Prompt Communications

Welcome

Thanks for reading this edition of the Prompt Communications newsletter.

This week we're pleased to announce that Prompt has been appointed as the public relations agency for the GenSight Group. GenSight is a leading provider of Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPfM) solutions that enable faster and more focused new product development and improved ROI in project-intensive organisations. EPfM is an exciting new market space and Prompt will be working with GenSight's management team on analyst relations, media strategy and increasing visibility in key vertical markets.

For any feedback on our newsletter, or to discuss how we can help you with your PR, marketing, social media initiatives, copywriting or surveys, please email me at hbutters@prompt-communications.com. We are always delighted to hear from you.

Best regards,
Hazel Butters
Prompt Communications

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US Media News

By Tarryn Morley

Geoff Dodge has resigned as the senior vice president and publisher of BusinessWeek to join Salesforce.com, a CRM software company. Dodge was recently passed over for the job of BusinessWeek president. He has previously served as the associate publisher and advertising sales manager for the publication. No replacement for Dodge has been announced.

Peter S. Goodman left his post as international economics reporter at the Washington Post on August 31. In mid-October, he will join the New York Times as a national news correspondent.

Douglas Frantz joined Portfolio as a Senior Writer this week. Frantz previously worked for the Los Angeles Times and most recently served as a managing editor at the newspaper.

Several other changes have taken place at the LA Times, which has recently added a number of editorial staff members to its Web site to help editors and reporters produce material that is appropriate for both the newspaper and latimes.com. Diana Swartz now serves as national news deputy editor, and Mary MacVean is now deputy news editor.

UK Media News

By Tarryn Morley

Intelligent Life, the new quarterly upmarket lifestyle magazine from The Economist, was officially launched this week. Edward Carr has been appointed editor of the new magazine. Other editorial appointments include Tim de Lisle as deputy editor; Rebecca Willis, former travel editor of Vogue, as associate editor; and Isabel Lloyd, former features editor of the Independent, as commissioning editor.

Patience Wheatcroft's resignation from her post as editor of the Sunday Telegraph has caused a flurry of editorial changes at the paper and the Daily Telegraph. Telegraph deputy editor Ian MacGregor has been appointed as her replacement. Will Lewis has been appointed as editor-in-chief for both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. Tony Gallagher is now deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph.

David Ludlow has replaced Paul Sanders as editor of Dennis Publishing's Computer Shopper. Ludlow was previously deputy editor at the publication. Sanders is now Dennis Publishing's editorial director and will oversee the publisher's online strategy. Jim Martin will replace Ludlow when he joins Computer Shopper as reviews editor. Martin most recently worked for PC Pro.

Website of the Week

By Sean McManus

Egypt's Great Pyramid is the only surviving wonder of the ancient world. Now there are plans to build a new Great Pyramid in Eastern Germany and you're invited to register your interest in having your remains interred there. As more people die and their memorial stones are added to the structure, it will grow to become the largest artificial structure ever built, the website claims. Your place in the pyramid will cost EUR700 and it's open to all-comers, whatever their religion or nationality. What's more, the pyramid will become a massive tourist attraction and will help to stimulate the depressed economy in the former East Germany. Everyone's a winner. Er, except those inside the pyramid. Because they're dead.

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Web 2.0 Watch

By Fiona Blamey

Could social media save local media?

Gaurishankar Rajak, a barely-educated washerman, has dedicated the last 21 years to publishing a handwritten local newspaper, Din Dalit, exposing corruption and discrimination in his home town of Dumka.

Rajak decided to create Din Dalit after trying in vain to interest his local media in covering government discrimination against the poor. As well as highlighting local issues and providing a focal point for public debate, Din Dalit has made a concrete difference by helping at least one Dumka resident to obtain social security payments.

As Rajak has discovered, Din Dalit meets a need for dedicated community reporting that should be fulfilled by established local news media organisations - not just in India, but also in the US and the UK.

Yet here and elsewhere, local news media are in crisis. Advertisers are preferring to spend their money with Google or advertise for free on sites like Craigslist. Falling circulations and rising running costs are forcing local papers to scale down or amalgamate, so that 'hyperlocal' issues are no longer featured. And professional journalists often have an eye on more prestigious outlets, leaving local reporting to rookies, no-hopers or retirees.

The impact may be profound: without their own media, neighbourhoods can lose their identity and feeling of 'togetherness', contributing to a deterioration of the shared sense of place and belonging that holds communities together.

Could amateurs step into this breach, as Rajak has done? The growing use of social media like blogging and online social networking makes amateur community reporting a very viable proposition. Could bloggers become hyperlocal reporters? And could local news media collaborate with those bloggers to reinvigorate hyperlocal coverage? Could the recent successful Facebook campaign against HSBC's overdraft fees be replicated for local issues?

Media commentator Jeff Jarvis is convinced that if local media start partnering with bloggers, the decline in local reporting can be halted and even reversed. Author Steven Johnson, meanwhile, has created Outside In, a website that aggregates blog posts about specific postcodes, drawing individual bloggers together to form ad-hoc reporting communities.

And with Facebook proving to be a hugely fertile forum for single-issue groups and campaigns that - for the moment at least - are capable of garnering significant mainstream media attention, the internet may yet turn out to be the saviour of the local community, rather than its downfall.

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Technology News

By Fiona Blamey, Sean McManus and Reshma Raghavani

China infiltrates US defence network

According to the Financial Times, senior US defence officials believe that China has the capability to disrupt US defence communications at critical times. Intelligence agencies are believed to frequently probe each other's networks just to test the response, in the same way that Russian fighter aircraft would scoot through UK airspace during the Cold War only to be escorted home by the RAF. The Pentagon has confirmed it shut down systems serving the defence secretary in response to an attack in June, but has declined to go on the record with a formal accusation that China was responsible. Officials speaking off the record told the FT that the People's Liberation Army was behind the attack, but The Register warns that such claims should be taken with a pinch of salt: bigging up China as an enemy won't do the US defence industry any harm when it comes to budget reviews.

Apple rejigs iPods and iPhones

Apple has cut the price of the iPhone by $200 just two months after it first went on sale. Some press reports were scathing, with The Register describing it as a slap to Apple's one million most ardent supporters. Apple has bounced back by offering early adopters a voucher for $100. iPhone customers will still be out of pocket, but at least Apple's met them halfway.

Apple also announced the iPod Touch, which strips the phone from the iPhone so that you effectively get a slinky touch-screen interface for the iPod. The device supports wi-fi, so that you can buy music at participating hotspots without using a PC. Cheekily, Apple has also said it will charge double for iTunes music downloads that can be used as ringtones on the iPhone. With no shortage of workarounds, we can't see that being popular with people who have already paid to download their music.

Facebook knocks down garden wall

Long criticised for being a 'walled garden' that doesn't share its data with the wider internet, Facebook has this week been preparing to make its members' profile information searchable by Google. While some will see this as a victory for transparency and information-sharing, others are more circumspect. I'm already wary of 'people-search' engines like ZoomInfo that aggregate data about me (and you, try it) from various places on the internet and pull it into one place to create a spookily detailed profile. We recently placed an article for our client Complinet that talks about the risks of identity theft from Facebook. Now that your personal information is becoming even more public, the risks are becoming even greater. Be alert.

New tool rates trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries

Tech gossip-blog Valleywag reports on a new tool that rates the trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries down to the level of individual words and phrases. The University of California at Santa Cruz's Wiki Lab has developed the Wikipedia trust coloring tool, which monitors which words and phrases are changed most frequently, and highlights them in various fetching shades of orange. The more times a word or phrase is changed, goes the thinking, the more contentious it is, and therefore the more likely it is to be biased. Statements that have never been altered display normally, instantly highlighting the most stable - and therefore most trustworthy - content on the site.

Finally something to slow 007!

At the Frankfurt Motor Show next week, Volvo will unveil the breathalyser that will be built in to some of its 2008 models. Alcoguard will stop a car from starting if the driver is over the legal alcohol limit. In order to start the car, the driver has to blow into a hand-held unit which will analyse the results and transmit a radio signal to the car's electronic system. If the reading is over the legal limit, the engine will not start. One in every three fatal road traffic accidents is alcohol-related in Europe, so this sounds like a good idea. But how practical and time consuming is it really if you are running errands using the car frequently? Also, 007 may not have such a quick get away after all.

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