Recently, a popular blog about media trumpeted a decision by a newspaper to shutter its presses and go completely online. The writer said this was the future of journalism. I posted a comment saying that this was not the future, that the future will involve giving consumers more control of content. I got skewered.

Other people commented and said I am jumping on the “citizen journalism bandwagon.” One wrote that, if you followed my argument, journalism will look like that job site commercial where hundreds of fans at a tennis match rush the court and try to play.

All of the people commenting said I don’t understand that the value that journalists bring is accuracy, and that giving consumers control over content will create a messy concoction of truth and fallacy posing as journalism.

It’s not an either/or proposition. Saying that success in the future will require ceding some control to consumers is not saying that journalists should go get new jobs. Of course not. How do people get information now? They rely on journalists, yes. But they rely just as much on their neighbor, the postman, the clerk at the store, their priest, and so on. The online newspaper that figures out how to bring both to their site will win their market, hands down.

My other bet is that it won’t be today’s brand name newspapers that do this. Somebody new will move into the media space and create, local market by local market, online news sites that combine journalists’ reporting and analysis, with local citizenry filing reports. That’s how people have got their information for centuries — somebody’s going to figure out how to bring that together on the web and actually make money.

Last Blogenberg I wrote that “accuracy is what accuracy does” when noting why the mumbling in the distance heard by traditional media is the last rites. That is, unless traditional media stops pretending it controls information and, most important, has a monopoly on accuracy.

Citizen journalism — where your neighbor feeds your need for information — will overtake traditional journalism as the trusted source of information in the coming years. That’s because it’s all about control and accuracy. Technology allows consumers to control where and how they get information. Journalism, advertising, marketing, etc. no longer have control over what information you get and where you get it. You do. And traditional journalism no longer decides what’s accurate. You do. People assign credibility where they decide to assign it.

What do you think people find most credible? The New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times? Or different feeds of information from neighbors, colleagues, family, the clerk at the local drugstore, etc., all creating a tapestry of information from which they determine their version of accuracy. Because accuracy is what accuracy does.
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I usually pay no attention to the Public Relations Society of America online discussion group for independent and small PR shop owners. But a recent thread about marketing caught my eye. Several contributors raved about a certain marketing consultant. They touted his books, his websites, his talks. They said he can revolutionize your marketing.

I was intrigued. Goodness knows, bringing in new business is one of the biggest challenges I face. So I clicked through to the marketing genius’ website. It was a cluttered mess. It was the online version of the proverbial everything but the kitchen sink. My reaction? If you can’t put together a clean, tight, attractive website that easily and quickly tells me what I need to know, why in the world would I pay the brain that created that website to think about my marketing?

I am the end of journalism. The very end, my friend.

I read the Washington Post every day. But I never read the front section, the news section. Because all my news comes from news aggregators, blogs, social networking sites, etc. (I read the Washington Post for sports, arts, entertainment, etc. But that’s only because I’m from a newspaper generation.) Obviously, I could know everything I want to know without ever reading a newspaper or watching TV news.

There’s something else I can get without ever touching a newspaper, something more important than information alone — and it’s what really portends the end of journalism as we know it. I can get proximity of information source. I can get credibility where I assign credibility. I can get trust. In other words, I can choose to assign accuracy and credibility to, and invest trust in, blogs, Facebook feeds, Twitter updates, etc.

In a recent post in his influential blog, Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel, writes, “Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.”

It’s trust and accuracy that has always been the currency of traditional media. It’s trust and accuracy upon which journalism professors hang their hopes for their profession. Problem is, to steal from Forrest Gump: accuracy is what accuracy does. Next Blogenberg I’ll explain what I mean, and why, within 15 years, at most, citizen journalism will be the market for this currency.

*Borrowed, with a bit of Blogenberging, from The Doors depressing song, The End.

This is the first edition of Blogenberg News Links. Each week we’ll compile, in no particular order, a few stories that we’re following that you may not have noticed, that we’ve found interesting and that provide insight into communications, media, business and culture.

• True to form, Marc Gunther takes a provacative look at business and the potential costs of carbon emissions caps.
• Seth Godin sort of perfectly captures the definition of good writing.
• NPR covers the impact of blogging on sports reporting in “Blogging the Name of the Game in Sports Coverage.”
• Conde Nast Portfolio explains why CEOs should be aware of what their kids post online.
• Newsweek predicts the “Return of the Experts” will define the future of the Web.
• The Harvard Business Review podcast looks at how to make your business a learning organization.
• Brandstorming explains that a small business’ online marketing budget is better spent on blogging than Pay-Per-Click advertising.
• From Good Experience, a look at the ultimate example of corporate citizenship.

I got two phone calls last week, within a day of each other, inquiring whether I had any interest in selling my business. One I called back. One I ignored. The difference in my response was so simple, yet it speaks volumes about effective marketing and public relations.

First things first: I’ve got no interest in selling my business. Maybe someday in the future my view could change, but it’s certainly nowhere near my radar screen right now. But the mix of curiosity and the possibility of learning something led me to return one of the calls.

One caller asked for me by name. He had done some preliminary research and had a good sense of my business, what we are about, etc.

The other caller left a voicemail message in our main mailbox. He didn’t even bother to press “1 for Jeff Rosenberg.” Keep in mind, even if you’ve done no research into my business, it’s doesn’t take a degree from MIT to figure out that Jeff Rosenberg is the principal in a business named Rosenberg Communications.

Not very hard to figure out which guy I called back, is it?

(I did learn some interesting things from the guy. I’m not selling my business but I am a bit smarter after the conversation.)

Public relations used to be about “getting our message out.” Today it’s much more about telling stories that will resonate with certain groups of people — people who have signaled they will care about the story through their affiliations, memberships, community connections, what information they access and where they access it, etc. In other words, public relations is about building relationships with select audiences for clients. That’s because 1) there are so many different ways to get information today and 2) consumers expect and have much greater control over their information sources and 3) numbers 1 and 2 impact each other bi-directionally and constantly, further changing, nearly every day, the communication landscape. (Marketing guru Seth Godin captures this bi-directionality brilliantly and quickly in his new book Meatball Sundae. A taste of the sundae is regularly found in Seth’s Blog, especially and including this recent post called “Dumbing Down.”)

Like any organization, I’ve got a story for Rosenberg Communications that I need to communicate to my target audiences. Problem is, if I’m completely honest about it, I’m having trouble keeping up with the story. (more…)

In an earlier Blogenberg I wrote about a unique Word of Mouth Public Relations (WOMPR) effort we are undertaking in Pennsylvania coal country. We’ve finished our analysis of the community. We’ve created the theoretical framework, so to speak, for utilizing WOMPR to support social change. Now we’ve gotten to work.

We’ve just finished the “put it to work” meeting, the meeting where we boil the message down to small bites, identify specific strategies, and lay out a timeline for activities. This WOMPR effort is designed to help a community address far-too-many instances of older male/younger (sometimes much younger) female sexual relations — the objective is to empower parents to help youth make healthier, safer decisions. So, for example, one strategy we have developed is the use of “ambassador parents.” But deciding how many “ambassador parents,” how they will be recruited, what they will do and say, how we will support them, what feedback mechanisms we will use, etc. is hard work. Indeed, the entire “put it to work” meeting is hard, hard work.

If you’re engaged in a WOMPR effort and you are facilitating that “put it to work” meeting and you are not mentally exhausted at the end, you’re either not getting anything done that will make a real difference or you’re just much better at it than me.

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Jose Brooks is Blogenberg’s father-in-law. He passed on Saturday. He was a man’s man. Not in the hackneyed American way. I mean in an old-world European fashion. He was French, an important business and government figure in his home. Measured by inches or centimeters, he was much shorter than I. But I always felt smaller than he — standing next to him, looking down I always felt I was looking up. At times, sometimes in frustration with me, my wife says that I remind her of her father. Blogenberg will always be beyond flattered by such a comparison.

As a small business owner some of the toughest decisions center around resource allocation. How do I know what to do in-house and what to outsource? For me, it comes down to how best to utilize the creativity of my staff.

We create and manage blogs for clients. If we decide, in partnership with a client, that a blog can effectively help tell their story to people who will care, we blog. But we don’t do the building of the blog in-house, even though we have the in-house capability to do so. Why not? Because I decided that having my staff spend time on building the blog as opposed to doing what they do best and few others do as well — that is, crafting a story, developing the strategy to tell the story, and managing the storytelling — would be a bad use of resources.

We can outsource the building of the blog for less than what we would charge a client for the time, when the client would much rather be paying us for the same amount of time to manage the complete public relations strategy.

And we are skilled at bringing in just the right subcontractors to whom we outsource specific tasks. For example, for creating blogs we bring in Durbin Media. We work well with them. They can grasp what we want to create for a client. They do it at a reasonable price. And that just makes us even more valuable to a client because we can design the entire conceptual framework for a campaign, bring together all the right tools (in-house talent and outsourced talent), and manage it all to achieve desired outcomes within required budgets. That’s a pretty good talent for us to sell.

Corporate citizenship is a big term. Rosenberg Communications is a small (but growing!) shop. But I’m finding that being a corporate citizen supports my bottom line without costing me much.

For a long time I’ve understood corporate citizenship, or corporate social responsibility (CSR). The Hitachi Foundation, one of our clients, is a leader in the field. We’ve worked with the Foundation, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, and Net Impact, to create the blog, corporatecitizen07.com. And we’re managing the rollout of the State of Corporate Citizenship 2007, the only survey of executives’ attitudes and behaviors that includes small, medium, and large businesses. The most important finding? Action trails behind talk when it comes to CSR.

I was one of those — a good talker, not much of a walker. But I figured, “I’m small. Just keeping afloat is my biggest contribution!” I’ve since learned that being a good corporate citizen doesn’t cost me much at all, and has some immediate payback. (more…)

On Blogenberg, I’ve talked a lot about the direction we are heading, much of it built around Word of Mouth Public Relations (WOMPR). We’ve done some walking of that talk — quite a bit actually, for a number of clients. We’re about to start walking that talk deep into Pennsylvania coal country.

We’re working with a rape and victim assistance center that’s trying to address sexual abuse by helping young people decide to wait to have sex — there’s a lot of young girl, older (much) guy relations going on, all of it, almost by definition, exploitive and harmful. One of their strategies is to help parents talk to their kids about avoiding unhealthy risk behaviors, especially sex. We’re building a WOMPR campaign throughout the county to support the effort. (more…)