us.movies1.yimg.com
NPR, realizing that young people think it's boring, lays on the hip: To attract the younger demographic accustomed to TV and the Internet, the public radio staple is launching "NPR Zack: A New Space for Younger Listeners." Why the name? According to one staffer, "We thought Zack is exactly the kind of name NPR staffers would give their male children." Uh huh. Maybe they're aiming for the post-"Saved By The Bell" crowd. [Boston Globe]
from www.chicagogsb.edu
Today's revelation that Wal-Mart is countersuing former SVP of Marketing Communication Julie Roehm, whom it fired last year and who is suing the retail giant for wrongful termination, comes with a bombshell revelation that Roehm and executive Sean Womack, her junior, were enaged in a personal relationship. Wal-Mart policy expressly prohibits managers from romancing their subordinates. The relationship may or may not have been physical and/or consummated, but it did involve wanton email exchanges like Rohm writing "I hate not being able to call you or write you. I think about us together all the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me" and Womack writing "Tell me something, anything ... I feel the need to be inside of your head if I cannot be near you." Roehm had claimed that the relationship had not been improper; Womack had referred frequently to Roehm as a "big sister" figure. To paraphrase Gawker, oops.
All the juice is here (NYT) and, a little more juicily, here (AdWeek). But in the meantime, the show must go on — and Roehm and Womack were scheduled today to deliver a presesntation at OMMA Hollywood. Which is exactly what they are doing RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE, according to MediaPost's (and HuffPost's) Tobi Elkin, who confirmed to ETP via email and subsequently on the OMMA Hollywood blog that Womack and Roehm are delivering their "Marketing 2.X" presentation "to a packed ballroom...They're talking about the shift from Marketing 1.0 to 2.0 now to 3.0 but who can focus on it?" Perhaps they are all thinking about what Womack looks like when he's kissing her. Though if you've ever actually looked at someone while they're kissing you, usually they look sort of goofy, like a bobbing, slurpy fish.
Elkin told ETP that she spoke to Roehm at a luncheon earlier today, and that she would not speak tot he story directly, but said that her lawyer is apparently issuing a statement. Legs continue to sprout. Apparently Roehm is anticipating no falloff in attention, according to Elkin:
There was a twitter after a slide of Hillary Clinton appearing on a Web video came up. The New York Senator has taken a beating in the press lately. The Roehm joked, "I'm looking forward to someone else fighting the press."
Looks like she'll have a fight — Wal-Mart appears to be pulling no punches:
"When we fired Ms. Roehm, we had no intention of sharing the details of her flagrant personal and professional misconduct, even as she made disparaging the company a centerpiece of her self-promotional campaign. Now, we must respond to her lawsuit and are in a position where we have no choice but to share the real story of what happened."
So there you go: Roehm and Womack in their first public appearance since the scandal broke. No word on what the accommodation arrangements are for speakers.
Update: Excerpt from a statement from Roehm's lawyers:
"It is not a coincidence that in Wal-Mart's proposed counterclaim, Wal-Mart -- which apparently reads its employees' e-mails -- has chosen only to excerpt small portions of some of those e-mails in its filings. Wal-Mart deliberately chose to take the e-mails out of context, eliminating from its filing some of the substance of those e-mails, and then editorializing about the few actually quoted words that it left behind, putting its own spin on them to create sensationalism."
Wal-Mart Fights Back Over Firings [NYT]
Wal-Mart Files Countersuit vs. Roehm [AdWeek]
Wal-Mart Accuses Ex-Adwoman of Office Roehm-ance [WSJ Law Blog]
Related:
How a Highflier in Marketing Fell at Wal-Mart [WSJ]
nytimes.com
Here's an example of the New York Times' Public Editor desk put to good use: A reader writes in with an astute question about the reliability of Iraqi translators used in conducting interviews in the field, and receives a thorough response under the PE's watchful eye. Specifically, observant New Yorker Mark Schroeder inquired about Richard Oppel's February 23, 2007 piece,"Old Problems Undermine New Security Plan for Baghdad," asking:
[H]ow can someone who does not speak the language of the people involved quote them and determine an accurate set of facts for an article?...The whole premise of the Oppel argument is that the new effort is going to fail because all Iraqis lie and have agendas (except for those who are Oppel's sources). Yet how can he have independently verified this from other sources?
Knowing a good egg when he sees it, possibly-soon-to-be-eliminated Public Editor Byron Calame picked out the query and passed it on to Foreign Desk Editor Andrea Kannapell who composed a detailed response based on consultations with Times correspondents, explaining how the paper offers language training, cultivates relationships with trustworthy local staff and double-checks the accuracy of translations. At the end of the day, everyone is (presumably, anyway) happy - a reader has seen his question taken seriously, while the Paper of Record has maximized an opportunity to describe on the record how its correspondents monitor translator accuracy in the field - an issue that, if left unaddressed, could potentially be used to attack the credibility of its war reporting. Not to throttle a dead horse or anything, but it's moments like this that illustrate just how valuable a role the Public Editor desk plays in preserving accountability at the nation's top paper. We're just sayin.
from Amazon.com
To be a Canadian watching the Conrad Black drama play out is to have all sorts of associations: Remembering his launch of the National Post (what! Challenging The Globe & Mail!), recalling the outbreak of nationalistic indignation when he threw over his Canadian citizenship to accept British peerage; seeing photos of Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, in the paper, looking fancy; and a general awareness that this guy was a massive, massive titan. (For a Toronto kid living nearish by, there was also the memory of driving past his mansion on The Bridle Path, a fancy street with a few truly massive homes.) Black's rise to general awareness-level prominence in the U.S., though, has resulted from his legal woes, and as they've mounted since late 2003 I've had that feeling of mixed pride and ownership that comes with a well-known Canadian making it big here ("Barenaked Ladies? I remember when they played Frosh Week in the fall of '91!" "CNN's John Roberts? You mean MuchMusic VJ J.D. Roberts, circa 1983. Well I remember the mullet." "Northrop Frye? Ahem. OURS.")
So as a Canadian it's funny to observe the Canuck factor at play in this trial. First, there's Eddie Greenspan, Black's lawyer and a legal legend back home. You may have read about him in the New York Times last week, profiled by Richard Siklos, who is covering the Black trial for the Times. Siklos, another Canadian, could probably have done that and any other story in his sleep, considering he's been on the Black beat for a decade and a half as the author of Shades of Black, his 1995 biography of the media baron that became Shades of Black: Conrad Black — His Rise And Fall, the "completely revised, updated, and vastly expanded" version in November 2004. The star witness for the prosecution, too, is Canadian: David Radler, who, judging from this Maclean's profile could be a character out of a Mordecai Richler book, and who, by all accounts, Greenspan is raring to tear into on the cross, Canadian-style (and no, that doesn't mean 'nice').
turbulence.org
AdAge had the scoop and now Radar elaborates: Former RocketBoom host-turned-ABC News videoblogger Amanda Congdon has been working on the side for DuPont, hosting so-called "infotainmercials" for the chemical corporation's website while simultaneously headlining a weekly videocast for ABC. As Radar puts it, "That's a huge no-no for ABC News staffers, because it naturally raises questions about how aggressively the network covers DuPont's role in, say, building up Iraq's nuclear program or its part in giving thousands of people cancer."
A spokesperson for the network told reporter John Cook that Congdon was merely an independent contractor (though, according to IRS guidelines for determining the existence of an employer-employee relationship, that categorization is debatable), and was "solely responsible for the content of her videoblog segments" (also a legally hazy claim, given that all ABC videos are co-produced, broadcast and fully sponsored by the network). Still, dancing just shy of a "full-time correspondent" title gives Congdon some leeway in skirting those tricky conflict of interest issues - though Cook notes that the videoblogger's segments are also featured on the ABC's 24-hour digital news channel and she may appear in the future as a correspondent on the network's TV broadcasts.
This isn't the first time that an ABC News reporter has found him/herself taking heat for corporate conflicts, though the presence of web video makes Congdon's sponsorship clash all the more visible (and potentially embarrassing for her network). Adding a touch of irony is the fact that, as Radar notes, among Congdon's ABC News online co-stars are investigative journalist Brian Ross, who reported in 2003 that the EPA was examining Teflon, a DuPont product, as a likely cause of health problems including birth defects, organ damage and cancer.
bluegrassreport.org
Based on a TVEyes search of closed captioning transcripts by TVNewser, the number of mentions of the Iraq war's fourth anniversary between 6 A.M. and 3 P.M. yesterday were as follows: MSNBC - 153 mentions. CNN - 112 mentions. Fox News Channel - 42 mentions. Interesting numbers, especially given the rundown earlier this month of FNC's minimalist coverage of the Walter Reed scandal (compared to champion mentions of Anna Nicole).
from thescotsman.com
Rachel Haimowitz
According to a recent Pew Research poll, the Mistrusted Name in News is just as popular as the Most Trusted. Surprised to see fake anchor Jon Stewart listed right beside old-guard giants like Rather and Brokaw and new-guard stars like Cooper and Williams? Not me. Not one bit.
But not, perhaps, for the reasons you might think. No, the poll wasn't thrown by a bunch of stoned slackers; to the...
