Loving all the spin and swirls of Wag-Ed's memo on "how to handle Fred" being leaked. What's most amusing is the two assumptions that all PR Pros are doing this. Really they aren't. And 6,000 words, don't worry hacks, Execs generally don't read anything exceeding 500 words.
All of this stems from Wired's story on transparency. I also chatted to Fred on the Channel 9 piece. Fred's a terrific journalist and very, very smart. Frank, like Fred, is also a good guy. I'm surprised anyone feels the need to defend this practice or conveniently bundle it under the guise of transparency.
But while I'm on this track, how about every journalist publish all their notes for all of us to read post publication of a story. Tapes become podcasts. Notes loaded into a blog or Wiki. Sources disclosed. Now we're talking transparency.
Chris makes a great point:
By the way, as far as I can tell, everything in the memo is accurate. I also think the executives were very well served by the document; they did indeed stick to their message and they got pretty much the story they wanted. This was also, as it happens, the story I wanted--or was it just the story I thought I wanted because I was so effectively spun by Microsoft's PR machine? The mind reels...
And therein is the rub, when great journalists with good ideas meet willing, prepared participants, terrific stories are generated. I don't mean prepared in a cynical way - I mean in the sense they know what they are meeting about, what the other person wants from the meeting, what the context is, and what the key facts are. From that perspective, the Wag-Ed memo was good. Long, but good...