Regardless of how you feel about these kinds of regulations - there is no way to be sympathetic to that argument.

Another quoted spokesperson later in the article tries to suggest the monks don't have the know-how to build a quality coffin - but offers no proof to support the viewpoint.

It never would have been easy for the cartel to come off as sympathetic in a story like this - but these responses they made a bad situation worse, not better.

Revenge of the Publishers: WSJ on Amazon/Wylie Deal

I blogged an interesting article last month about a superstar literary agent taking his clients private and moving all of their e-book sales to self-publishing.  Well, today Jeff Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal reports that Random House's lawyers have stepped in and that the deal is off.

A month after jolting the book industry with a deal to give Amazon.com Inc. exclusive digital access to some of the country's best-known literary works, literary agent Andrew Wylie is largely abandoning the agreement.

The Amazon deal was struck after Mr. Wylie failed to agree to terms with publishers for electronic rights to his authors' existing titles. It was a notable step in the battle between Amazon and its two main rivals in e-books, Apple Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc.

But Bertelsmann AG's Random House, which published 13 of the 20 titles at issue, had disputed Amazon's right to sell the titles in digital form. It boycotted new offerings by all of Mr. Wylie's clients, putting some of the New York agent's famous authors, including V.S. Naipaul and Dave Eggers, at a disadvantage.

It looks like the old world will hold off the new for a while longer - but publishers value-added to already famous authors is diminishing and unless they figure out a new model, someday this is going to break the other way.

Bloomberg's Baum on Bubbles

I have mentioned a couple of times how happy I am that Caroline Baum's columns on the bond market are now so easy to find, being linked on the Washington Post's business section page, and today she makes me happy by writing about why business reporters are so bubble happy.  My best guess was that they didn't want to be accused of missing the next crash, but Baum has an even meaner take on it.

You know market watchers are going through serious withdrawal when they start imagining bubbles everywhere they look.

The latest candidate is the U.S. Treasury market, where prices have soared in recent months. Treasuries now offer yields ranging from 0.15 percent for a three-month bill to 3.7 percent for a 30-year bond. The yield on the benchmark 10-year note has fallen from 4 percent in April to about 2.6 percent today.

The last time I wrote about the Treasuries-are-a-bubble fallacy (October 2009), the 10-year was trading at 3.3 percent. Has the 70-basis-point dive in yields changed my view?

Not in the least. A big rally, in and of itself, doesn’t constitute a bubble. Nor do high prices or low yields, either on an absolute basis or relative to other periods in history.

She goes on from that glove across the face opening to describe the four phases of a bubble as well as what the the state of treasuries would have to be in order for those conditions to be met.  They fail the test and she declines to go with the herd and call bonds a bubble.

Baum writes bond market poetry and her meter is common sense.  We're lucky to have her.