MARRIOTT CHECKS IN WITH BSMG

Marriott International has consolidated its estimated $1 million U.S. account at BSMG Worldwide.

Roger Conner, VP-communications at Marriott, said the chain had used a "handful of national agencies."

He noted that Marriott will continue working with a "cluster" of regional firms, plus specialized talent, such as Rogers & Cowan for product placement.

BSMG started work for Marriott's Renaissance Hotels unit in 1997. "That was a $12,000 project," said Rene Mack, who heads BSMG's travel group.

BSMG is now responsible for Marriott Hotels, Resorts, Suites and Conference Centers; Courtyard, Fairfield Inn, SpringHill Suites, Residence Inn and TownePlace Suites brands.

The firm also will promote Marriott's 75th anniversary, and its role as official hotel of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games.

Mack and Wendy Lussier, managing director at BSMG, handle Marriott, which is one of the firm's biggest travel accounts.

F-L TAPS SV FOR CITADEL DEAL

Incepta's Sard Verbinnen unit is advising Forstmann-Little on its $1 billion acquisition of Citadel Communications, owner of more than 200 radio stations, according to George Sard.

F-L has received good press for its decision to buy CC despite the soft advertising market.

Tom Bell, former Burson-Marsteller and Young & Rubicam CEO, is special limited partner at F-L. He's known Ted Forstmann from his days at Gulfstream Aerospace, which was an F-L investment. Bell was Gulfstream's vice chairman.

Jim Lake, the veteran Washington, D.C., PR counselor, was among those pardoned by President Clinton. He was convicted in 1998 for making illegal campaign contributions to the brother of then- Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. Lake is now president of Policy Impact Comms., a Republican lobbying firm...Al Rankin was named senior VP/chief comms. officer at USAA. He headed corporate comms. at Marriott for 15 years, and joins from Columbia Energy Group...Catherine Fisher is senior VP-CC at Revlon. She was at Tommy Hilfiger as its senior VP/global comms....Ken Rabin, who had headed Burson-Marsteller's U.S. and global healthcare practice, is now at Ruder Finn as a strategic counselor.

BOLTON NAMED PRSA PRESIDENT

PR Society of America has promoted Catherine A. Bolton to president and COO of the Society.

Bolton, who joined last September as chief PR officer, was named acting president and COO in December when Ray Gaulke, who had those titles, became a consultant to PRSA, its Foundation, and Kids in a Drug-Free Society. Bolton, who will now be paid at the annual rate of $215,000, said that interviews are being held for a director of media relations.

Kathy Lewton, chair and CEO of PRSA, said that unaudited financials of the Society will be released in mid-February.

Lewton said that Bolton had the "ideal career profile: senior-level experience as a PR executive and a wealth of association management expertise."

Bolton, she further said, "has moved with speed and sensitivity to address many needed changes since she was appointed acting president/COO in December. She is reorganizing the staff to more closely align it with key Society needs and priorities and to develop functional budgets with a strong budget/spending control system."

C&W WAS TIGHT WITH $$, AFFIDAVIT SAYS

Cohn & Wolfe withheld bonus pay, delayed salary hikes, was slow in paying expenses and withheld information about bonus pay goals, according to a sworn affidavit Jan. 10 by Anthony DeMartino, former CEO of the Atlanta office of C&W.

DeMartino and other employees of the office, who have set up The Titan Network, have been sued in two courts by C&W and C&W's parent, Young & Rubicam, owned by WPP Group. The C&W suit is in Fulton County Superior Court, Georgia, and the Y&R suit is in the Court of Chancery, Delaware.

They seek to enjoin DeMartino and Titan from soliciting or working for current or potential clients of C&W; from hiring any employee of C&W, and from using confidential information of C&W and its clients. Charges include breach of proprietary information and non-compete agreements; unfair competition, and intentional interference with existing contractual relations.

In his affidavit, in which he denies the charges, DeMartino said C&W "routinely dealt with me in a manner which I believe was fundamentally unfair."

He said C&W regularly withheld expense reim-

(continued on page 7)

McDONALD'S CEO HAS BEEF ABOUT IMAGE

McDonald's Corp.'s chairman/CEO Jack Greenberg said his company is being unfairly portrayed by critics as a symbol of globalization.

"I think you're right that McDonald's is oftentimes the poster child for anti-globalization sentiment," Greenberg said in response to a question at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

"In fact it is absurd. We are probably the least likely company that should be selected for such a target ... We are an amalgamation of small businesses owned and operated in the local country," he said.

Anti-globalization protestors regularly target McDonald's restaurants. At last year's Davos forum, some 2,000 anti-free trade demonstrators broke shop windows and smashed car windows at a McDonald's restaurant.

The singling out of McDonald's was "a question of publicity," Greenberg said.

"I hate to be so cynical but some in the business of attacking globalization have said privately that they know that picketing or breaking windows at McDonald's is not appropriate given how we run our business, but that's the only way to get their picture in The New York Times," he said.

Greenberg spoke during a panel discussion on relations between grassroots groups and business that also included Monsanto, a biotechnology company that has been the center of controversy over genetically modified crops.

Hendrik Verfaillie, who is Monsanto's CEO, said his company had changed its attitude towards critics.
"What we did two or three years ago is certainly not what I would recommend to be the best approach. We basically didn't listen. We tried to convince the opponents or the activists that we were right and they were wrong, that they should listen to us and that they basically should shut up. We learned that that doesn't work.

"If NGOs, industry and governmental institutions could combine their resources and energy, there is nothing that we could not achieve," he said.

SUPER BOWL VIEWERS RATE COMMERCIALS

Football fans in Canton, Ohio, picked Anheuser-Busch's "Whassup?" commercials as their favorite Super Bowl game commercial, according to the findings of an online poll conducted by Innis Maggiore Group.

Levi Strauss made the top of the least favorite list with its "jeans donor" ads, which feature a medical team and an emergency delivery of replacement jeans, the Canton-based ad/PR firm said.

David Maggiore, president/CEO of IMG, said the findings show "We like humor in our ads in Canton, but not when it involves sensitive subjects."

The average price of a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl has been reported at $2.3 million to reach 130 million viewers, up from $2.2M for 120M viewers last year.

PRODUCT PLUGS MAY REPLACE ADS

Product placements may make 30- and 60-second spot TV commercials a thing of the past.

A panel of advertisers told attendees at the annual NATPE conference that was held late January in Las Vegas that product placement and even scripts paid for by major advertisers are becoming the norm in the movie and TV business.

"In the future, you probably won't know where the commercial stops and the programs begin," said Bob Kuperman, who is president of TBWA, a New York-based ad agency.

"What we now talk about in terms of commercial advertising, what we call interruptive messaging, is probably going to be, in the future, the least efficient way to build a relationship with consumers," said Kuperman, who was on the NATPE panel, "When the Advertiser Turns Producer." Also included on the panel were Chris Gagen of Coca-Cola, Robert Reisenberg, Universal McCann, and Kaki Hinton, Warner-Lambert.

PT&C WINS 'BEST OF SHOW' FOR TRAVEL

The Hospitality Sales & Marketing Assn. Int'l, Washington, D.C., has awarded Patrice Tanaka & Co., New York, the Edward L. Bernays Award for the most outstanding entry in the Golden Bell PR Awards contest.

The "Best of Show" award, which was presented during the 2000 HSMAI Travel Industry Awards Night Dinner, held on Jan. 23 in New York, was for the firm's "Women on Their Way" program that it created for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

This year's contest attracted 1,800+ entries from 52 countries and destinations around the world.

FISHER, KRAUSS JOIN STREAMPIPE

Burson-Marsteller veterans Joe Fisher and Kurt Krauss have joined Streampipe.com, the Alexandria, Va.-based Internet broadcasting company. Fisher becomes CEO, while Krauss will be chairman.

Fisher was B-M/USA CEO. He was replaced by Chet Burchett in October. Krauss, a former Booz-Allen & Hamilton consultant, was B-M's CFO and a board member of Streampipe.

DEATHS

O. Winston Link, 86, a commercial photographer who started his career at Carl Byoir & Assocs. in 1937, died Jan. 30. As a freelancer, Link took photos for PR firms, ad agencies, newspapers, and fashion houses...Charles Crisman, 85, who had been a business reporter and PR consultant, died Jan. 19. He began his career in 1938 as a stringer for The Associated Press and later was a reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He later worked as a PR executive for New York Life Insurance Co. and Reynolds Metals Co...Patrick Lynch, 85, a former turf writer, who was VP of PR for the New York Racing Assn., which he joined in 1967 as PR manager, died Jan. 15.

WRITER: HAVE CEO PITCH STORIES

Robert La Franco, who writes for Red Herring magazine, said the CEO, rather than a publicist, should pitch stories about the company to a reporter.

La Franco, who spoke at a Jan. 30 meeting in Beverly Hills that was attended by some 200 sales, marketing, and PR executives and Internet representatives, said some reporters are "automatically turned off" when they are pitched by a publicist.

The journalist, who is Red Herring's Los Angeles bureau chief and top entertainment writer, said reporters are impressed when the CEO or VP calls and says, "I've been reading your stuff, and I founded this company, and this is what we do. I would be very interested in talking to you."

He said the CEO technique can't be used on every journalist. "You have to pick and choose. Read their publications, know what the journalist reports on and then you can say, `Oh that journalist gets it.' That is more successful than having some hot shot PR firm send out mass market PR pitches to everyone, and they end up getting" tossed, said La Franco.

La Franco said he deletes 20 to 30 e-mail pitches a day that he gets from publicists after he reads subject lines like "innovative technology," and "fantastic company." "Everyone has a fantastic company, but how?" he asked.

Readers have begun to lose interest in failure stories about Internet companies. "Back then [last year] failure stories were good, but today they're old hat," said La Franco.

He said he is looking to do stories about companies that are providing solutions to the problems of the Internet.
"They could be bandwidth problems, routing problems, and alternative solutions to distribution of information and media," said La Franco.

While it is still possible to get interesting, entrepreneurial stories in Red Herring, these entrepreneurs must be "evolutionaries, not revolutionaries, who are fighting the tide of corporate America," he said.

EX-CNN PREZ SAYS NETWORK TOO 'SLICK.'

Reese Schonfeld, the first president of CNN, writes in his new book, Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN (HarperCollins, $25), that he believes "slick" news coverage is the reason the network's ratings have steadily declined.

He calls CNN "sluggish and constipated" as well as "old and fat."

Schonfeld, who left CNN in 1982, two years after the Atlanta-based network was up and running, said Ted Turner originally wanted a rotating block of half-hour newscasts, devoted to news, sports, business and "women's news." He convinced Turner to go for "fluid news."

"The idea was we would show viewers a skelton, the framework on which everything would hang, and they could watch us do the hanging. We wanted to expose the entire news-making process," he writes.

"I don't think viewers like slick" coverage, writes Schonfeld. "If you say we have a reporter moving now and he'll give it to you when he gets there, there is a reason for them to keep watching."

ATTORNEY/EDITOR OFFERS PITCH TIPS

Mike Maslanka, an attorney with Clark, West, Keller, Butler & Ellis, in Dallas, said reporters "like to use sources who give them a 'sum-up' quote," which puts the story into perspective, and analogies.

When he was interviewed on the granting of summary judgment in the Paula Jones case, his comment was that case ultimately showed that "you can't roll around in the mud without getting some of it on you, that's a lesson both sides learned."

Maslanka said the reporter used it as the closer for her article.

Another time he was quoted in a New York Times article about how harassment suits are often paired with retaliation claims.

His comment was that these paired suits are an "iceberg [the Titanic movie was big at the time], with the most dangerous part waiting underwater."

His follow-up comment was these claims resonate with juries because people intuitively believe that employers have it in for employees "who rock the boat."

Maslanka, who is editor of Texas Employment Law Letter, also advised readers of the Newsletter Industry Monitor to speak to reporters like they write their newsletters-"short, punchy, humorous, user-friendly, and to the point. You'll ensure a steady stream of media calls and visits."

PLACEMENT TIPS

The Chicago Tribune has assigned Mary Umberger, who was writing for the Saturday "New Houses" section, to cover the real estate beat and write the weekly "Home" column. She replaces Steve Kerch.

WLVI-TV, Boston, has promoted Christopher Roach to executive producer of "Boston's WB in the Morning" from weekday producer of "The Ten O'Clock News," replacing Allison Hunter, who elected to become a fulltime mother.

CNNfn will be transformed to "CNN Money" later this year.

The channel's programming following the close of stock market trading will be revitalized to focus on breaking financial news and enhanced coverage of personal finance and small business.

It will include both a TV channel and website that are designed to work together to enable consumers to easily understand and address all aspects of their financial lives, a CNN spokesperson said.

(Media news continued on next page)

FORTUNE HIRES NINE JOURNALISTS

The addition of nine editors, writers and reporters at Fortune were announced by managing editor John Huey.

-Jason Tanz, 26, who was freelancing for Fortune and other publications, has joined as an editor on the magazine's "First" section.

-Shelly Neumeier, 35, previously at CNBC in Singapore, where she was a news editor, has joined as an editor to produce the "On the Job" section.

-Jim Rohwer, 52, a contributing writer since 1997, is now a senior writer based in Hong Kong.

-Deborah Franklin, 43, formerly with Health magazine, has joined as a senior writer in Fortune's San Francisco office, focusing on science and health coverage.

-John Simons, 35, has joined Fortune's Washington, D.C., bureau, to write about technology and general business issues. He had been a Markle Fellow at the New America Foundation, where he wrote about Internet-related policy and legal matters, and he was a technology policy reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1997-2000, and covered the Internet beat for U.S. News & World Report.

-Fred Vogelstein, 38, previously at USN&WR, joins as a tech beat writer based in the San Francisco office.

The three new reporters are: Paola Hjelt, previously with banks and other businesses in Sweden, Switzerland and Brazil; Lisa Munoz, formerly the Queens beat reporter for Newsday, and Ellen Florian, formerly an assistant editor at Newsweek, specializing in graphics for international and business stories.

GUTMAN JOINS NEWSWEEK'S D.C. BUREAU

Roy Gutman has been named diplomatic correspondent in the Newsweek Washington, D.C., bureau, headed by Dan Klaidman.

Gutman, who joined the magazine on Feb. 5, came from Newsday, where he covered foreign af fairs from Washington and was a foreign correspondent.

Prior to Newsday, he was Belgrade bureau chief and a reporter in Central Europe for Reuters.

Gutman's reports from Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s included the first documented accounts of Serb-run concentration camps, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award and Selden Ring Award.

Brant to White House

Martha Brant has been named White House correspondent. Most recently, Brant spent a year and a half covering George W. Bush's presidential campaign, during which Bush nicknamed her first "Newsweek Jogger Girl," followed by "Martita" when he learned her name.

In 1999, Brant was a national correspondent. She was the Mexico City bureau chief from December 1996 through December 1998 and a Washington correspondent before that. She joined Newsweek as a summer intern in June 1993 and was promoted to reporter in 1994.

Additional changes in the D.C. bureau include:

-Debra Rosenberg, formerly White House correspondent, becomes a national correspondent based in Washington. She will report on social trends around the country as well as other national affairs.

-Washington correspondent Bill Turque will now cover Congress. Turque spent the past year following Al Gore's campaign, and published Inventing Al Gore, a biography of the former Vice President.

-After a year spent working on Newsweek's special election issue, associate editor Adam Rogers joins the Washington bureau to cover science and technology. He will report on the area's burgeoning high-tech corridor.

-Trent Gegax, who also worked on the special election issue, joins the bureau as a correspondent, covering national affairs, the White House, and breaking news around the country.

BEAUPRE NAMED M.E. OF SCRANTON TIMES

Lawrence Beaupre has been named managing editor of The Scranton (Pa.) Times and The Tribune, where he has been interim M.E. for the past three months.

Beaupre, 56, who was editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer from 1992 to 1998, is suing Gannett, which owns the paper. Beaupre says top Gannett officers allegedly made him a scapegoat for problems with the Enquirer's 1998 stories questioning Chiquita Brands International's business practices in Central America.

In June 1998, the Enquirer renounced the stories, fired the lead reporter, apologized to Chiquita on its front page and agreed to pay the banana company $14 million in an out-of-court settlement.

Gannett says the lawsuit is "full of inaccuracies."

RUSSIN NAMED MULTIMEDIA EDITOR

Joseph Russin was named assistant managing editor of a new multimedia desk at The Los Angeles Times, where he will oversee content sharing between the Times, its website, Tribune Co. newspapers, and broadcast stations, including KTLA-TV in Los Angeles.

Russin had been supervising producer on the Fox TV show "America's Most Wanted" and senior producer of the PBS series about the media, "Inside Story."

He also helped train people to operate an independent TV network in Bosnia while working as a consultant to the U.S. Information Agency. He is a former education editor and correspondent for Newsweek and managing editor of The Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune.

C&W LAWSUIT VS. EX-EMPLOYEES (cont'd)

-bursements totaling "hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars"; withheld approved raises for employees for up to 60 days; withheld "for extended periods of time" bonus pay due to executive Michael Gavenchak, and did not give DeMartino information on his bonus goals for 2000 until the year was nearly over "despite my repeated requests."

DeMartino claims C&W still owes him $1,000 for expenses. He says it was "highly stressful" working for C&W because he and other employees were treated in an "abusive" manner.

Harassment Is Claimed

The DeMartino affidavit says the office had its "best financial year in 2000" but that C&W CFO Jim Kaplove "constantly harassed me regarding our production." Kaplove, he said, phoned him in early December and "without so much as a greeting, commenced our conversation by yelling into the phone 'Your numbers suck!'"

Kaplove, according to DeMartino, made "derisive comments" about senior managers in the office and regularly threatened their employment.

Kaplove said "Kill that fat f___" on a "number of occasions," in referring to one member of the team, said DeMartino. "Several times, Kaplove pressed me to terminate a female employee, making extremely rude references to her anatomy in the process," said DeMartino. "On other occasions," he continued, "he offended and angered me by making ethnic slurs in the presence of employees of the Atlanta office."

Kaplove Denies Charges

Kaplove said the personal charges made by DeMartino are "without merit, were gratuitously made, and they do not appear to be even relevant to the proceeding in which they were filed."

Since DeMartino's charges "were leveled to a large degree at me, personally, and since they have now been published beyond the confines of the legal proceeding in which they were filed, I am undertaking a thorough evaluation of my legal options," said a written statement by Kaplove.

C&W says it found Titan's business plan on C&W's computers and that as early as Nov. 30, 2000 the plan indicated 12 employees of C&W were to be employed by Titan.

The employees, besides DeMartino and Gavenchak, were said to be Matthew Coleman, Jay Ariano, Karen Wilcox, Chris White, Jen Ahner, Ginger Morris, Ashley Feldhaus, Angie Trantham, Shelly Pierce, and Diana Garza. Videotaped depositions of the first eight names on the list are set for March.

C&W said the plan contained confidential financial information including revenues and earnings for 1998, 1999 and 2000.

DeMartino is accused of soliciting C&W clients on behalf of Titan while still employed by C&W.

DeMartino asked the court to declare C&W's employment non-compete/confidentiality statement "overbroad and unreasonable." He denies ever agreeing to the non-compete contract and did "not misappropriate or destroy C&W documents such as the alleged form non-compete/confidentiality statements which C&W claims were signed" by him, Gavenchak and Coleman.

Both sides refused to provide any of the legal papers but this NL obtained them from the court. C&W is represented by Rogers & Hardin, Atlanta. Davis & Gilbert, New York (law firm for parent WPP Group) is listed as "of counsel." DeMartino and the other former C&W employees are represented by Alston & Bird, Atlanta.

ANALYSTS TAKE ANOTHER HIT

Security analysts were blasted in a segment on "60 Minutes II" Jan. 30 that charged they were profiting by recommending stocks in which they had a personal interest.

"I don't know how some of these analysts live with themselves," former Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette analyst Tom Brown told the show.

New York Daily News financial columnist Peter Siris wrote Jan. 30 that "Perhaps the analysts should be labeled, 'company-paid spin doctor.'"

These were the fourth and fifth attacks on the credibility of analysts in less than two months. The others were in USA Today Dec. 21; "20/20," Dec. 22, and the New York Times, Dec. 31 (1/10/01 NL).

The Securities Industry Assn., which represents about 700 brokerage houses, would not comment directly on the articles nor on the conflict-of-interest charges that are being made.

Dan Michaelis, assistant VP, CC, said the SIA is performing its role of "educating the investing public." He suggested a call to the New York Society of Security Analysts. That group has also declined specific comment on the stories.

"Many investors don't realize that some high-profile analysts and their firms stood to make a fortune on stocks they recommended," said "60 Minutes II" correspondent Scott Pelley. Highlighted was the glut of "buy" and "hold" recommendations. The program found only 29 "sells" among 8,000 current stock recommendations.

Analyst Couldn't 'Look in the Mirror'

Brown, an analyst for seven years for DLJ, said he and other analysts were told their job was to make the stocks they represented look good. The show noted that brokers make 70% of their profits from investment banking. "They are really cheerleaders," Brown said.

He said he was fired because the banks he criticized stopped doing business with DLJ. The brokerage told Pelley Brown was dropped because of "inability to operate effectively within a team infrastructure."

SEC chairman Arthur Levitt told "60 Minutes II": "There's got to be much greater disclosure of the kinds of conflicts that are part of today's market." Brokers were criticized not only for recommending stocks but for setting "target prices" that may be far above the current price.

PR OPINION/ITEMS

The legal battle going on in Atlanta over the defection of a dozen employees of ad agency-owned Cohn & Wolfe (page one) pits local managers and creatives against New York-based financial management.

The sworn testimony of former office head Anthony DeMartino that New York h.q. was hassling him about revenues and profit margins and was holding up payment of bonuses, pay raises and expenses rang a bell with us.

We can personally attest that the PR units of ad giants are very slow payers. Payments do come in-after several months. We doubt we are being singled out for slow pay. Financial writer Chris Byron has written that ad agencies seems to operate on the principle, "Honest, guy, the check's in the mail."

The PR units of ad agencies have become manic about profits and growth. Employees say their shops are "numbers driven." They must account for every quarter hour of the day and are constantly hounded about "margins." The principals of PR firms that sold out got rich but now the working PR pros must not only earn their own salaries but must send a sizable profit to the parent in New York. Firms that sold to Shandwick in the late 1980s told us they were "Slobumized" by Shandwick's David Slobum, who set "25/25/25" goals for each office (25% growth, 25% profits, and 25 days on receivables).

It seems more than coincidental that two breakaway PR firms have been launched in Atlanta. A local resident said there is a strong "Atlanta for Atlantans" feeling.

Eight staffers quit Manning, Selvage & Lee/Atlanta in 1995 and were hit with a lawsuit similar to the two that C&W has lodged against DeMartino et al.

Former office head Joseph Ledlie said in a sworn affidavit that the office provided between $600-$700K in profits in the two previous years but he only got $8,000-$10,000 in bonuses. Ledlie said he and fellow employees were not getting their fair share. The suit was settled out of court in 1997.

WPP, the owner of C&W, is no stranger in court. It waged a suit against breakaway ad agency Lord Einstein O'Neill & Partners that the Wall Street Journal said was "one of the most contentious battles the ad industry has seen" (10/9/89 WSJ). It pitted "stubborn creative types" against Martin Sorrell of WPP, a "brilliant and determined financial man," said the WSJ. LEOP, accused of breaching fiduciary duty and stealing clients, ended up paying $7 million to WPP (half paid by Young & Rubicam, which backed LEOP; WPP had sought $40M).

WPP's Hill and Knowlton unit sued healthcare PR pros who left in 1992 to form Interscience. It was settled out of court in January 1993. WPP won a $750K settlement from Interpublic in 1996 after accusing IPG of hiring WPP employees when IPG had agreed in writing not to do so. Sorrell in 1993 filed a writ in High Court of Justice, London, charging Crain Communications, Advertising Age editor Fred Danzig, and reporter Gary Levin with libeling him in an article headlined, "WPP Starts to Feel Financial Crunch." Damages and an injunction to stop them from publishing "similar words" were sought. There were no further stories on this.

Lawsuits such as C&W's are a warning to any other PR pros thinking of quitting their firms. They must be very careful about what they say and do in the period before their resignations. The suits add to the climate of fear and distrust that currently envelopes the PR counseling field.

A PR recruiter told us that the PR pros he sees are "frightened out of their wits" about contacts with the press. Agency heads fear the wrong thing might get into print. Having a friend in the press is seen as fraternizing with "the enemy." We know that PR firm events at which reporters and PR A/Es can mingle are almost non-existent now. Nor do we hear of reporters being invited to firms for "brown-bag" lunches (which used to be a favorite technique). The current mass-production mode is to have A/Es telemarket to editors all day and not leave the office.

This mass-marketing, profit-driven form of "PR" creates an opportunity for the individual PR pro who has built a trusting relationship with important media.


Security analysts continue to be pummeled by the media for their apparent loss of objectivity (page 7). "60 Minutes II" did about ten minutes on this and Daily News columnist Peter Siris, a former analyst, said analysts are "like the political operatives who serve as spin doctors for politicians" except that political operatives are identified. The New York Society of Security Analysts is mute on the subject and the Securities Industry Assn., representing the firms, has put out the weakest of statements, saying its duty is to "educate the investing public." Further attacks are no doubt due because the media and the SEC want companies to talk directly to the public in understandable English and numbers. The IR-to-analyst-to-public route for information has proven to be untrustworthy. Too many hands with too many agendas are involved...also in the Daily News on the same page was a story about PR firms suing dot-coms that haven't paid their bills. "You had a lot of unqualified PR firms charging a lot of money and overpromising services to delusional entrepreneurs," said Jason Calacanis of Silicon Alley Reporter.