U.S. EYES INDONESIAN PR EFFORT.
The U.S., which saw positive PR results from the millions donated to Indonesia after the tsunami devastation in May, wants a PR firm to spread awareness that Uncle Sam has given over $1 billion to the archipelago over the last 50 years.

The U.S. Agency for International Development issued an RFP on Sept. 12 for a marcom effort to convey how Americans through USAID are working “in partnership with Indonesians to generate prosperity and a better quality of life,” according to the statement of work. Budget for the assignment is between $350K and $370K.

PSA production, research and polling about Indonesian media, demographics and awareness of U.S. aid efforts, along with other aspects of a social marketing campaign are included in the effort.

Strong fluency in English is a must for the work. Proposals are due Sept. 21 and a contract is slated to run from award date to February 1, 2006. Dale Gredler is contracting officer for USAID/Indonesia.

APCO Worldwide, Ogilvy PR Worldwide and Weber Shandwick are among major U.S. firms with Indonesian operations.

IPG FINDS ‘COOKED BOOKS.’
Interpublic must restate earnings from `00 to `04 because of lax financial accounting for revenues, acquisitions and lease expenses.

It has uncovered “falsified books and records; violations of laws, regulations and company policies; misappropriations of assets, and inappropriate customer charges and dealings with vendors.”

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the ad/PR conglomerate said “culpable employees” had been or will be fired.

The ad/PR conglom remains on track to meet the Sept. 30 deadline to release full-year `04 financials and the results for the first two quarters of `05.

BERRY JOINS TIME WARNER.
Tim Berry, chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom Delay, will join Time Warner next month as VP-global public policy. He will report to Carol Melton, executive VP-global public policy. TW’s cable operations face a range of regulatory challenges.

Berry served Delay for a decade. The Texas Congressman issued a statement that praised Berry as a “complete professional.

Time Warner is negotiating a deal to merge its America Online with Microsoft’s MSN Internet portal.

H&K REGISTERS WITH VERISIGN.
Hill & Knowlton has been awarded Verisign’s U.S. PR account, edging finalists Weber Shandwick and Bite Communications.

The technology company, know for its ‘Net domain registry services, had $1.1B in sales last year.

Brian O’Shaughnessy, director of corporate communications, told O’Dwyer’s the company went through an “exhaustive” process of reviewing its PR account that went “much longer and deeper” than he had anticipated.

Bite Communications was the incumbent and took on the Verisign account when it acquired Applied Communications in 2003. Applied won the last review for Verisign’s U.S. PR work in 2001, counting the work among its top four clients, which also included Oracle, H-P and Veritas.

Verisign, a top registrar of Internet domains, also provides telecommunications, e-commerce and ‘Net security services.

O’Shaughnessy said H&K is slated to transition into the work by Oct. 1, initially in the U.S. but likely globally down the road. Text 100, under the same umbrella of NextFifteen Communications with Bite, has handled overseas PR assignments, mostly in Australia and the EMEA region, for Verisign. The company has also used a handful of boutique shops overseas.

VENABLE GETS $900K PHILIPPINES PACT.
The Republic of the Philippines has hired Venable to a $900K pact to gain support for President Gloria Arroyo’s charter change initiative to re-shape the government into a “parliamentary federal system.”

Venable, according to its contract, seeks grants needed for the “re-engineering of the bureaucracy to recover large estimated losses from acts of corruption and government inefficiency.”

The Venable contract has drawn heated criticism in the Philippines. Former President Fidel Ramos feels the pact recalls colonial days when the U.S. ruled the Philippines. He feels any reform should come “without foreign participation.”

The Philippine Headline News Online questions why “U.S. support for constitutional change is needed at all.” Venable lawyers James Pitts and James Jatras, who lead the account, refused to discuss their work with PHNO. They cited attorney-client privilege.

Venable’s contract also calls for the firm to achieve an upgrade in support for the Philippine National Police to include training and gear in the areas of counter-terrorism, forensic science, transportation and communications.

MARMILLION GUIDES LOUISIANA RELIEF.
Marmillion + Co., the Washington, D.C.-based firm with deep Louisiana roots, has been tapped to lead Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s disaster recovery and redevelopment organization.

The non-profit Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, was set up by Blanco on Sept. 8 to accept donations for immediate and long-term needs for the state’s residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. M+C, which has a Baton Rouge office, worked with Blanco to set up the LDRF and its website LouisianaHelp.org. The firm is handling PR and spearheading the initiative to raise funds.

Cliff Mintz, a media associate for the firm in D.C. and a Louisiana native and graduate of Tulane Univ. New Orleans, said M+C staffers in Louisiana are safe and healthy despite some damage to property.

M+C had been guiding a national, multi-year marketing communications campaign tagged “America’s Wetlands” to highlight Louisiana’s shrinking coastal marshes and estuaries as a recipe for potential disaster in the state. The firm, founded by Valsin Marmillion, a former chief of staff to then-Rep. John Breaux (D-La.), also works for the state’s tourism agency.

GREYHOUND BARKS AT JAIL OFFICIALS.
Greyhound Lines is happy with the prompt response of Louisiana officials to its request to stop referring to a makeshift jail set up at its New Orleans bus station as Camp Greyhound, Kim Plaskett, director of corporate communications, told O’Dwyer’s.

She made the call to corrections officials in a bid to “defend the brand name of an American icon” that has a 91-year reputation for providing courteous service to its passengers. Camp Greyhound housed Louisiana looters.

Plaskett said Greyhound—at the peak—supplied 100 buses to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s evacuation of New Orleans. “We are now down to about 20 buses,” she said.

Greyhound also has backed the Katrina recovery effort by increasing the number of buses on its Baton Rouge, Houston and Dallas routes. Those cities house displaced people from the Crescent City. More than 300,000 passengers traveled from/through Greyhound’s New Orleans depot in `04.

Camp Greyhound has been renamed Angola South after the name of the central Louisiana prison that is America’s largest maximum security jail.

DEVRIES LANDS SEPHORA ACCOUNT.
DeVries PR has emerged from a competitive review to handle consumer PR for upscale beauty and fragrance products retailer Sephora.

Tractenberg & Co., a New York-based advertising and PR firm, had handled Sephora’s PR account. Kekst & Co. continues to represent the company through the business and trade media.

DeVries, an Interpublic unit, has senior VP and managing director Stephanie Sage Smirnov and VP Jessica O’Callaghan heading the account.

Sephora, founded in France in 1969 and acquired by Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in 1997, operates 111 retail stores in the U.S. and Canada.

DYSON CHARGES SOX IS MISUSED.
Tim Dyson, CEO of publicly-held NextFifteen, owner of Text 100 ($45 million in 2004 fees) and Bite Communications, said on his blog that he does not believe the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has made it too dangerous for ad conglomerates to reveal revenue and staff totals.

Holding companies including Omnicom, WPP Group, Interpublic, Publicis and Havas have withheld such figures for three years on the ground that if anything is misleading in such figures their executives could face millions in fines and jail terms.

The conglomerates have said that they operate in many countries and that differing accounting rules make it virtually impossible to satisfy the strict rules of SOX.

NextFifteen, which operates in about 25 countries, has not been deterred by SOX considerations in reporting revenues and staff totals of Text 100.

Dyson, writing in his blog, siliconvalleypr.blogspot.com, criticized the conglomerates for putting their PR revenues “under one line” in their annual reports.

“We no longer have any meaningful tables,” he said, adding: “Am I the only one that thinks this is bad for our industry?”

Twenty-one of the 25 biggest PR operations ranked in 2001 by the O’Dwyer Co. withdrew from the rankings. All are owned by the conglomerates.

Says the blog: “I believe it would benefit the industry to make public the performances of all the significant PR businesses that operate in the industry. Clients and staff would benefit by seeing which firms really were growing. Agencies would benefit by being able to see how well they were performing relative to their competitors.”

Concluded Dyson: “I’m willing to have someone tell me why SOX really does require WPP et all to report agency fees as one big number instead of breaking them out by agency but until someone does, I’ll continue to hold the view that SOX has provided a fig leaf for holding companies to hide behind. Am I the only one who’d like to see that fig leaf removed?”

HOUSE NAMED SONY’S FIRST CMO.
Sony Corp. has named a veteran of its corporate communications units as the electronics company’s first chief marketing officer.

Andrew House, a Wales native and British citizen who has been with Sony for 15 years, will split time between New York and Japan.

House joined Sony in 1990, working in corporate communications for five years in Japan. He later joined Sony Computer Entertainment’s marketing and communications unit, guiding Europe and the U.S. In 2002, he was named executive VP for the computer and entertainment unit.

House reports jointly to Sony Corp. CEO Howard Stringer, the Welshman who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in `99, and Sony Electronics president/CEO Ryoji Chubachi.

Sony said House takes global responsibility for corporate marketing with a special emphasis on advertising and PR.

NASCAR NAMED ‘FASTEST-GROWING’ SPORT.
Fortune magazine has crowned NASCAR, which claims one-third of all American adults as followers, as the fastest-growing sport in the U.S.

“It doesn’t hurt that while other major sports keep waking up to one PR nightmare after another—baseball’s ongoing steroid scandal, last season’s NHL lockout, fisticuffs between NBA players and fans—NASCAR drivers are media-savvy, fan-friendly marketing machines,” said writer-reporters Julie Schlosser and Brian O’Keefe.

“They never talk about their cars without mentioning their sponsors,” the reporters point out in their cover story report that appears in the Sept. 5 issue, highlighting the 100 fastest-growing companies.

Trends Cited

They said “NASCAR’s recent explosion in popularity—and establishment of its racetracks as big-time commercial venues—is unprecedented.” These marketing trends were cited:

—NASCAR had total corporate sponsorship revenue last year of $1.5 billion, compared with $445 million for the NFL and $340 million for Major League Baseball.

—NASCAR is the second-most-watched sport on TV behind pro football.

—Licensed retail sales of NASCAR-branded products have increased 250% over the past decade, totaling $2.1 billion last year alone (up from $1.3 billion in 2000).

—Nascar.com is one of the most highly trafficked sports websites.

—The NASCAR name is the country’s No. 2 brand for 2005.

—There are 106 Fortune 500 companies involved as sponsors—more than any other sport.

NASCAR, a private-family-controlled, for-profit company, was started 57 years ago in Daytona Beach, Fla., and now includes offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Bentonville, Ark.

Brian France, a 43-year-old college dropout, is the third generation member of his family to run NASCAR (National Assn. of Stock Car Aruto Racing).

Since taking over as CEO a year and a half ago, France has staffed NASCAR’s N.Y. office with marketing pros formerly employed by the NBA, the NFL, the NHL, and MLB.

France, who feels strongly that stock-car racing doesn’t get enough coverage in newsapers and on talk radio, has hired PR specialists in N.Y. and L.A., and the publicity staff has grown from two full-timers in 2001 to 25 today, Fortune said.

“France has even talked about starting a news service to help increase coverage. NASCAR already has a password-protected website for journalists with suggested story ideas,” the magazine said.

JOURNAL PUBLISHES NEW EDITION.
Karen House, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, said the new Saturday “Weekend Edition,” which began publishing on Sept. 17, will put the past week into perspective, offer a preview of the key events of the week ahead and will help readers make the most of their limited leisure time.

The new edition will address decisions that occupy Journal readers’ weekends, for example, purchasing decisions, cooking and dining out, sports, fashion, financial plans, family matters, reading habits, travel choices, and more.

The Journal has hired 150 new editorial and sales staff for the new edition, which is edited by Edward Felsenthal, who is also editor-in-chief of the “Personal Journal,” a section which appears Tuesday through Thursday in the paper.

Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, said Friday is a major business news day, and the idea of providing readers with a combination of business news and articles about personal finance, recipes, fashion, and travel on weekends is a “logical next step in the evolution of the Journal.”

A new section, called “Pursuits,” will cover such topics as personal health and fitness; cars and travel; fashion and food; gadgets and education; and entertainment and shopping.

The edition, which will arrive at subscribers’ homes early on Saturday morning, will have three sections.

—The first, or main section will be a compilation of the most important news.

—“Money & Investing” will focus on personal finance as well as the latest market news and analysis.

—“Pursuits” will be a news section that extends coverage aimed at helping readers make better decisions about their personal lives.

PLACEMENT TIPS_________

High Noon Entertainment in Denver is looking for “special homes” to feature on “What You Get for the Money,” a TV show airing on the Fine Living and Home and Garden TV networks.

“The homes, especially their interiors, have to pop!,” said HNE media contact Gregg Stucker. “They need to have an ‘Ohhh’ and ‘Ahhh’ rating of at least an eight (out of 10).”

He said a variety of styles, including but not limited to contemporary, mid-century, art deco and traditional, will be considered.

“If you know of a home that truly has personality and is valued at a million or less, then we’d like to see it,” said Stucker, who is a researcher for the program.

The show’s premise: a price point between $200,000 and $1M is selected and viewers are shown what they can get for that amount in six markets.

Upcoming markets include Madison, Wisc.; Reno, Nev.; Dallas/Ft. Worth; Minneapolis/St. Paul; Charlotte, N.C.; Memphis, Tenn., and Trenton, N.J.
Stucker wants publicists to e-mail him pictures (jpeg format) of each proposed home’s interior, exterior and views, along with pertinent details and contact information. Submissions should include the market name in the subject line.

Contact: [email protected].

(Media news continued on next page)

SITES TO REPORT FOR YAHOO NEWS.
Blogger-journalist Kevin Sites is joining Yahoo Media Group in Santa Monica, Calif.

Sites, who filmed a Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in a mosque last fall, will spend the next year reporting from nearly three dozen war zones across the globe.

He will begin filing video, audio and text dispatches to Yahoo News each day and hold live chat and videoconferencing sessions from the battlefield.

The program, “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,” is seen as an indication that Yahoo will compete with TV networks for viewers and advertisers.

Sites, 42, who has reported for NBC, CNN, and ABC from war torn areas, has been operating his own website.

BARRETT JOINS BUSINESS WEEK.
Paul Barrett, a Page One news editor at the Wall Street Journal, is joining Business Week as assistant managing editor-investigative projects on Sept. 26.

In this new position, Barrett will help lead and cover difficult-to-report topics of vital interest to readers of the magazine.

Barrett’s book on the topic “American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of Religion” is scheduled for publication next fall. He is also the author of “The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America,” published in 1999.

MARTINEZ TO HANDLE OPINION PAGES.
Andres Martinez, who is editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, will also oversee the op-ed page and “Sunday Current,” page.

Martinez, 39, is replacing Michael Kinsley, who resigned as editorial and opinion editor.

Prior to joining the L.A. Times in Sept. 2004, Martinez was a member of the editorial board and assistant editorial page editor of the New York Times, and was an editorial writer at the paper.

SILVERMAN NAMED GANNETT NEWS EDITOR.
Mark Silverman was named editor of Gannett News Service, based in McLean, Va.

Silverman, previously publisher and editor of The Detroit News, will replace Caesar Andrews, who was named executive editor of Detroit Free Press.

LIPSCHUTZ PROMOTED TO M.E. OF TICKER.
Neal Lipschutz was promoted to VP/managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires.

Lipschutz, 48, who was senior editor, Americas, will report to Paul Ingrassia, president of DJN, starting Oct. 3.

Lipschutz will supervise the news staff in the Americas. He also will be the chief arbiter of, and spokesman for, news policies, coverage and standards for Newswires on a global basis.

He has worked for Dow Jones since 1982, servicing in a variety of Newswires editorial positions.

Richard Levine, who was executive editor of DJN, was appointed VP/news and staff development.

‘ASK MARTHA’ WRITER TO BUDGET LIVING.
Bunny Wong, who wrote the syndicated “Ask Martha” newspaper column, has joined Budget Living magazine as a senior editor.

Angela Matusik, editor-in-chief of the New York-based lifestyle magazine for women, also named Elizabeth Johnson as special projects/online editor.

Wong, who spent five years at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, also handled feature and front-of-book articles for Living, Weddings, and Kids: Fun Stuff to Do Together magazine.

Johnson was previously an editor at InStyle.com.

MEDIA BRIEFS________

Travel Savvy magazine, which was acquired by liquor mogul Sidney Frank in January, is back on newsstands with a Sept./Oct. number.

The bimonthly magazine, which is devoted to “Lists That Matter,” will showcase the “best of” in every category: destinations, hotels, cuisine, nightlife, fashion, art and adventure.

Jill Brooke, a former CNN correspondent and New York Post and Daily News columnist, is editor-in-chief.

“Anyone can Google a place and get travel information,” said Brooke, “but the list concept sets us apart.”

The magazine’s editorial offices are located at 72 Madison ave., New York, N.Y. 212/579-2010.

New York magazine will publish two wedding guides per year, one in September and one in March. The first issue is dated Sept. 15, 2005.

Betsy Burton or Serena Torrey, who are PR contacts for the wedding guides, can be reached at 212/508-0700.

Time Warner’s CNN and Time Inc. business-news websites will merge in January under the CNNMoney.com name. The site will include material from CNN Money, Fortune and other outlets.

Corland Publishing in Ann Arbor, Mich., has started publishing Diesel Forecast Magazine, an online publication dedicated to reporting on diesel vehicle technology and business news.

Coverage will include interviews and columns by respected figures at the major automakers and suppliers.

DF’s editorial focuses primarily on decision-makers at the automakers and major supplies.

John McCormick, a former writer at AutoWeek magazine and Ward’s Auto World, who has been an independent journalist since 1992, is executive editor of the new magazine. He can be reached by calling Cleveland at 734/239-3586.

Media numbers_________

51—According to data from Nielsen Media Research, nearly 51 million viewers tuned into the Weather Channel on Aug. 28, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast to give the network its highest ratings in the company’s history.

55—The percentage of journalists in Bennett & Co.’s annual media survey who said it matters if the address on the press release is personalized.

Text 100, PR unit of a public company, publishes its fee income total ($45 million in 2004) and staff counts and CEO Tim Dyson wonders why public ad holding companies Omnicom, WPP, Interpublic, Publicis and Havas won’t let their PR units publish their figures (page 2).

This withholding of PR data (for the fourth year in a row) is “bad for our industry,” says Dyson, who heads Text 100 parent NextFifteen.

Ad groups have cited the possibility of violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as the reason for withholding data. But Dyson says he has made a study of SOX and can find no rules that block the divulging of such basic statistics as total revenues and staff.

The ad groups have said they operate in many countries with different accounting rules and therefore it’s too complex to report data.

But Text 100 operates in 25 countries and doesn’t find this a problem. Employees (full-time) are employees no matter in what country they work.

Also, Dyson points out, individual PR units keep close tabs on their revenues since bonuses are based on them.

He’s pretty sure the ad parents know exactly what each unit is doing.

This withholding of data is one result of the purchase of 21 of the 25 biggest PR firms and hundreds of other PR firms by the five ad groups.

The financiers who had taken over the ad business went to work on the PR counseling industry and this takeover was mostly complete by 1998.

In that year, the ad groups formed the Council of PR Firms. The bulk of CPRF’s funding came from the ten biggest PR operations which paid $50K each annually to the Council. CPRF had two apparent missions: redefine PR to include paid advertising and take control of the ranking of PR firms from the PR trade press (this NL and The Holmes Report).

CPRF firms owned by the ad groups decided they would only report to CPRF which would then provide the figures to the trade press. CPRF also mailed ranking forms to 5,000 PR firms.

CPRF, unlike the O’Dwyer Co., required no proofs of ranking data such as top pages of income tax returns, W-3s, CPA statements, etc.). Account lists were not required. Ad commissions could be counted. The only back-up asked for was a letter from the CFO of the PR operation.

When Sarbanes-Oxley came along in 2002 and executives of public companies faced jail terms and fines for providing misleading statistics, CPRF stopped collecting data.

Coincident with the creation of CPRF in 1998 was the creation of PR Week U.S., a sister publication of PR Week UK. CPRF members supported PRW US with hundreds of pages of ads in the first couple of years.

Support has continued with CPRF firms buying 45 ad pages since last November. Page rate is $6,980.

A third PR institution, PRSA, played a major role in getting PRW US started.

PRSA president and COO Ray Gaulke on Aug. 12, 1998 wrote to major PR firms and PRSA leaders that PRSA would “introduce” PRW to “leaders in the business” and “our advertisers.” Said Gaulke’s letter: “we could encourage our members to subscribe.” The letter further said Gaulke and1995 president John Beardsley made two trips to London in 1998 to encourage PRW to start a U.S. edition.

For the first year or so, the controlled 20,000 circulation of PRW US was largely the membership list of PRSA. PRSA said its list was available to anyone with a suitable mailing piece.

Steve Pisinski, 1998 treasurer of PRSA, said PRSA’s help to PRW US was unethical. “This assistance was neither board initiated nor board approved,” said Pisinski, who added PRSA should not “favor any PR industry publication.”

Patrick Jackson, 1980 president, said PRW should not be allowed to use PRSA mailing lists since it would compete with PRSA’s Tactics and Strategist.

The above helps to explain another negative development of recent years–the demise of at least four PR trade publications as the big ad group PR units put almost all their publication funds into PRW ads and its awards program.

Gone after 46 years was PR Reporter, which provided original PR research reports; Reputation Management magazine of Holmes, which had lasted about six years until 2000; PR Journal, a bi-monthly of Ragan Communications, and PR Intelligence Report, a monthly NL of Ragan.

PR Quarterly, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this December, has one steady advertiser at $735 per insertion. PRQ has articles by PR executives and PR professors. Its editorial content is as good as anything being published in PR. PR Reporter had exclusive research coverage.

PRQ ad director of 11 years Edgar Hopper, a former VP-marketing of Ziff Davis and an experienced ad salesperson, couldn’t get anything from the ad conglom PR units although they had revenues of about $2 billion in 2001 (when last reported) and nearly 20,000 employees.

An example of the exclusionary ad policies of ad group PR units is O’Dwyer’s PR Services Report, our monthly magazine which has been published since 1987.

Eleven ad group PR units placed 39 ads in PRW since last November and one ad in the O’Dwyer magazine.

The magazine, meanwhile, ran 46 profiles of PR specialties of these firms such as beauty/fashion, healthcare, high-tech, travel, etc. They are equally short of funds when it comes to subscriptions.

For example, five of the firms, employing about 3,000, have a total of eight NL subscriptions.

– Jack O'Dwyer