It's campaign season again. That means it's press release season again, too, and a lot of them are crossing my (virtual) desk via various lists and such.
Some of them are good.
A few are fantastic.
Most of them suck.
Herewith, a (very) brief primer on campaign press releases:
The press doesn't care what you think. They care what you do.
OK, it's not quite that simple, but close. "News" is generally about action, not ideas.
The candidate supports an audit of the Federal Reserve? Not news (unless the candidate is someone you'd expect not to support an audit of the Fed).
The candidate addresses a crowd of 2,000 at an "Audit the Fed" rally? News.
If you want to get your policy positions covered by the media, do something newsworthy and fold those positions into that action. Don't send out a press release saying what you think. Send out a press release saying what you did, are doing, or are about to do.
Shorter is almost always better. Shoot for a target length of 300 words.
An editor doesn't have all day to read your release. He wants the five Ws (Who, What, Where, When and Why) and some supporting material (a couple of good quotes and basic bio information on the person and organization issuing the release).
Give an editor those things, and he may write a story, call you for an interview, or even just run your release verbatim if he needs filler.
Give an editor a thousand words of argument and he probably won't bother to wade through it. It will go in the recycle bin, or perhaps in that stack of paper he takes home at night for his kids to color on.
Do, however, go with the catchy headline.
Compare and contrast:
"Candidate speaks on VA problems at VFW meeting"
vs.
"Smith to veterans: You got hosed"
Which title would catch your eye?
There's no guarantee that even the best press release will result in coverage for your campaign -- but the better the release, the more likely it is to get you the attention your'e seeking.
For the record, yes, I write press releases on demand, and that demand has been brisk enough that I've decided to monetize it. Click here to find out more.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Hardware update
Thanks to MS and DS, both of whom responded to my premature obituary for the Mac.
After a few frustrating days of trying to work on an 8.x" netbook, I hauled the Mac back out. It worked, and it's still working. I think it was a heat problem, even though I kept a dual-fan cooling pad running beneath it at all times. I'm babying it along -- using it for shorter lengths of time and actually shutting it down instead of just letting it suspend after an idle while, etc.
But, backup is paramount. I can't afford to be offline for even a day -- it's where I work!
MS sent me a desktop that had some problems (a tendency to reboot for unknown reasons). It's a great computer. Unfortunately, UPS banged it around so much in shipping that (despite an abundance of bubble wrap, packing peanuts, and even some oranges from the S family's own tree) the bay covers were all knocked loose ... and the thing won't power up. Not to worry -- there's enough good stuff in it, including 2Gb of RAM and two large hard drives, that I think I'll be able to cobble a working desktop PC together with some stuff I have here.
I'm writing this blog post on the HP laptop DS sent me. His description of it was: Wireless had stopped working at some point in a Ubuntu upgrade (more on that in a minute), and he didn't think the optical drive worked.
The optical drive did work. Because I had Xubuntu lying around, I went with that. Mistake. Wireless indeed did not work, so I plugged it in via Ethernet ... until the third boot when Xubuntu finally said "you know, there's a driver that will enable wireless" or something to that effect. And it worked. But after futzing around with packages trying to get Firefox from 3.0.x to 3.6.x, I gave up.
The thing is, every time I try to use Ubuntu (regular, K, X) it's just a huge pain in the ass. It's a solid distro underneath. I love several distros based on it (and perforce on Debian). Jolicloud (Ubuntu-based) is great, and I'd be using it if it supported this laptop, but it doesn't. I'm using another Ubuntu-based distro, Linux Mint, and it's fantastic. Easy install, easy upgrades/updates, detected my need for a proprietary wireless driver on the first boot. Love it, but I don't ever plan to bother with a distro ending in "buntu" again.
Sweet machine. AMD 64 dual core, NVidia graphics card, LightScribe optical drive. I could get used to this! Thanks, guys! Computer emergency over.
After a few frustrating days of trying to work on an 8.x" netbook, I hauled the Mac back out. It worked, and it's still working. I think it was a heat problem, even though I kept a dual-fan cooling pad running beneath it at all times. I'm babying it along -- using it for shorter lengths of time and actually shutting it down instead of just letting it suspend after an idle while, etc.
But, backup is paramount. I can't afford to be offline for even a day -- it's where I work!
MS sent me a desktop that had some problems (a tendency to reboot for unknown reasons). It's a great computer. Unfortunately, UPS banged it around so much in shipping that (despite an abundance of bubble wrap, packing peanuts, and even some oranges from the S family's own tree) the bay covers were all knocked loose ... and the thing won't power up. Not to worry -- there's enough good stuff in it, including 2Gb of RAM and two large hard drives, that I think I'll be able to cobble a working desktop PC together with some stuff I have here.
I'm writing this blog post on the HP laptop DS sent me. His description of it was: Wireless had stopped working at some point in a Ubuntu upgrade (more on that in a minute), and he didn't think the optical drive worked.
The optical drive did work. Because I had Xubuntu lying around, I went with that. Mistake. Wireless indeed did not work, so I plugged it in via Ethernet ... until the third boot when Xubuntu finally said "you know, there's a driver that will enable wireless" or something to that effect. And it worked. But after futzing around with packages trying to get Firefox from 3.0.x to 3.6.x, I gave up.
The thing is, every time I try to use Ubuntu (regular, K, X) it's just a huge pain in the ass. It's a solid distro underneath. I love several distros based on it (and perforce on Debian). Jolicloud (Ubuntu-based) is great, and I'd be using it if it supported this laptop, but it doesn't. I'm using another Ubuntu-based distro, Linux Mint, and it's fantastic. Easy install, easy upgrades/updates, detected my need for a proprietary wireless driver on the first boot. Love it, but I don't ever plan to bother with a distro ending in "buntu" again.
Sweet machine. AMD 64 dual core, NVidia graphics card, LightScribe optical drive. I could get used to this! Thanks, guys! Computer emergency over.
Friday, June 25, 2010
(Everyone Except) The (New York) Times, They Are a'Changin'
What if, 15 years after Johannes Gutenberg assembled and deployed the first modern printing press, every other house in Europe had hosted such a press in its living room, with an unlimited supply of paper and ink moving continuously through the kitchen to feed it?
That's what the first 15 years of widely available and accessible Internet access has wrought with respect not only to the printed word and still images, but audio and video as well. A solid majority of the populations of western industrial nations have the Internet and its effectively limitless publishing capabilities at their fingertips. Outside the "first world," access statistics range from a low of 8.7% in Africa to nearly one in three in Latin America and the Caribbean [Source: Internet World Stats].
The spread of printing technology was obviously much slower, and the average person's access to it much more limited, than that ... and look at the political, economic and cultural changes which can be traced to it.
The freedoms secured by that first technological revolution serve, to some degree, as guardians of the freedoms opened up by the second. From 1483 to 1729, the use of a press to print Arabic script was prohibited in the Ottoman Empire "on pain of death." But modern Turkey got widely available Internet access about the same time as everyone else (1993), and today 26 million of its 72 million citizens are Internet users.
The reactions of the politically connected and the state-privileged to the second revolution seem to differ in degree rather than in kind.
Just as 15th century clerics cried foul on the idea of a Bible in every home, to be read by the masses instead of selectively quoted to them by approved religious authorities, today's "professional" journalists howl against the proliferation of bloggers and citizen journalists ... and for the same reasons. How dare the unwashed seek truth along any pathway that doesn't lead through the toll booth of the authoritative?
And just as the printers (and to a lesser degree, the authors and composers) of yore turned to the emerging state to protect what they deemed a new, "intellectual" class of property, today's publishers (and, to a lesser degree, content creators of all kinds) seek coercive recourse through government to maintain their ever more tenous control of "intellectual property."
Frankly, it's getting almost embarrassing to watch.
I cannot, in the space of a column, cover all the theoretical ground over which the subject of "intellectual property" is scattered. That's a book-length topic, and there are libraries full of books on it. Instead, I'm going to just jump straight to the consequential, and I'm going to start with a quote from Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America:
In the case of the late Confederacy, the theory is that one commonly referred to as "states rights" -- the context of the quote above was his concern over his national government's inability to enforce various taxation, conscription and other laws on its member state governments in support of its war effort to tear itself away from the United States.
In the case of "intellectual property," the fatal theory is an illusion, false on its face, of control.
"As a professional writer whose name is his commercial brand," writes J. Neil Schulman in a piece published right before I began writing this one, "I can no more allow someone else to rewrite me as they like and put my byline on it than the Walt Disney Corporation can allow someone else to publish cartoons of Mickey Mouse buggering Donald Duck."
The problem with Schulman's claims as to what he can or cannot "allow" is that he has about as much control over what's done with his work -- or with his name -- as I have over the orbital characteristics of the moon. And, as the long, storied, pre-Internet history of Disney porn demonstrates, he never really did have much control over those things (for what it's worth, it took me about two minutes on Google Images to turn up a cartoon conforming precisely to Schulman's description of that which Disney can't allow).
The current situation of those attempting to protect "intellectual property" claims resembles that of the Dutch boy with his finger in a dike (yes, I know, you're off to Google Images to look that one up too, you naughty, naughty thing, you).
The state's never been very good at protecting "intellectual property," and technology has finally and forever outstripped its ability to do so by any means short of imposing totalitarian controls on all information exchange (and that probably wouldn't work either, but they'd love to try it).
Content creators and distributors who don't adapt to this simple fact of life are going to die of their theory. Let's hope they don't drag the rest of us down with them into yet another dark age of state terror by courting those totalitarian controls in defense of a lost cause.
That's what the first 15 years of widely available and accessible Internet access has wrought with respect not only to the printed word and still images, but audio and video as well. A solid majority of the populations of western industrial nations have the Internet and its effectively limitless publishing capabilities at their fingertips. Outside the "first world," access statistics range from a low of 8.7% in Africa to nearly one in three in Latin America and the Caribbean [Source: Internet World Stats].
The spread of printing technology was obviously much slower, and the average person's access to it much more limited, than that ... and look at the political, economic and cultural changes which can be traced to it.
The freedoms secured by that first technological revolution serve, to some degree, as guardians of the freedoms opened up by the second. From 1483 to 1729, the use of a press to print Arabic script was prohibited in the Ottoman Empire "on pain of death." But modern Turkey got widely available Internet access about the same time as everyone else (1993), and today 26 million of its 72 million citizens are Internet users.
The reactions of the politically connected and the state-privileged to the second revolution seem to differ in degree rather than in kind.
Just as 15th century clerics cried foul on the idea of a Bible in every home, to be read by the masses instead of selectively quoted to them by approved religious authorities, today's "professional" journalists howl against the proliferation of bloggers and citizen journalists ... and for the same reasons. How dare the unwashed seek truth along any pathway that doesn't lead through the toll booth of the authoritative?
And just as the printers (and to a lesser degree, the authors and composers) of yore turned to the emerging state to protect what they deemed a new, "intellectual" class of property, today's publishers (and, to a lesser degree, content creators of all kinds) seek coercive recourse through government to maintain their ever more tenous control of "intellectual property."
Frankly, it's getting almost embarrassing to watch.
I cannot, in the space of a column, cover all the theoretical ground over which the subject of "intellectual property" is scattered. That's a book-length topic, and there are libraries full of books on it. Instead, I'm going to just jump straight to the consequential, and I'm going to start with a quote from Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America:
If the Confederacy fails, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory.
In the case of the late Confederacy, the theory is that one commonly referred to as "states rights" -- the context of the quote above was his concern over his national government's inability to enforce various taxation, conscription and other laws on its member state governments in support of its war effort to tear itself away from the United States.
In the case of "intellectual property," the fatal theory is an illusion, false on its face, of control.
"As a professional writer whose name is his commercial brand," writes J. Neil Schulman in a piece published right before I began writing this one, "I can no more allow someone else to rewrite me as they like and put my byline on it than the Walt Disney Corporation can allow someone else to publish cartoons of Mickey Mouse buggering Donald Duck."
The problem with Schulman's claims as to what he can or cannot "allow" is that he has about as much control over what's done with his work -- or with his name -- as I have over the orbital characteristics of the moon. And, as the long, storied, pre-Internet history of Disney porn demonstrates, he never really did have much control over those things (for what it's worth, it took me about two minutes on Google Images to turn up a cartoon conforming precisely to Schulman's description of that which Disney can't allow).
The current situation of those attempting to protect "intellectual property" claims resembles that of the Dutch boy with his finger in a dike (yes, I know, you're off to Google Images to look that one up too, you naughty, naughty thing, you).
The state's never been very good at protecting "intellectual property," and technology has finally and forever outstripped its ability to do so by any means short of imposing totalitarian controls on all information exchange (and that probably wouldn't work either, but they'd love to try it).
Content creators and distributors who don't adapt to this simple fact of life are going to die of their theory. Let's hope they don't drag the rest of us down with them into yet another dark age of state terror by courting those totalitarian controls in defense of a lost cause.
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