Last April, at John Seigenthaler's Justice & Journalism conference at the First Amendment Center, David Sellers asked me to speak at his groups conference in Phoenix. David is President of of the Conference of Court Public Information Officers - the folks who run media relations for courts. From the folks I met it seemed that most of them were former journalists. Of course, I said before asking when? and that is how I found myself heading to Arizona in August when the temperature can reach 115 degrees. As it turns out it was actually cooler in New York (103) than Phoenix (100) so go figure!
Once there, I spoke on a panel on changing media moderated by Janet Blair, the Information & Outreach Director for the Metropolitan Court in Bernalillo County, New Mexico and consisting of...
Sue Green is the managing editor at KNXV-TV/ABC15 and a professor at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. She is a former executive producer at WABC-TV in New York where she learned what real baseball is all about and became a Yankee fan. Sue is also running and interesting project called the Cronkite News Service in downtown Phoenix.
John Craft is the senior faculty member at the Cronkite School where he has taught since 1973. Among his many accomplishments, John received the Silver Circle Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Robin Phillips is a business editor at the Arizona Republic. She has been in both business and news, and for a short time also worked as a PIO for the Arizona State supreme court.
Sally Rankin, the coordinator for the CCPIO event, had hoped we might answer the question "Are Bloggers Journalists" but to the credit of the PIO's in the room the question never came up.
Janet led off with a review of our bios and then directed folks to a paper from Shift Communications called PR 2.0 Essentials which is an excellent, up-to-date document that does a great job of covering pretty much everything you might need to know about blogging and related social networking media.
Robin explained how the online edition of the Arizona Republic, a Gannett paper, has evolved over the past ten years. It was interesting to hear how the online folks were originally kept in a separate room but migrated into the newsroom and now participate fully in the editorial meetings.
John provided a thoughtful analysis of the recent Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership. He pointed out that the Internet is fast becoming the preferred source of news in the United States. He was worried that the under-30 demo was not paying attention to news at all - that people were looking for entertainment from the media but not news. He cited iPods and Tivos as what people want from media today.
John told how how the BBC found that 15-20 year olds were not watching TV and were now worried that they were not building a future viewership. That's funny because for years we've been hearing how kids watch too much TV - now they don't watch enough.
Sue made a statement that truly surprised me - that TV is "way behind" newspapers and that print is the leader in interactive media. She also said that TV is only looking to keep viewers for seven minutes. When my turn came I really wanted to focus on how the PIOs could make their communication strategy more "blog friendly" - putting out press releases and announcing rulings on their site using blogging software, using that to generate RSS feeds, making use they permalink web pages, and so on. I seconded Janet's recommendation on the Shift Communications document. I closed by noting that if the PIO's took away only one thing from the session it would be RSS.
Most of the session was dedicated to Q&A and there was a great deal of interest in the MBA, blogging and, interestingly, how they ought to respond to bloggers seeking information from the courts and credentials to cover trials. This turned out to be a hot-button issue and came to dominate not only the Q&A but the follow up questions afterwards. In fact, later that night, at the cocktail party, I met with Jerrianne Hayslett who works as a media consultant for courts and we explored ways in which the MBA might serve the courts by qualifying bloggers seeking credentials to cover court cases, something I intend to pursue with her after the conference.
One of the highlights of the event was a chance to have dinner with Fred Graham, the founder of Court TV. Graham is an attorney who was the New York Times first Supreme Court reporter. He left there for CBS News. He had an interesting take on Star Jones who got her start when Graham gave her a shot on Court TV.
Being a court PIO event, everyone there knew Graham...except me! Duh. When we were introduced I could tell I was supposed to recognize him but didn't.
I said "I'm sorry but I don't watch Court TV".
He replied "that's OK, I don't read blogs". Funny guy.
Over dinner I learned that he was from Nashville, knew Seigenthaler as well as Bill Kovach from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He also roomed with David Halberstam. Overall an impressive person and a pleasure to meet.
