Comet Branding - Branding | PR | Social Media

Response to Sarah Soczka's Post on "5 Reasons Why @NewsHub is Better Than @BizJournalMke"

When I arrived to my office this morning, I took a quick look at my Tweetdeck, which is a desktop Twitter application that I use, and saw this post by @artcity (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s arts, culture and architecture reporter, Mary Louise Schumacher. She also organized a recent Tweetup at Art Bar.):

So, I clicked on the link and read Sarah Soczka’s Post on “5 Reasons Why @NewsHub is Better Than @BizJournalMke.” It’s interesting reading – please take a look.

Now, my post here has little to do with whether Sarah, who works in PR for a Milwaukee-based firm, makes valid points in her argument. She does. Rather, it has to do with the following:

1) Is her post a fair comparison?
2) Should a PR person publicly be critical of a journalistic entity, especially in a smaller market like Milwaukee?
3) Is her post in line with the ideals of social media?

Let’s start with a note and a disclaimer. I am writing this because I am a pretty big advocate for Milwaukee, for PR and for social media’s use as a tool in the branding + PR picture. Beyond this, I don’t intend to throw any other Twitterers under the bus or Sarah either. I love seeing so many of our local pubs on Twitter! Let’s see some more! I wish only to raise some questions, offer my opinions and hopefully shed some light on this topic. As a note, I contacted the Journal Sentinel, the Business Journal and Sarah for comments.

Here are her comments: “First, I had no idea this thing was going to get so big. I see that you pointed out where I work. For the record, my blog does not represent any viewpoints of my agency and is purely my own opinion. [NOTE: This is my bad here. I apologize for mentioning where she works. She is right.] I hope it is clear that I am in no way denouncing either paper’s value only their use of Twitter. If I have got something wrong I will readily admit it and post a correction on my blog.”

1) Simply put, comparing @NewsHub to @BizJournalMKE is pretty apples to oranges. Each, in their current form, have very different objectives. I personally dig @NewsHub (Sharif Durhams). He does very well including personality and egaging readers. As a side note, The Business Journal and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel were both bystanders in Sarah’s post. Sarah was likely trying to give kudos to a JS feed that uses personality and has been engaging (two things I highly recommend).

Sarah did confirm this, “I was mainly trying to give kudos to @NewsHub. I had been following both accounts and had noticed such a difference in their styles and truly appreciated @NewsHub’s use of Twitter. Like I was not trying to “beat up” or “slam” @BizJournalMke. Although it may have seemed harsh. In truth, both paper’s are excellent sources of news. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t follow either of them.”

I contacted Sharif to get his take on the post and the comparison, and I paraphrase it here: We patterned a lot of what we’re doing with @NewsHub after @ColonelTribune at the Chicago Tribune and @statesman at the Austin American-Statesman. We are still learning – we all are.

In my opinion, a more fair comparison for Sarah to make would be among the following: @BizJournalMKE, @js_biz and @BizTimesMedia. Each is currently focused on being a news feed and very useful.

2) This is one I’d love to hear comments from journalists and pr people. Over the last six months there have been many PR vs. Journalist/blogger memes that have floated through the social web. This is not one of those. However, in my opinion, being publicly critical of a journalistic entity should always be handled with caution if you are a PR person.

In PR, we work A LOT with a media and there are such thing as being black listed. I am not implying that any of our local outlets use these or would not cover a piece of news because of a conflict with the PR person. Rather, I’m saying in PR we need to have friendly relationships with media outlets and you never know how one or two might react to a critical blog post.

3) Social media is very new to everyone – especially traditional news outlets – and that’s cool. Each of us, no matter if we have 1,300 followers, 10 followers or nearly 190,000 like @lancearmstrong, started out not knowing what we were doing.

We all learned along the way. Many of us have received help, tips and guidance from others. Social media is very much about working together as a community – I’ve even made the point that it should be called “social we-dia instead of social me-dia.”

In additional, the Milwaukee Business Journal has only been on Twitter since February 10th – just over two weeks. The publication still has time to learn, evolve and grow and I know it will. The Biz Journal also has to deal with a national level organization that likely restricts many of its actions and potentially its use of social media. So, quite frankly, it might not be able to do much more than it is currently.

Just prior to posting, I received a note from Mark Kass, Editor of the Milwaukee Business Journal: “Our site is evolving every day as we just entered Twitter two weeks ago. I have been amazed at the response and the interest in what we are doing. It really shows again the amount of respect The Business Journal has in the community and people want to know what we have to report and say.

“We have a lot of internal interest in social media and Twitter and it is something you will be seeing a lot more of over the next several months as we continue to move into new areas. It is not your traditional media outlet and it takes time for those of us who work in the daily and weekly media business to learn the new rules and best ways to communicate our message. We are learning every day and I believe our offerings are improving. All of our reporters now have Twitter sites and we will begin promoting them in our paper tomorrow. They will be more interactive with their followers. We are looking at adding additional site for events and issues that will also be more interactive. I would encourage people to keep looking for our postings. They will be pleased with what they see.”

Sharif made a really great point when he added, “I think all of us in the mainstream media are trying to figure out how to use these tools. We’re learning from each other about how people want to get their news and interact with reporters.”

So, in conclusion, maybe I’m a total wuss, but I believe it’s very important to be cautious about what we each put on our blogs, on Facebook, in our Twitter feeds and elsewhere. Like Sarah said, “I had no idea this thing was going to get so big.” Let’s all work together to make everything we do even better – together! So, to all of the media outlets out there – keep it up. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Also, cheers to Sarah for having an opinion and not being afraid to share it.

Tags: Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, social media