GH PICKS UP SC JOHNSON.
GolinHarris has been awarded SC Johnson’s PR and public affairs account following a tight-lipped review by the family-run consumer products marketer.

Weber Shandwick, a sister Interpublic unit of GH, was the company’s main outside PR firm. The account was estimated in the mid-six-figure range.

Kelly Semrau, director of global communications and public affairs, told O’Dwyer’s the company liked GH’s brand marketing experience and “strong cultural fit.” She said there was not a conscious effort to pick a Midwest firm, despite the company’s roots in Wisconsin, because the PR work is global. It was not important to be part of Interpublic either, she said. Ten firms pitched.

Ellen Ryan Mardiks, worldwide director for marketing and brand strategy for GH, heads the account with Scott Farrell, managing director, with both based in Chicago.

Johnson brands include Pledge, Ziploc and Saran. The Racine, Wisc., company began the review last fall.

RED LAKE TRIBE
RELIES ON PR SUPPORT.
The Red Lake Tribal Council has turned to high-powered law and lobbying firm Holland+Knight to help with the barrage of press covering last week’s school shooting rampage by a teenager on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation.

Kate Dando, spokeswoman for the law firm and former press secretary for H+K senior policy advisor Sen. Ben “Nighthorse” Campbell, told O’Dwyer’s the law firm is helping the tribe with the crisis. H+K is a client of Rubenstein Assocs., which disseminated a press release regarding press contact information and a news conference on the reservation. RA said it is helping its client and is not directly involved in the school shooting.

Campbell, who joined H+K in January, was the senate’s only Native American member before his retirement last year.

VAN LENTEN TO B-M/CHICAGO.
Burson-Marsteller has added Liz Van Lenten to its Chicago office. She will be in charge of its 30-member brand marketing practice.

The 20-year PR veteran had been running her own firm after 17 years at GolinHarris’ headquarters in Chicago.

She has handled key accounts such as Florida Dept. of Citrus, Kellogg’s, Oscar Meyer, McDonald’s, Sara Lee, American Lamb Board and Energizer.

Van Lenten reports to Linda Recupero, U.S. brand marketing practice chair.

EDWARD JONES SHOPS FOR PR.
Edward Jones & Co., St. Louis, has sent out a request for information to 20 PR firms and hopes to consolidate its account to one shop by May.
The privately-owned brokerage house has $357 billion under management.

John Boul, director of PR, said he expects replies from the contacted agencies to come in the next week. The company’s PR budget has been estimated at $300K.

Almost all of the PR work, now at firms in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia and other cities, will be placed at one firm, he said.

Stern & Co., headed by Richard Stern, handles the New York account.

In January, Jones agreed to pay $75 million to settle charges that it didn’t disclose marketing deals with mutual funds. Claims were made by the SEC, NYSE, NASD and U.S. Attorney in St. Louis. It was the largest penalty ever imposed over “revenue-sharing” deals.

FD NABS FRANKEL.
Steve Frankel has left Abernathy MacGregor for a New York managing director slot at Financial Dynamics.

Frankel, who was placed by Arnold Huberman Assocs., will advise clients on mergers/acquisitions, litigation and crisis management at FD.

He has counseled Capital One, North Fork Bank on deals, and helped investment banker Sandler O’Neill & Partners recover from the murder of 66 staffers in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Abernathy meanwhile has brought in Tom Johnson, mergers and acquisitions editor for Reuters America since 2001. Johnson takes the title of senior VP, starting April 18.

PRU QUESTIONS
NEWSPAPER FIGURES.
Some major newspapers are boosting their average circulation figures by not counting slow days and by increasing their hotel guest and airport copies, which do not have the same “quality” as fully paid single copy and home delivery sales, says a study by Prudential Equity Research.

The New York Times left out 20 days in calculating “average” circulation for the Audit Bureau of Circulations while the New York Post left out 29 days and the New York Daily News, 30 days.

Analyst Steven Barlow feels that papers that omit more than two days of circulation a year because of weather or other factors are compromising the quality of their numbers. (continues on pg 2)

PRU QUESTIONS
NEWSPAPER FIGURES (cont’d)
He also feels copies purchased in bulk by hotels and restaurants and distributed free are not as “high-quality” as single copy sales at the full price.

Barlow, who also analyzes ad/PR giants Omnicom, WPP and Interpublic, surveyed 50 major newspapers for his 72-page report which can be purchased for $180 from finance.yahoo.

He gave his worst ranking to The Boston Globe, owned by the NYT, for not counting 27 days in arriving at its average circulation and because of other factors affecting its circulation.

The Globe (+0.2% to 451,471), also had a 6% drop in full paid home delivery and a 40.5% jump in “other paid circulation,” mostly from hotel/guest copies “home delivered third-party sales.”

“Average” circulations of the NYT, Post and News in the six months ended Sept. 30, 2004 were 1,121,057 (+0.2%), 686,207 (+5.2%), and 715,052 (-1.9%), respectively. ABC will only allow ten “omit” days a year, starting this year.

Catherine Mathis, VP-CC of the NYT, said the Pru report had “a flawed methodology and a number of material inaccuracies and errors.”

Calls to Mathis have not been returned. Prudential, commenting on the remarks of Mathis, said it stands behind Barlow and his report.

Scandals Have Hit Papers

Barlow notes that circulation misstatements have been uncovered at Newsday, Dallas Morning News and Chicago Sun-Times.

Circulations will probably continue to shrink, says Barlow, as a younger audience looks to free media on the Internet and daily newspapers.

He sees the free dailies “as a response to, not a cause of the circulation declines of recent years.”

The Washington Post, which had a circulation decline of 3.4% to 707,690, recently started a free daily for commuters called Express.

Clarity Media, owned by Philip Anschutz, founder of Qwest Communications, launched the Washington Examiner, a free daily that goes to affluent homes in the D.C. area.

Circulation of the Los Angeles Times dipped 5.6% to 902,164. Full paid home delivery was down 10.8%, vs. a 2.4% decline for the 50 papers studied.

The Wall Street Journal’s average daily circulation was up 0.8% over the year although full paid home delivery, representing 58% of circulation, was down 7.8%. Full paid single copy sales were off 7.4%.

The declines were offset by copies to schools, which were up 39%. The WSJ includes online subscriptions in calculating total daily circulation.

USA Today Gets Highest Mark

Barlow’s highest mark went to USA Today, which was up 7.2% to 2,309,853. The paper raised its newsstand price to 75 cents from 50 cents in September and this may affect sales, he noted.

The paper depends heavily on hotel guest and airport copies, which make up 48% of circulation.

Single copy sales are 39% and home delivery and mail, 13%. Both are at the full price.

COUNCIL MULLS NEED
FOR GUIDELINES.
The Council of PR Firms has established a committee to probe whether there is a need to develop guidelines for handling government PR contracts, Harris Diamond, Council chairman and Weber Shandwick CEO, told O’Dwyer’s.

He would not identify members of the committee, other than to say they are a “variety of people from a variety of firms.”

Ogilvy PR Worldwide CEO Marcia Silverman heads the panel that will explore how the government awards PR pacts, and how they are serviced after being doled out to firms. Disclosure practices rank as another area of discussion.

The Council’s move follows the New York Times attacks on video news releases, and a study by House Democrats showing that the Bush Administration spent more than $250 during its first term for PR, more than twice what was spent by the Clinton Administration.

NEWS CORP. HIRES GLOVER PARK.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., parent company of Fox News and the New York Post, has hired Glover Park Group for “advocacy & image advertising, media relations, issues & crisis management and research,” according to its federal filing.

Joel Johnson, a former aide to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, heads the account. Fox spearheaded the successful drive to defeat Daschle, portraying the South Dakota Democrat as an obstacle to President Bush’s agenda.

The New York Times on March 22 profiled GPG as a firm with “extremely close ties to two giants of the Democratic Party: Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

The story identifies former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart as a founder of GPG. It highlights GPG staffers with Hillary Clinton connections including her former spokesperson Howard Wolfson, campaign coordinator Gigi Georges and political action committee director Patty Doyle.

The Times reports that The American Spectator dubbed GPG as the “center of operations” for a potential “Hillary for President” bid.

Besides News Corp., GPG has picked up high-profile accounts such as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (healthcare reform) and Major League Baseball Players Assn. (steroids).

WSJ’S SHERER TO OGILVY.
Paul Sherer, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, is now VP-senior media and editorial strategist, in Ogilvy PR Worldwide’s San Francisco office. At the WSJ, Sherer covered bankruptcies, corporate restructurings, international finance, venture capital and junk bonds.

He led coverage of the collapse of Thailand’s financial system in `97, and the ensuing bailout by the International Monetary Fund.

Sherer also reported on Microsoft for PC Week, and is author of “Targets of Suspicion,” which is about Dept. of Homeland Security’s special registration program.

Michael Law, who formerly headed Ogilvy’s southeast Asian group, is the WPP Group unit’s California managing director.

NEW PR FIRM
TO TARGET ITS PITCHES.
Many PR firms take a “quantity-oriented approach” to getting a client’s message out, says Scott Baradell, who just opened his own PR firm called the Idea Grove in Dallas, Tex.

Baradell, 39, a former reporter for The Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Observer, who was Belo Corp.’s VP/ communications from 2001 to 2004, said calling the news media to pitch a story is “bulk” activity at most PR firms.

“They make many calls to reporters to increase their chances of placement. And—for the sake of cost efficiency—a junior staffer who knows very little about the client’s product or company often does the work,” he said.

Baradell said the staffer might make 100 calls to reporters to get mentioned in, say, three publications. And the agency presents that to the client as a success.

“At the Idea Grove, we worry about the 97 ‘other’ calls. Did the caller, because of his or her inexperience or lack of knowledge, have rude or embarrassing interactions with reporters that will cause them to never write about the client’s product or company? We don’t take a ‘bulk’ approach in media relations or anything we do.”

He said his firm will do the homework to create highly focused messages for clients; then, “we communicate those messages to highly targeted groups of people, who in most cases, want to receive the message.”

PUBLISHER: SPONSORS
NOT SOLD ‘ACCESS’.
James Hopson, publisher of The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, said the 10 businesses that paid a $25,000 fee to join the advisory board of the new Capital Region Business Journal did so because they want to “make sure that neither they nor anybody else was going to influence our journalism.”

“I was not selling access and I certainly did not promise it,” Hopson said in a memo to the paper’s staff following a report in The Capital Times that questioned the ethical dimensions of the sponsorship package, which includes a minimum of six meetings per year with key editors of the State Journal and CRBJ.

“When I spoke to candidates for these sponsorships, my pitch was exactly the reverse of selling access,” said Hopson. “I wanted this advisory board because I wanted advice on the categories of business activity that were most important to cover, on the kinds of topics people would be interested in reading about,” he said.

He said the sponsors “agreed at our first meeting” that they were not interested in puffery.

Ellen Foley, editor of the State Journal, said she also disagreed with anyone who says “we’re selling access.” She said it does not matter who you are, “you can call me up and talk any time.”

MEDIA BRIEFS_____________________
TiVo is offering journalists a $200 discount on its new TiVo-Humax Digital Video Recorder, which sells for $299.

The “Media Accommodation Program,” which was e-mailed to reporters by TiVo’s PR department, was not intended to influence the media’s coverage of the company, a spokesman for the company told Phillip Swann, president of TVPredications.com.

Maryland Public TV is cancelling “Wall Street Week.” The last episode of the 35-year-old PBS series will air on June 24. The show never regained its momentum after host Louis Rukeyser left and funding declined.

PLACEMENT TIPS___________________
xplor, an outdoor magazine, made its debut on March 16 in Chattanooga, Tenn.

True North Custom Publishing, a Chattanooga-based company, is producing the magazine with backing from RedPoint Management, whose owner Mike Pollock is editor-at-large.

The magazine will have articles about various outdoor activities in the Chattanooga region, including kayaking, rock climbing, hiking and mountain biking.

Secondary features include environmental and educational issues, plus a current listing of outdoor activities such as places to hike and mountain bike and where to buy gear.

Sheryl Montle, who works for TNCP, is managing editor of xplor. It is starting with almost 50,000 readers from the local area to California and Canada.

Montle can be reached at 423/266-3234.

BusinessTVChannel.com has started a new online TV show, called “CEO Moms,” that airs every Monday.

The new segment, which began on March 7, is hosted by Valerie Kinsey Harris, who is the founder and PR manager of The Kinsey Group, an Atlanta PR firm.

Harris will interview a different mom who has started a business from home or is considering leaving a job or career to do so. Harris is at 770/234-0459.

Sylvester Stallone, the actor, has started a personality workout magazine, called Sly, which will feature him on every cover. Stallone is also editorial director.

The monthly magazine will show men how to “stay in the game past 40” with articles on health, nutrition, style, technology and travel.

Neil Boulton, who is editor-in-chief of Men’s Fitness, is also editor-in-chief of Sly.

Washington Hoy will make its debut on April 1 in the D.C. metro area as an English-Spanish weekly newspaper.

The paper, which is based in Silver Spring, Md., is a joint venture by three journalists—Alex Ormaza, publisher; Isabel Estrada-Portales, associate publisher/managing editor, and Jorge Dalmau, executive editor.

The new publication will have a tabloid format and will be distributed free of charge at Latino stores, Metro stations, colleges, embassies and other places.

Ormaza can be reached at 703/371-4609.

Campbell Robertson is replacing Joyce Wadler as the writer of the “Boldface” column in The New York Times.

Richard Leiby has quit writing “The Reliable Source” column for The Washington Post. No replacement has been named. Leiby took over the column after Lloyd Grove went to The New York Daily News about 18 months ago.

(Media news continued on next page)

CHINA ISSUES REPORTING RULES.
The Publicity Dept. of the Central Committee of the Communist Party has issued regulations that forbid reporters and editors, who are employed by state-run news organizations, from seeking benefits or gifts that might influence their writing.

China has about 150,000 journalists. More than 70,000 are writers for newspapers and magazines, and more than 60,000 are from broadcasting and TV stations. The rest work for news agencies such as Xinhua.

The press watchdog’s new rules, which went into effect on March 1, also prohibit journalists from operating businesses or taking concurrent jobs at other press or economic organizations.

Chinese reporters and editors who fabricate stories or take bribes will face stern punishments including confiscation of their press cards and a five-year ban from reporting work, according to the new regulations.

People, who impersonate reporters, will be given “severe penalities.” Journalists who are bribed to report unjustly or write stories with false information can have their press cards revoked and be barred from news writing for five years.

If they are given criminal penalties for violating laws, they may not work as journalists for the rest of their lives, according to the rules.

The General Administration of Press and Publication issued 146,541 new press cards, hoping to curb the rampancy of phony cards.

SPORTS MAGS REACH OUT
TO HISPANICS.
Editorial Televisa has teamed with ESPN Deportes to start a monthly Spanish-language sports magazine.

ESPN Deportes will have original content geared toward the interests of the Hispanic population in the U.S.

Editorial coverage is expected to include coverage of Major League Baseball, as well as Caribbean and Mexican league baseball; boxing; NFL; Latin American, European, and international soccer; auto racing; action sports, and translations of articles from English-language sister ESPN The Magazine.
A preview edition is planned for May.

Miami-based Editorial Televisa, an arm of the Mexican media giant, will publish and distribute the magazine.

Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated plans to publish three test issues of Si Latino, starting with a baseball season preview on April 7. That will be followed by an NFL and boxing look-ahead in August, with a year-end issue to focus on soccer’s 2006 World Cup.

Sensacion Marketing, a small New York-based publisher, last year ramped up Futbol Mundial as a newspaper distributed in 13 Spanish-language newspapers. Next month, it is starting Beisbol Mundial as a quarterly, also as a newspaper insert.

PEOPLE_______________________
Jyll Holzman, senior VP for advertising at The New York Times, and John Geddes, managing editor for news operations there, were married March 19.

Neil Chase, a co-managing editor for CBS marketwatch.com in San Francisco, has joined NYTimes.com in New York as deputy editor for news, handling hard news sections, like foreign, national, business and sports.

Philip Gourevitch, 43, a longtime staff writer of The New Yorker magazine, was named editor of The Paris Review, based in New York.

Carolyn Noyes, executive managing editor of Seventeen, has resigned, and Sunny Gold, who was Seventeen’s health editor, has joined Glamour as associate editor.

Ron Mwangaguhunga will write a monthly column starting in May for Razor Magazine. He will continue to provide his daily posting at his ronmwangaguhunga.blogspot.com site.

David Andelman has resigned as business editor of The New York Daily News. Dan Dunaief was named acting business editor.

Diane Weathers has stepped down as editor-in-chief of Essence magazine.

Jerry Schwartz, 49, was named editor of AP NewsFeatures, replacing Bruce DeSilvia, who was named writing coach for The Associated Press.

Myron Kandel, who retired March 12 as financial editor of CNN, held a party for his “PR friends” on March 28.

Mary Matalin, political pundit, who was an assistant to Vice President Cheney during his first term, was hired by Simon & Schuster to run a new conservative publishing imprint. She will continue to work out of Washington, D.C.

Marc Millstein, founder and editor-in-chief of Executive Technology magazine, is joining Edgell Communications as associate publisher of RIS News on March 28.

Media numbers___________________
394—The number of entries considered by the preliminary judges in this year’s Gerald Loeb Awards for distinquished business and financial journalism, tying last year’s record high.

40,000—The number of signers of a petition, which was circulated by an Internet group called Free Press, that asks the FCC to probe the use by broadcasters of government-created VNRs.

52—The number of free daily newspaper editions published by Metro International in 75 cities in 17 countries in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America.

8,000,000—The number of weblogs tracked by Technorati.com through its search tool and directory services.

PR firms pitching Edward Jones (page one) must read the 12-page SEC description of the scam that this huge ($2.9 billion revenues) brokerage has been pulling on its many thousands of customers (SEC.gov and Edward Jones in “search”).

Agents were instructed to push mutual funds that paid extra fees to the company besides the usual “standard sales loads, commissions, Rule 12b-1 (SEC) fees, expense reimbursements and sub-transfer-agent fees for maintaining customer account information.”

Jones even demanded ownership interest in some of the high-commission funds they favored. In fact, out of the thousands of funds available, Jones salespeople were instructed to push only a few heavily loaded funds.

The customers were not told of this “conflict of interest,” noted the SEC.

Jones, with 9,100 mostly one-broker offices, put on this folksy, neighborhood broker false face while its agents were loading up naive customers with expensive mutual funds. Investors would have been much better off just buying a no-load fund based on the S&P 500.

Jones, according to the SEC release that came out during the holidays (Dec. 22, 2004), agreed to pay $75M in fines. Any settlements it must now make with those who sue the company are not to be subtracted from the $75M, says the SEC.

Speaking of scams, a lot of newspapers, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, New York Post and New York Daily News, among others, are incapable of reporting accurate average circulations (page one).

The four papers left out 20, 27, 29 and 30 days, respectively, in calculating their “averages.”

This is not the only trick being pulled with numbers, either, if you read the exhaustive report by Steven Barlow of Prudential Equity Research.

Imagine the New York Yankees or some other team removing 30 days from their attendance figures because the weather was threatening or the opposing teams were dull. Their figures wouldn’t be “averages” and neither are the “averages” of the newspapers. Circulation scandals, resulting in lawsuits and firings, have hit Newsday of Long Island and other papers. It doesn’t do their credibility any good.

While the business side of newspapers appears to be no different from the business side of other types of industries, journalists have a “highly moral character,” according to a book-length study by Prof. Lee Wilkins of the Missouri School of Journalism and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University.

They used the “Defining Issues Test” on 249 print and broadcast reporters nationwide and found that “thinking like a journalist involves moral reflection done at a level…that equals or exceeds members of other learned professions.”

Researchers gave the same test to 65 ad people and found “ad professionals do lack ethics, or at the very least choose not to exercise the ethical reasoning abilities they have.” The study is at : www.aejmc.org/pubs/
jmcqaut04/coleman.pdf.

Stepping into the ethical fray last week was the Council of PR Firms, which said a committee would set guidelines for handling government contracts (pg. 2).

This touched off comments on odwyerpr.com including one that wondered how Marcia Silverman of Ogilvy PR can head this panel when three of her co-workers are awaiting criminal sentencing on charges of cheating the government. Another wondered if Ketchum, a founding member of CPRF now under probes by at least five government agencies, will be represented on the panel, whose members have yet to be disclosed. CPRF will no doubt ask for “transparency,” said another posting, while keeping confidential the panelists.

Ethical issues abound in PR/IR and journalism, including columnists being paid via PR firms by institutions they write about; security analysts writing about stocks they own; newspapers fudging their circulation figures; reporters being barred from asking questions at the quarterly teleconferences of public companies; PR pros hiding when controversy strikes (i.e., Ray Kotcher and Lorraine Thelian of Ketchum); PRSA lying to its new members by not warning they will be second-class citizens ineligible for national office and will be looked down upon by APR members, and PRSA’s misleading balance sheet which treats dues as a “gift” to PRSA with no claim on future services.

None of these topics was discussed at the “ethics summit” of PRSA March 22. Judy Phair, PRSA president, told reps from NIRI, SPJ, Arthur W. Page, Black PR Society and other groups (a complete list was not available) that the “big picture” rather than “specific issues” were to be discussed (crippling this summit).

PRSA studied the ethics codes of five other PR and journalism groups and found none had any enforcement mechanisms. PRSA can only expel members who are found guilty in a court of law, Phair said.

Jim Edwards of BrandWeek told an afternoon press teleconference that justice will be very slow at PRSA since it took six years for the courts to find Ogilvy employees guilty of fraud.

Michael Cherenson of the PRSA board said the smartest thing all day when he noted, “Enron’s ethics code was 60 pages.”

The secretive way PRSA conducted this “ethics summit,” including not publicly announcing it, withholding attendance lists, barring reporters, and only letting them ask questions on the phone when a press conference could have been held, is further proof of the non-New York nature of PRSA that makes it so inhospitable to PRSA/N.Y.

By New York we don’t mean a place but a state of mind; a willingness to discuss issues in public; sophistication, and guts rather than fearfulness. PRSA/NY should follow the 1989 lead of the Institute for PR and withdraw from national ASAP.

– Jack O'Dwyer