SeanReadsTheNews

PR Man's Wiretaps Roil Indian Business: FT

This FT story by Amy Kazmin and James Fontanella-Khan isn't actually groundbreaking journalism but it does fit into one of this blog's themes, the degree to which the practice of PR is becoming news and in this case, scandal, as a PR person connected to the highest levels of Indian business has his personal phone calls exposed.

The court petition comes as Mr Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, has warned India is on the path to becoming a “banana republic,” after government investigators’ recordings of 104 phone calls by Niira Radia, founder of Vaishnavi Communications, to various Indian power brokers – including Mr Tata – were leaked to the media.

Fellow PR pros - did you write anything today you wouldn't want outsiders to see?  Saying anything about a difficult client behind his or her back in a voicemail?

We're past the point of pretending that kind of stuff won't get out and past the point where no one would care anyway.

 

 

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Ratan Tata, India’s top corporate executive, has asked the Supreme Court to bar publication of intercepted telephone conversations with a powerful corporate lobbyist under investigation by Indian anti-corruption watchdogs.

The court petition comes as Mr Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, has warned India is on the path to becoming a “banana republic,” after government investigators’ recordings of 104 phone calls by Niira Radia, founder of Vaishnavi Communications, to various Indian power brokers – including Mr Tata – were leaked to the media.

 

BW on The Copper Theft Wave

Ben Paynter's BusinessWeek cover opus on a world-wide copper theft explosion went up while I was on holiday break but since I didn't see anything overwhelming elsewhere today, I'm throwing it in.  it's a great sprawling story that covers commodities, construction, threats to U.S. infrastructure, criminal gangs, police work, the laws of supply and demand and how you launder stolen tubing.

Think it's kind of a minor story to devote this much attention to?  Think again.

Dallas, like many cities, was being rocked by copper theft. That might not sound as threatening as bank heists or murder sprees, yet the scope and frequency of the crime threatened to disrupt a far more important target—the wiring and plumbing that makes up the central nervous system of the city itself. And Dallas was, and is, not alone. Thanks to a boom in the copper market, city services around the country are being hit, leaving law enforcement agencies nationwide scrambling to understand the scope of the problem and to confront it.

It's compelling reading of the sort BusinessWeek does really well.  The reporters find the context that make this story cover a wide range of modern life and its underpinnings, neatly tying the business story to a wider theme of how we live now.

 

Forbes on Dropout Poker Champ

My subheading of unemployment porn -- or reporting on unrealistic career paths as a solution to our unemployment problem - doesn't get much of a workout.  When I launched it I was expecting more entries.  Every now and then, I do spot one and that was the case yesterday when Nathan Vardi of Forbes reporting on a dropout poker champion.

For Jonathan Duhamel, the road to riches meant dropping out of a finance degree program at the University of Quebec in Montreal to concentrate on playing poker. The move paid off recently when, at the age of 23, Duhamel won the World Series of Poker’s main event and the $8.9 million prize that went with it.

Ok, dropping out of business school isn't the same thing as dropping out of high school, and Forbes was using his story as an excuse to write about finance and poker, not giving unemployment advice but it still glamorizes professional gambling.  Which, come to think of it, also makes this a Signature Story for Forbes.

I have a friend who is a competitive poker player who told me that since the hold-em craze of the 1990s "the dead money isn't dead any more" -- that the folks the pros used to take down with ease have gotten so sharp from online practice that they are actually competitive, which has upended the traditionally small field of champions.

The article also indulges in what I might call private equity porn - his parents made $90,000 by staking him part of the tournaments $10,000 entrance fee.

Duhamel’s parents have now accepted his decision. So have his friends. One of them, who is studying to become a high school teacher, pulled off  a great trade by contributing $100 to Duhamel’s $10,000 entrance fee for the World Series of Poker. Duhamel recently paid his buddy his cut of the winnings: $90,000. PokerStars, the world’s biggest online poker site, also made a good bet by sponsoring Duhamel on the eve of the World Series of Poker.

It's a fun story with multiple messages, perfect for Forbes.com's high class link troll model.

David Carr Reads the News

This blog makes no secret of its admiration for David Carr's New York Times media column, which by all rights should be a pedantic thumb-sucking slog through self-reference but is instead consistently witty and thought-provoking.

And after two weeks of watching my fellow libertarians flail away at the TSA airport security flap (FYI - we were right all along, again, and we don't seem to be getting tired of saying so), Carr's more balanced view in yesterday's New York Times was a welcome change.  

The set-up makes it sound like's he's about to attack public and media hysteria.

By midday Wednesday, a forlorn CNN correspondent was wandering around during a live shot with nothing to report, with a nearby keening baby the only indication of terminal rage. No word on whether the diaper was breached.

The pat-down story was the equivalent of vaporware — it seemed as if something huge was about to happen, but it turned out that it was a story about a story, the noisy, fervent sound of a news system feeding on itself.

What made the T.S.A. story so sticky and irresistible, a nearly perfect Perfect Storm?

Where he goes instead, is to list why the story actually was important, separate bombast from fact and actually give everyone involved credit for reporting on the story.  Didn't see that coming?  Neither did I.

I could go on, but you get the idea. A mainstream media that has been run over in the past — the rise of the Tea Party comes to mind — has begun to understand that the Web is a great place to listen as well as publish.

“NewsHour” on PBS was among the throngs, with an embeddable widget that let people post to Twitter their experiences in the security lines — so the mainstream media are now on a hair trigger, reacting, and sometimes overreacting, to social media and Web-borne protests.

Another great column on a story that nearly every other outlet did wrong.  

Off For the Holidays

Sean will not be reading the news until Monday November 29 at the earliest.

Please read the Friday Wall Street Journal as it needs the love.

Bloomberg: States Pull Back on Welfare for Movie Studios

I've reported here and there on attempts by non-traditional sites to turn themselves into entertainment meccas by lavishing tax breaks on production companies -- Detroit/Michigan is usually there somewhere.

Tom Moroney of Bloomberg News checks in on the trend today and notes that the gravy train is finally slowing down.

Incentives for Hollywood have been scaled back in Wisconsin, capped in Rhode Island, suspended in New Jersey, Iowa and Kansas and scheduled to expire in Arizona. While states continue to expand and introduce subsidies, programs around the country face allegations of corruption, doubts about job-creating power and, most of all, questions about affordability.

“We are starting to stem the tide of state government pandering to the film industry,” said Bill Ahern, policy director for the Washington-based Tax Foundation, which advocates lower taxes.

The Tax Foundation's leaders were last seen campaigning for more-friendly business climates at the state level but here is arguing that this particular business is getting way too much friendship.

Bloomberg goes national with the story, looking at all the states with major subsidy programs and analyzing the often-dubious claims about their economic multiplier effects.

The bar is usually fairly high even for ostensibly non-partisan advocacy groups like the Senate Fiscal Agency to get business coverage for their initiatives - so their economists need to be armed with a lot of data and examples so that their story goes beyond just complaining and reaches the level of trend.

In 2009, Michigan’s inducements created just 355 full-time job, defined as those lasting at least 250 days, according to a September report by the nonpartisan Senate Fiscal Agency. In the two-plus years of the program’s existence, the return in tax revenues has been a little more than 10 cents on a dollar spent, according to the report’s author, economist David Zin.

Moroney does an excellent job of covering a complex web of state-by-state subsidies and painting a picture of a sexy business that uses its celebrity factor to grab favors not open to, say, PR firms as they choose where to locate.

 

Another Silly Survey Scores Major Coverage

Jessica Dickler of CNNMoney has a hard-hitting story today on how many people check their e-mails over Thanksgiving.  You can't really blame individual reporters for these kinds of stories - I get the feeling some shadowy editor somewhere says "get me something about Thanksgiving that will drive clicks," and you do what you can to get out of the office in time to go shopping.

That said, there is no place in the universe that a survey from Xobni on how many people check e-mail over the holidays is news.

The majority, or 59%, of working Americans check their work e-mails during Thanksgiving, Christmas and other traditional holidays, according to a survey by Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards), a Silicon Valley startup that organizes Microsoft Outlook inboxes and address books.

We could use some dignity here.

Forbes Notices Health Insurance Bonus in Obamacare Bill

David Whelan on Forbes.com reports the obvious: Obamacare is the best thing that could ever happen to health insurance companies.  Despite industry complaints about new rules that cap their medical loss ratios (i.e. what they get to keep after delivering care) at 15%, well, they are also 100% assured of a vast new market.

Health reform includes a mandate that every single person buy health insurance either with their own money or if they’re lower income, via subsidies. And there’s no Medicare-like public option for younger people. (Medicare of course has a MLR in the 97% range.)

So that means we will soon be forced, by the government, to buy insurance from one of the major private HMOs. That insurance will be highly standardized and sold over a government exchange. And a big chunk of it–15% to 20%–won’t go to doctors or hospitals or otherwise help you stay healthy.

Whelan notes that the day this news broke, the health insurance stocks were up 2-3% as investors digested the fact that these companies are now as invulnerable to financial hardship as state governments, which is nearly but not absolutely.

NYT's Wortham on Kinect and Tinkerers

Ok, I'm not sure how I missed this one the NYT Business Section Homepage, but Jenna Wortham had a fantastic story on high-tech tinkerers getting their hands on the new Microsoft Kinnect controller so they can play around with its remote motion sensors.

Everybody else saw an incremental advance in videogame technology - ok, kind of cool but I've got stuff to do, you know?  These guys saw this:

Mr. Kreylos, who specializes in virtual reality and 3-D graphics, had just learned that he could download some software and use the device with his computer instead. He was soon using it to create “holographic” video images that can be rotated on a computer screen. A video he posted on YouTube last week caused jaws to drop and has been watched 1.3 million times.

Mr. Kreylos is part of a crowd of programmers, roboticists and tinkerers who are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it is outfitted with cameras, sensors and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the shape and position of the human body.

This story is about human potential, science and the fact that on occasion, the much-maligned Microsoft can still bring it - and not only that they know how to message it when they get lucky like this:

“Anytime there is engagement and excitement around our technology, we see that as a good thing,” said Craig Davidson, senior director for Xbox Live at Microsoft. “It’s naïve to think that any new technology that comes out won’t have a group that tinkers with it.”

Lesser tech companies (or perhaps ones with a little more buzz around their products) might sue or something.  Amen to this from the beast of Redmond, today at least.

Carr on the new iPad Publication

David Carr of The New York Times today explores Rupert Murdoch's latest bad idea (which all seem to succeed) - launching a high-end journalism outlet on the iPad.

Why does Carr think it will work when so many other digital-based journalism outlets have failed?  Because we are conditioned to expect news on the Internet to be free and we are conditioned to expect that anything with Apple's logo on it requires payment.

With The Daily, the News Corporation can enter the digital newsstand business in earnest with a new product that was never free on the Web and in a format for which payments are easily made. When I am on a Web browser and I bump into a pay wall, I reflexively pull back unless it is in front of something I really must have. But when I’m in the App Store on an iPad, I’m already in a commercial environment: pushing the button to spend small money on something I’d like to see or play with doesn’t seem like such a sucker’s bet.

He covers a great deal of ground in the article on who The Daily is hiring, how it will repurpose content from the rest of News Corp. and how it reflects on the broader News Corp. brand - but that seems to be the key observation.

When people expect free, you're doomed if you try to charge.  But if people expect to pay, they'll pay.

I've criticized Murdoch's paywall plans broadly in this blog - but this experiment bears watching, particularly if The Daily succeeds as a journalistic enterprise and starts breaking big stories.

It won't be a regular focus of SRTN because from what I can see in Carr's article very little of the content will be about business but it's an interesting experiment that bears watching for the PR business more broadly.