NYC ISSUES BIG VOTER ED RFP.

New York City’s Board of Elections has issued a multimillion-dollar RFP to educate the Big Apple’s 4.3M registered voters about new electronic machines that will be installed under the ’02 “Help America Vote Act.”

The Board is looking for a PR firm to announce the new system, educate the public about how it works, and inspire voters’ confidence in the accuracy and reliability of casting their votes using the new machines, according to the RFP.

The firm must be able to translate messages into Spanish, Chinese and Korean.

The BOE wants a firm with at least $3M in revenues in each of the last three years, and experience in working with a public service organization serving a population of at least 500,000.

The contract begins June 5 and runs through December ’08. There are two two-year option years that are renewable at the same financial terms.

There is a mandatory pre-proposal conference on April 21. Proposals are due May 8. Elliot Borack has info at 212/487-7290, or [email protected].

HAMMOND WINS S.C. TOURISM ACCOUNT.
Lou Hammond & Associates has won a review for South Carolina’s $200K/year PR account to highlight its beaches, resorts and world-class golfing to the public and media.

The New York-based firm has offices in Charleston, S.C., and Miami. It defeated Chernoff Newman and Edelman for the account.

The S.C. Dept. of Parks, Recreation and Tourism has not recently worked with outside PR counsel. It wants LH&A to complement ongoing advertising and marketing efforts that cultivate the Palmetto State’s 32 million visitors.

HULLIN SUCCEEDS DELEON AT BOEING.
Rudy deLeon, 53, is stepping down as Boeing’s top lobbyist on June 30. He will be succeeded by Tod Hullin, who will move from Chicago to Washington.

Hullin, senior VP-public policy and communications, joined the aerospace company in `03. The 62-year-old executive held top public policy posts at Vivendi Universal, Seagram Co., Time Warner and SmithKline Beecham.

Tom Downey, who headed PR for Boeing Commercial Airlpanes unit in Seattle, will move to Chicago to take over Hullin’s duties.

Boeing is looking for an executive to replace Downey.

BOLTON STEPS DOWN FROM AETNA PR POST.
Roger Bolton, SVP of communications for Aetna in an 11-year career at the $20B insurance giant, has decided to leave the company pending the appointment of a successor.

The company told O’Dwyer’s it has begun an internal and external search for a replacement.

Bolton heads PR, public affairs, internal/executive communications, advertising and brand management for the company. He also heads the company’s Council for Organizational Effectiveness, and is a member of the Aetna Foundation and Aetna PAC.

Bolton is president of the Arthur W. Page Society and a member of PR Seminar.

He began his career as a newspaper reporter before jumping into politics as press secretary and staff director to Rep. Clarence Brown (R-Ohio).

He then joined the Reagan-Bush re-election campaign as director of speechwriting, later serving as assistant U.S. representative for public affairs in the Executive Office of the President and as a special assistant to Reagan.

His corporate PR career included a stint as director of corporate media relations for IBM and director of communications for Big Blue’s server and software groups.

COMMCOR ACQUIRES BLISS GOUVERNEUR.
Bliss, Gouverneur & Assocs., the 25-member New York-based financial and professional services shop, has been acquired by CommCor Inc., which has revenues in the $30M range.

BG&A, which had a strategic alliance with CommCor’s Dudnyk Healthcare Advertising unit for more than a year, chalked up $3.7M in `05 fees.

CommCor is located in the Philadelphia suburb of Horsham and is the parent company of Ad-Tech, a medical device/diagnostic ad agency; NDW, a marcom outfit, and Virtu Interactive, a web marketing operation.

Ed Dudnyk, CEO of CommCor, says the deal enables him to service a broad range of “mature markets.”

John Bliss told O’Dwyer’s he made the deal because the “name of the game is keeping good people” as the PR market strengthens. Bliss feels the financial muscle of Commcor will enable him to better reward his staffers. He also was eager to expand into the healthcare PR arena.

BG&A will continue to operate under its own name, serving clients MetLife, BDO Seidman, KeyCorp and Chubb.

PENTAGON PROPAGANDA TARGETS U.S.

The U.S. military is “hyping” the role that Al-Qaeda plays in the chaos of Iraq, according to a report in the Washington Post. It is bolstering the profile of Al-Qaeda leader Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, to capitalize on the traditional distrust that Iraqis have for foreigners, and to tie the terror group with the 9/11 attacks.

The propaganda campaign, according to military documents of the Pentagon’s “strategic communications program,” says the “U.S. home audience” is among its six target audiences.

The Pentagon successfully leaked information to Dexter Filkins, of the New York Times, that resulted in a Feb. 9 front page story about Zarqawi’s role in planning suicide attacks. Filkins says he was not aware that he was being used by the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit.

In another instance, Fox News ran a video of the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein that it received from the Pentagon’s psychological operation corps.

The Pentagon denies that is trying to manipulate the U.S. press. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesperson, said the intention was to provide Filkins with a “good scoop.”

Col. James Treadwell, who commanded the psyop unit in Iraq in ’03, told the Post that in the era of the Internet and satellite TV, it is impossible to prevent information spread in Iraq from hitting the U.S. This carryover is “not blowback, it’s bleed-over,” he said.

The Zarqawi program is separate from the work of The Lincoln Group, which is planting pro-American stories in the Iraqi press.

SPSU WANTS PR HELP.

Southern Polytechnic State University is looking for a PR firm to drive the message that it is “Georgia’s technology university.”

The Marietta-based institution’s RFI says it wants to hike public awareness that it uses “technology to teach technology” to solve real-world problems.

SPSU has relied on an array of marketing slogans. Using the “Tipping Point” philosophy, SPSU believes its $100K marketing communications budget (July 1-Nov. 30) can create the one “dramatic moment” to power it to the top of the heap.

The school wants pitches by May 1. More information is available at [email protected].

Gustav Carlson, VP of communications for Standard & Poor’s, has joined Thompson Corp., the $8.7B business information company.

The 48-year-old executive will oversee a VP team of four and report directly to president/CEO Richard Harrington.

Prior to S&P, Carlson was an associate partner in corporate communications at Accenture, and earlier he held stints at Barnes&Noble.com, PaineWebber (vice president and director of media relations ) and a VP and senior counselor at Hill & Knowlton.

He began his career in journalism as a business editor for the New York Times and Miami Herald.

‘THANK YOU FOR SMOKING’ PRAISED.

“Here is a satire both savage and elegant, a dagger instead of a shotgun,” says Chicago Sun Times reviewer Roger Ebert of “Thank You For Smoking,” a movie based on the 1994 book by Christopher Buckley, son of William Buckley.

David Rooney of Variety calls the movie “slick, stylish and sharp-witted” and says it skewers both “the corporate spin culture” and “political correctness.”

PR/lobbyists for cigarettes, liquor and guns, nicknaming themselves the “MOD Squad” (Merchants of Death), joke at lunch about how many people their industries killed that day.

“Guns don’t kill people,” quips the gun industry PR pro. “Bullets do.”

The cigarette PR pro, called a “gifted spin artist” by Variety, argues that adults should have the freedom to smoke or not.

While some reviewers are calling Nick Naylor, who works for tobacco companies, a “lobbyist,” he spends most of his time in the public eye, including appearing on a TV panel show about cancer.

His main assignment is to get cigarettes back into the hands of movie heroes since the only characters smoking now are “psychopaths” and “Europeans.”

Those studying PR will learn that working in secret and stopping or blocking a story or legislation are common tasks of PR pros.

One of Naylor’s tasks is to give “a briefcase of money” to a former “Marlboro Man,” who is dying of cancer. Naylor explains that it is a gift and the donor expects the recipient to stop his attacks on smoking. The ex-Marlboro Man wants to take half the money and reduce his attacks, but Naylor explains it’s all or nothing.

Another task is to stop a bill that would require a skull and crossbones on every pack of cigarettes.
Naylor tells a reporter friend about the MOD Squad and other aspects of his job and the reporter eventually does a major feature on this, “outing” Naylor and the PR pros for the gun and liquor industries.

In the last scene, Naylor has quit his job and is holding an outdoor press conference. A reporter asks what he actually does. “I talk,” he says, which is the last line in the movie.

HENRY ROGERS SCHOLARSHIP SET AT USC.

The USC Annenberg School of Communications has established a scholarship fund to honor the legendary PR man, Henry Rogers. It is funded by his children Marcia Ross and Ron Rogers, who runs the Rogers Group in Los Angeles.

Rogers, who died in 1995, launched his own firm in 1935, and gained notice for his work on behalf of Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford.

He partnered with Warren Cowan in 1950 to form Rogers & Cowan, which is now part of Interpublic.

The Henry C. Rogers Endowed Scholarship is to be awarded to a PR graduate student who demonstrates professional potential and a passion for the business.

Geoff Baum, Annenberg’s assistant dean-PA and special events, has more info at 213/821-1491.

POST USES SUN TO HIT TIMES.

The New York Post, angered by the heavy coverage the New York Times has given to charges that a Post Page Six reporter tried to extort money from a celebrity, has accused the NYT of imbalance in its news coverage by ignoring, among other stories, the “scandal over the anti-Israel paper co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.”

The Post’s charges of imbalance came on April 12, the very day that the NYT, in the “Education” section, did a lengthy story on the 82-page paper, called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

The paper was written by Stephen Walt, academic dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and John Mearsheimer, Wendell Harrison, distinguished service professor of political science and a co-director of the Program on International Security Policy, University of Chicago.

It asks, “Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?”

The answer, says the paper, is the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is described as the second biggest lobby in Washington, D.C., after AARP.

U.S. foreign policy is “bent” by this lobby and the U.S. has a “terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel,” says the paper.

Gergen, New Republic Attack Paper

David Gergen, editor-at-large for U.S. News & World Report, devoted a full column April 3 to an attack on the paper, which was headlined “An Unfair Attack.”

“Allegations that a pro-Israeli ‘lobby’ has hijacked American policy in the Middle East are without foundation and do a disservice to American Jews,” said a subhead.

Michael Oren, senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a visiting lecturer at Harvard and Yale, said in the April 10 New Republic that the paper’s “slipshod quality was so evident that the Kennedy School removed its official seal from the treatise.”

He criticizes the Harvard faculty for refusing to “distance itself from a report that fails to meet rudimentary research standards, posits unsubstantiated conspiracies, and, if directed against any other ethnic group, would surely be renounced as racist...”

The paper says that “any real debate” about Israel is blocked by the lobby. Those who bring up the subject of Israel risk being charged with anti-Semitism, say the authors.

In an unusual move for a newspaper (printing another newspaper’s editorial), the Post April 12 carried an editorial from the April 11 New York Sun chastising the NYT for putting “at least 13 individual reporters” on its coverage of the extortion charges involving a Post freelancer. The editorial said that attention came while ignoring or providing scant coverage to other important stories such as the paper on Israel, the Israel and German elections, and the dismissal of a suit against Senator Hillary Clinton relating to alleged campaign fund-raising abuses.

Eliot Cohan, professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins Univversity, told the NYT in a telephone interview that the paper is “a blanket denunciation of a very large number of American Jews and an accusation of disloyalty.”
In an opinion article in the Washington Post last week, Cohen described the paper as anti-Semitic and “a wretched piece of scholarship.”

The NYT story said that Mearsheimer initiated the paper and, considering “the subject too touchy to confront alone,” enlisted the help of Walt “to help provoke a public discussion.”

Kills ‘Boldface’

After giving extensive coverage to the Post’s Page Six flap, the Times has dropped its own “Boldface” gossip column.

Editor Bill Keller announced the shutdown in an April 12 memo in which he praised Boldface as a “great adventure” and something that was “entertaining, daring and laugh-out-loud funny.”

The paper is proud of Boldface’s five-year run, but Keller believes “even the most entertaining of adventures have a natural end.”

Keller denies killing Boldface has anything to do with the “bonfire at Page Six.”

Times hit for ‘luxury porn’

In another attack on the Times last week, the paper was criticized for its push into the “luxury porn” market and its praise of “wretched excess” as an awkward move for the venerable paper, according to the April 17 New Republic.

The mag zeroes in on the “Critical Shopper” column of Alex Kuczynski that runs in the “Thursday Styles” section. Kuczynski, recently wrote about dropping $5,000 to buy herself a “yummy, chocolate-suede shearling coat” for her birthday.

The NR frets that the Times is lending its “imprimatur” to a genre “at odds with its own high-minded liberal sensibility and intellectual pretensions.” The same paper that writes about the loss of the American dream for the lower class has Kuczynski recapping her shopping sprees at Versace's Fifth Ave. flagship store.

NR’s Michelle Cottle wrote: “With its wink-wink nudge-nudge asides and deep thoughts window-dressing, ‘Thursday Styles’ lets us indulge our desire to buy-or even imply to fantasize about buying-obscenely expensive trinkets while maintaining our intellectual integrity.”

DISNEY’S ABC POSTS SHOWS ON ’NET.

Disney ABC Television Group announced last week that it would become the first network to offer its programming free on the Internet during a two-month test.

Broadband users will be able to watch ABC hits such as “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost,” “Commander in Chief,” and “Alias” the day after they aired.

Users will have to go to a special Disney ABC site to view the content that is accompanied by zap-proof commercials.

Procter & Gamble, Ford Motor and Unilever have already signed up as sponsors of the service.

Disney ABC, in October, cut a deal with Apple Computer to show episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives on i-Tunes for $1.99 each.

(Media news continued on next page)

TIME REVAMPS MAG PR IN LATEST SHAKE-UP.

Time Inc. has revamped PR for its magazine group in the aftermath of the restructuring move that will cost another 250 jobs at the company that was one-time known as “Paradise Publishing.”

Three veteran PR staffers: Susan Ollinick (VP-communications of the parenting group), Sandy Drayton (PR person for Entertainment Weekly) and Sherri Lapidus (In Style) are exiting the company.

Time has reorganized its PR into “clusters.” Chris Connell is to oversee the women’s lifestyle and luxury group (In Style, Real Simple, Parenting and Essence), while Nancy Valentine is in charge of the entertainment and communications group (People, Entertainment Weekly).

Brief___________

Washington, D.C., counselor Eric Dezenhall is profiled as the “pit bull of PR” by BusinessWeek (April 17). He serves clients like ExxonMobil by going after its foes (Greenpeace).

The magazine also has an extensive piece about “companies in the crossfire,” dealing with crisis management matters springing from the rise of the "ideological consumer."

Bud Liebler, former senior VP-communications and marketing at Chrysler said companies used to hope that bad news would just disappear, but can't do that in the age of the Internet.

He adds that when political and religious issues are involved “you’re never going to please 100 percent of your consumers. Your goal is to do the least damage.”

Placement Tip___________

“Relationships are critical when it comes to getting a good story and photo placement in Variety,” said the magazine’s photo editor Lisa Weinstein, at an Entertainment Publicists Professional Society meeting in Hollywood.

Variety, which began running pictures in 1988, “has a whole archive of mug files, and the most important thing publicists can do is update me with their client’s photos that the client likes as often as they can,” said Weinstein. She warned that editors under tight deadlines often pull outdated photos from the collection.

Weinstein said to forget the hats and sun glasses, and send her a picture as a high resolution .jpeg.

Weinstein decides what photos to run, but not which stories will have photos on publication. Bad pictures sometimes run because editors are desperate to fill space, she said.

Weinstein says Variety runs pictures of people “interacting with each other.” Her advice: forget mugshots, and don't look for a photo credit unless it's a news story.

Many publicists send photos to the “Photo bin” which is [email protected].

Weinstein highly recommends that publicists identify in the subject line what story the photo is for, and send three to five photos.

In addition, she recommends you copy her, too at: [email protected].

FINANCIAL EDITORS: ‘GIVE US AN EXPERT.’

In the world of financial news, publicists can increase their chances of airing a story by providing experts for commentary, said an April 6th Publicity Club of New York panel of top financial editors at the 3 West Club.

“If you have an analyst who will talk to us, I’d love to hear from you,” said Amey Stone, senior editor for AOL Money Finance.

When discussing money matters, insider analysis makes for good copy. David Andelman, executive editor at Forbes.com, said financial stories rely less on breaking news and more on discussing current trends and giving them a “different twist.”

Publicists can use this model to their advantage, however, and according to Andelman, it benefits the institutions that employ them to do so.

“A good analyst is great publicity for a bank,” he said. “It’s not that hard to make a phone call. By all means, make it easier for us to talk to them.”

Because AOL owns so many news sites, Stone said her site favors “entertaining pieces on money and finance” over hard news. Likewise, Ray Hennessey, managing editor for SmartMoney.com, said his site opts to give viewers a “participatory element” in financial matters, and while almost all of the material that runs on his site during the trading week is original, many weekend pieces are actually derived from other sources.

Keeping this in mind, publicists can take solace in the fact that the age-old adage of not pitching stories that have run elsewhere may not necessarily apply.

“Having a story featured somewhere else is actually a good way to pitch,” Stone said. “If you tell me that something ran in the New York Times, it will get my attention.”

Print and online share scoops

Because many financial news organizations also own a print version, the panel said there is a large demand for experts who will speak with the media about the latest mortgage rates or the hottest new stocks.

While Andelman said he encourages PR pros to pitch reporters at Forbes’ magazine or its website, he also noted it is impractical to pitch both simply because the two groups work together.

“It’s not bad form to pitch the web and the magazine, but it is counterproductive. We know everything that they’re working on for the next several issues and they know what we’re doing.”

Andelman noted that some of the material on Forbes.com are actually stories “left over” from the Forbes magazine.

Because there is generally more liberty to run greater content on the web, however, many news items on the company’s website are "more elaborated upon" than its print counterpart.

Likewise, Allen Wastler, managing editor at CNNMoney.com, said many of the news items his site receives may also run in both the company’s print and web formats, but it’s also common to use web items as a teaser – hopefully creating “leverage” to get readers to pick up the magazine.

Two descriptions of a PR spokesperson are currently on display in the public media – one a glib, know-it-all, and the other an inept bumbler.

The former is Nick Naylor, a fictional PR pro who is the spokesperson for tobacco in the movie, “Thank You for Smoking.”

The latter is White House press secretary Scott McClellan, as described by Michael Wolff in the May Vanity Fair.

Naylor relishes intellectual combat (such as being the only pro-smoking panelist among four others on a TV show). He likes to trade gossip and witticisms with fellow PR pros and reporters.

His mantra is, “The beauty of an argument is that if you argue correctly, you’re never wrong.” Asked to define what he does, he tells a press conference, “I talk.”

The Nick Naylors, who either knew or wanted to know everything, are rare now but were common a couple of decades ago. Newspeople cherished them.

McClellan’s ineptitude (“he plods and struggles through every sentence”) is described by Wolff under the headline, “Words Fail Him.”

McClellan “doggedly repeats” set phrases such as “We’re going to continue to focus on the priorities of the American people,” no matter what questions may be flung at him, says Wolff.

He feels Presidential advisers Karen Hughes and Karl Rove have put McClellan in the press room to exasperate reporters (“a cunning, diabolical setup”).

“Every day he’s pulped, pummeled and spit upon for speaking White House untruths – or for not speaking them well enough,” says Wolff.

The “downgraded” and “gross” press briefing room (“grungy carpets, buckled acoustic tiling, shabby draperies, noxious odor, harsh lighting, broken seats”) sends the Administration’s message that the press corps is “irrelevant and out of step with the American people,” writes Wolff.

So, instead of sending their best and brightest to match wits with reporters, some organizations now send out juniors. They won’t give up any company secrets because they don’t know them. ...a paper by two college professors saying the American Israel PA Committee (AIPAC) has a “stranglehold” on the U.S. Congress and could well register as a foreign agent has been described in mostly negative terms by the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post, New York Sun, US News & World Report and New Republic. The NYT put the story on its “Education” page April 12, the same day the NYP chided it for ignoring this “scandal.” Authors of the 82-page paper, published last month by the London Review of Books, are Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, political scientist, University of Chicago. The NYP is furious at the NYT for devoting 10,000+ words and 13 reporters to charges that a Post gossip reporter tried to extort a celebrity. It accuses the NYT of ignoring or slighting other important stories.

We have the same complaint against the NYT. Why doesn’t it put 13 reporters on Omnicom and find out why its stock is 20 points below its high of 1999 in spite of higher sales and profits every quarter. ...the NYT, whose net fell 69% in Q1 to $35M, is facing a new round of embarrassment over its Jayson Blair scandal of 2003. Deposed editor Howell Raines covers Blair in a book to be published in May. ...the NYT called us April 13 offering eight weeks of delivery to our office at half price (50 cents). We accepted.

Another interesting piece in the May Vanity Fair is a full-page on HBO’s “Deadwood,” saying the program’s main character, saloon owner Al Swearengen, tends to “belch” the F word “every five seconds” and has a habit of getting on-camera oral sex during which he talks about himself. Says VF: “It seems like anything goes on 21st century cable.” Recent HBO offerings include a 45-minute segment showing how a U.K. couple, after having grown too hooked on sexual devices, learned to face each other again and have “normal” sex. At a “sexual circus,” a striptease was performed on a trapeze and another woman, standing on her head, twirled dinner plates using a stick and part of her anatomy. HBO has the same inclusive philosophy as Playboy. It presents many educational and fine art programs as well as programs laced with sex, profanity and violence. ...PRSA/New York leaders, including president Art Stevens and past-president Dena Winoker, should reject the anti-democratic practices of PRSA/national and conduct a chapter-wide debate and secret ballot on whether the chapter should withdraw from national. The chapter should study the examples of the former Long Island chapter of PRSA, which broke away in 1989 after 15 years to form PR Professionals of L.I.; New York Women in Communications, which split from national WICI in 1998, and Boston Women Communicators, which split from WICI in 1994. Relieved of national dues, all three groups have prospered. PRPLI membership grew from 70 in 1989 to 230. Dues are $65. Restaurants donate meeting places for a heavy schedule (prpli.org).

L.I. chapter members in 1989 did a “thorough” cost/benefit analysis, said president Gene Seraphine, and voted overwhelmingly to leave PRSA. “We just do not get enough from national to justify $175 per member,” he said. When the board of Boston/WICI voted to leave in 1994, WICI said it was illegal because the entire membership had to vote. That vote was taken. Boston Women Communicators has 250 members who pay $150 yearly dues. The group, open to PR pros, journalists, advertising and service people, has a program of seminars and socials plus a job board, freelancers’ forum, working mothers group, members’ directory, sources directory and special rates for students. Founder is Jane Breschard Wilson ([email protected]). NYWICI, which also has media and service members, grew from several hundred members to 1,100+. Its yearly Matrix lunch nets nearly $500K.

--Jack O'Dwyer