Thursday, November 20, 2008

Podcast: Mark Feeney

Listen to my interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Feeney here

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Allen Adamson talks technology

Tuesday night, marketing consultant Allen Adamson spoke to a group of students in Brandeis University’s Golding Auditorium on the topic of online marketing. Director for the New York office of the brand design and consulting firm Landor, Adamson is currently touring New England in support of his most recent book, BrandDigital, a guide to building and sustaining a commercial brand in the digital age.

Aided by PowerPoint and video clips, Adamson described for the audience the current marketing landscape. Though the digital sector has not yet become the dominant one, it has become increasingly important. He described the current situation, in which economic conditions necessitate heavy budget cuts, forcing suffering marketing departments to develop new, more efficient ways of developing and pushing products.

Fortunately, the internet has provided a venue in which there have been very efficient returns on marketing investments. The internet, Adamson told the audience, has allowed for the development of a forum in which customers communicate their complaints and compliments on a given product in massive numbers. “One of the things digital allows you to do is be a fly on the wall,” he said, describing the new consumer culture. Adamson called this phenomenon a “back yard fence mentality,” in which products are marketed by word of mouth alone, almost free from any outside influence. “The internet,” Adamson added, “is a huge digital fence.”

Adamson went on to describe the various effects the internet has had throughout the marketing and branding industry. Though the internet is a powerful new tool, it can also sink a product as fast as it promotes it. Whereas once companies performed surveys on their products as little as once a year, the current environment, one in which word of a defective product can spread ever faster, calls for round-the-clock vigilance to ensure that no complaints go unnoticed and treated. In the digital age, he continued, it’s more important for companies to listen and learn from customers. The public are now the ones who can make or break you. Realizing this, corporations have begun to explore the vast possibilities of social networking tools modeled after phenomenon like Youtube and Facebook.

One story described in the lecture detailed the online exploits of Ameriprise, an offshoot of American Express. Realizing the value of a forum in which their customers could voice their opinions, Ameriprise set up a site in which customers were encouraged to share their dreams for the future from a financial perspective. The result was two-told. Not only did the company develop its own forum for customer opinion, they created a community.

However, some companies Adamson described did not share the same foresight and suffered as a result. He offered the audience the example of the Kryptonite bike lock, a product promoted as completely secure and with a $50 price tag. Shortly after the product launch, a video surfaced on the internet of a man opening the lock by inserting the end of a pen into the keyhole. The product was a bust. “Nothing spreads faster than when you make a promise and don’t keep it,” Adamson warned. He also gave the example of Cablevision, the self-proclaimed champions of customer service, embarrassed when an internet video surfaced of one of their repair men taking a nap on the couch of a customer.

Adamson also warned that even great products are vulnerable to decline if they don’t keep pace with the technology. To illustrate the point Adamson told the story of Shreddies, a stable cereal in Canada, which was declining but was revived by viral video campaigns. The company that owned Shreddies spread on the internet videos of test subjects sampling between the original Shreddies, and the “new” Diamon Shreddies, the same square shaped cereal simply rotated into a diamond shape on the box. There was no actual change being made to the product, but customers were nonetheless thinking about the cereal in a new way.

The lecture also touched on the new need for corporations to market themselves as well. Thanks to the wide range of information available on the internet, customers can now track all of a corporation’s products and activities. Not only must products stand for something, but so now must corporations. Adamson described the recent fuss made over the company Unilever, which makes and promotes Dove soap products, and the related “True Beauty” campaign, as well as Axe products, a line often derided as being sexist.

The lecture concluded as Adamson reminded the audience that the basic principles of branding and marketing remain the same, but with the digital market comes a need for a more complete customer experience, one where “who you are becomes much more important.” A product still needs to distinguish itself. “You still need to stand for something different,” he said.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Prize Writer

With his hands in his pockets, posture relaxed, the air dusted with the slightly-sweet smell of ink, Mark Feeney looks though a window onto the Boston Globe’s slumbering, two-story printing press and says, “It’s cool to work somewhere that’s both an office and a factory.” The words resound with a sincerity that can only come from genuine fascination and enjoyment. After almost thirty years, Mark Feeney still loves his job.

At least one should hope so. This past may, he took home the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the closest thing the profession of journalism has to the honor of knighthood or the Justice League. Yet even with the all the hoopla that comes with such an achievement, Feeney has stayed firmly grounded. Leaning back in his office chair, Feeney jokingly describes the professional perks of winning the prize. “I get asked to do interviews, talks. Not a ton…but no one was asking me before.”

Born in Winchester, MA and raised in Reading, Ma, Mark Feeney’s climb up the Boston Globe’s ladder began after his graduation from Harvard in 1979. Ever the literary lighting rod, Feeney occupied a diverse range of positions at the Globe, from library researcher, to book editor, to the head of the news analysis section, “Focus,” finally settling as a member of the “Living & Arts” staff. He’s also taught at both Brandeis and Princeton Universities, and published a book Nixon at the Movies (University of Chicago Press, 2004), an examination of Nixon’s career through the films he watched as president. The New York Times called the book “mystifying” and “formidably intelligent.”

Though once nominated for the Pulitzer in Feature Writing in 1994, it was Feeney’s work in the arts that finally brought home the trophy. True to his varied nature, his ten pieces submitted for consideration touched on a variety of subjects such as photography, film and the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Though some might have let such an award spur their inner ego to heights of insanity, Feeney remains reserved, almost blasé when pressed to reveal the personal significance of his critical recognition. “I don’t know if this sounds egotistical, modest or both, but I don’t feel that I needed to be validated,” he says. The attitude comes not from hubris, but rather simple confidence in his work, as well as a keen historical understanding of the Pulitzer and its true context and meaning.

Such a prize begs the question: How can a single prize quantify the legitimacy of a single person’s opinion? “It can’t! It’s bullshit! It’s total bullshit,” is his answer. “It’s true of any prize.” Feeney learned this lesson some twenty years ago, when he sat on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle while serving as the book review editor of the Globe. A board of editors and writers from various major publications, it was their job to come up with, on the basis of the finalists, the best books of the year in categories like novels, biographies and poetry. “It was ludicrous,” Feeney recounts; having to judge groundbreaking academic books against “big, fat journalistic ones.” “It’s apples and oranges.”

Flowing from topic to topic, Feeney’s reflection expands into a detailed portrait of our culture and our proclivity for rankings and analysis. “It’s in the nature of our culture…We like superlatives, we love hierarchies,” he says, explaining our need for critical validation. “It’s nice to honor worth. The sad part is that people, understandably, think that the raising up of a given work or an individual somehow reflects ill on other works that are equally laudable.”

But regardless of the relative nature of an individual opinion, Feeney still respects the craft of its expression. “The enjoyment is a legitimate, but the expression of that enjoyment is not.” Describing his favorite film as a young child, John Wayne’s The Green Berets, he says, “If you had asked me to justify why it was such a great movie back then, I could have done it. It would have been a worthless justification, but I could have done it.” When it comes to good criticism, his recipe is simple: “Its good writing. You want clarity, you want flow, you want vividness, and you certainly want enthusiasm.” Joanna Schorr, a former student of Feeney's confirmed this analysis of his method, saying "Professor Feeney did alot for my confidence as a writer. I learned from him that you shouldn't worry about whether your opinion is correct, whether it will be agreed with and fit within the social norm. The argument is there, you just have to bring it to life."

When pressed about his future plans, including the possibility of another book, Feeney remained reserved, stressing his lack of time outside his day job as an arts writer. “If you’re a journalist you’re a sprinter. You’re used to doing things in short bursts…You need a different set of muscles if you’re an author. You need time.”

Looking back on his award, Feeney remains humble, acknowledging the politics that may have played a role in his victory. With the Washington Post having won six Pulitzer prizes, he suggests that his award may have been the result of a preference for evenhandedness. “I was not in the room at Columbia University when they took the votes…but I guarantee that if ‘Criticism’ was towards the end of the day, that person from the Washington Post, she had the deck stacked against her…One of the prejudices we have as people is we like fairness. We want everyone to get a fair shake,” he says “It’s a filthy business.”

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Blog bashing

Do blogs constitute original journalism? That is, do they actively seek out their own stories, do their own reporting and then break the news to the public? It’s a tricky question. Journalism, in the traditional sense, is the process through which the public becomes informed on issues, both local and national, that pertain to their lives. Ideally, a well educated public will be able to steer its democracy in the most beneficial direction. As it stands, blogging achieves a sort of patchwork fulfillment of these criteria.

As far as local journalism is concerned, blogging has been something of a blessing. In a 2007 New Yorker article, Nicholas Lemann points out that the availability of blogging has broken “the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media... have supposedly been able to maintain up to now.” As more major news outlets continue to make cuts to their investigative and local bureaus, bloggers and online journalists, to a limited but growing degree, have taken up the charge. Without requiring many resources, people are now able to report and spread information on local issues, which are becoming harder to find even in established local press outlets. For example, The Blog of the Unknown Writer, based in NY, reports primarily on small stories of social injustice such as the death of an army veteran who was turned away from a hospital and died when he refused to participate in an Alzheimer’s study. In addition to this, an alternative issue like autism can receive coverage it wouldn’t normally receive in the mainstream press. However, blogs often don’t report, as much as they compile information and provide a forum for discussion.

National and global blogging suffers from the same problem on a higher level. Blogs that focus on larger issues still largely rely on the mainstream press for their information instead of breaking news themselves. While there are exceptions to this, such as the cutting edge blogging of the Scooter Libby trial, most blogs simply regurgitate, spin and analyze what they hear from the major outlets. Effectively covering national and global issues requires a plethora of resources and reporters covering multiple angles in multiple locations. Blogs, which for the most part are single person operations, simply don’t have the capacity to do this, regardless of the writer’s skill or prior experience. While corruption in the local Parent-Teacher Association can be uncovered with a few phone calls and a little determination, covering Russia’s invasion of Georgia requires not only manpower, but an acute understanding of all factors; economic, religious and military. At a certain point, a given issue moves beyond an individual’s sphere of understanding.

Both forms of blogging suffer from issues of credibility as well. While institutions like the New York Times can be held accountable for faulty or false reporting, as they were when Jayson Blair was caught fabricating stories, bloggers are free to post what they like without the watchful eye of editors and fact checkers. Whereas major journalistic institutions have a well defined responsibility to the public, many bloggers do not hold themselves to the same principles. This isn’t because they see the rules as useless and outdated, but rather because they think that what they do is too far removed from traditional journalism for such rules to apply in a practical fashion.

This isn’t to say that blogging doesn’t have potential. Its ability to break stories ahead of the mainstream media, like Matt Drudge did with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, has already been demonstrated and the potential for dissenting opinion and constructive public discourse is staggering. However, a system needs to be developed and put in place that helps make blogs more accountable and reliable as legitimate news sources. If blogs can earn the trust of the public through formalization and accountability, then they will have begun to fulfill the role of traditional journalism.