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Shel Holtz is globe-trotting this week, so Paul Gillin and David Strom of FIR B2B take the reins. Our guests are Todd Van Hoosear, a well-known social media figure in Boston and elsewhere, and Barbara Selvin, associate professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism, where she created and teaches a course on the changing news industry.
- Within minutes of delaying a vote on the replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act, President Trump placed calls to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa to spin the decision. These are the same publications the President recently branded as “enemies of the people.” What are we to make of his decision to reach out to them rather than Breitbart or Fox News, whom he has praised as being more reliable?
- Subscriptions surge for the ‘dishonest media’ after Trump’s attacks – Newspapers and magazines such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic and sites such as ProPublica and the ACLU are seeing print and online subscriptions surge in the wake of Trump’s victory. Could this be the silver lining in the “fake news” crisis?
- We could use one, because Nick Bolton writes in Vanity Fair that fake news is about to get even scarier than you ever dreamed. “Advancements in audio and video technology are becoming so sophisticated that they will be able to replicate real news—real TV broadcasts, for instance, or radio interviews—in unprecedented, and truly indecipherable, ways.” This is a chilling piece. Maybe blockchain will help?
- A photo of an all-male White House panel discussing women’s health issues sparks anger, highlighting the power of imagery and the importance of thinking about your images might be interpreted before you post them.
- IBM, remote-work pioneer, is calling thousands of employees back to the office. In a dramatic change of course, the company that championed telecommuting is telling its U.S. marketing employees that they must now work from one of six locations in Atlanta, Raleigh, Austin, Boston, San Francisco or New York or seek employment elsewhere. Has the tide turned on the virtual office concept?
- How do you label audio promotions? Google wants to create promotions that aren’t ads for its voice-controlled assistant, but it got grief for an audio Plug for Disney that Google said wasn’t an ad.
- One thing’s for sure: native advertising is a thing. eMarketer says spending on native digital display ads will make up more than half of all digital display ad spending in the US this year. Are these ads diluting th the quality of editorial content that goes around them?
- Dan York’s report covers the launch of a Producer API for Twitter and for Periscope, the arrival of live Facebook video from your desktop (heaven help us) and the ease of setting up such streams.
- How do American decide what to trust on social media? I turns out that who shared it is more important than where it came from. Not good news for those who disseminate real news.
- On a related note, James Somers makes a compelling case for why the ‘Like’ button ruined the internet by making engagement a bigger deal than the importance of the subject.
- Another day, another social media crisis. Cracker Barrel stays silent in the wake of the #JusticeforBradsWife backlash. Conventional wisdom says their social media people should be all over this issue, but maybe playing dumb isn’t such a bad strategy. Either way, Ragan has some suggestions for how Cracker Barrel could do better, but one of them – make a joke out of it – is frightfully wrong.
- Twitter might ask people to pay for a premium version of Tweetdeck, but there’s no evidence it’s going the next step of selling premium accounts. Given that Hootsuite has built a pretty nice business selling a similar tool, this doesn’t strike us as a bad idea.
- Horray for Houston PR’s Buzzsaw. This site will cleanse your press release of buzzwords. Talk about a needed service!
Connect with Todd Van Hoosear on Twitter. You can tweet to @BSelvin, but don’t expect an answer soon. She’s not a big fan, and we admire her for that.
Links to the source material for this episode are also available on Contentle.
Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.
About today’s guests:
Todd Van Hoosear is a professional communicator and technologist with more than 15 years of experience in marketing and technology. He is a Fellow with the Society for New Communications Research and a co-founder of the Social Media Club, where he headed up the Boston chapter for years. He’s worked in the trenches as a PR professional at agencies that include Miller/Shandwick, Weber, Topaz Partners, HB and Eric Mower and Associates. He also ran his own agency for years and has taught PR and social media at Manhattanville College and Boston University.
Barbara Selvin is an associate professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism, where she created and teaches a course on the changing news industry, runs the School of Journalism’s internship program and developed its programs in grammar and numeracy. Her research interests include community journalism and gender equity in journalism. Before she became an educator, Barbara was a reporter on New York Newsday’s business desk, writing about economic development, real estate, housing and health-care reform. Her freelance work has been published in Nieman Reports, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and business and health-care magazines.
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