Thank Criminy Someone's Talking Sense at Last (Even if it's Too Late)

I wish I wore a hat more often, because if I did, I'd take it off to Andrew Zolli, a Brooklyn-based consultant, who has often been ahead of his time when it came to talking about technology, and has just put himself forward as the first person to offer a high-profile apology for spreading the lunatic maxim that information on the Internet should be free.

I interviewed Zolli for DC Velocity, as it happens, back in 2003, about his wild ideas that Bluetooth and other technologies would mean that a great deal of our information would in the future come to us handed on like a baton from one machine to another, obviating the need for a cellphone tower every few miles, and that this would help transform transportation management, among other things.

Back then, and until recently, like a lot of other self-styled cyber-hipsters, Zolli was all for the idea that "information wants to be free," as Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, said at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984 - an idea adopted by Chris Anderson, editor of über-trendy magazine Wired, in his seminal 2008 book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price".

Zolli toured the country giving high-energy talks about how the introduction of electronic media, and its implications for vastly-lowered costs, meant that the business of delivering information - the core business of newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, music companies, and movie production houses - should now be able support itself through advertising alone, and that there should be no charges to the consumer at all for content. Now, in a Business Week column, he's recanted. "On behalf of all misdirected Internet visionaries, I'm sorry," Zolli says. "The idea that we Internet visionaries sold is a total load of crap."

What a shame he's too late. Let's survey the damage. It's not just that venerable newspapers such as The Rocky Mountain News have shuttered, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has ceased its print run. (It's now all-digital which, in theory, could simply signal a healthy shift to an information delivery technology that has superseded the old one. It isn't.) It's not just that Business Insider magazine called 2009 "the year the newspaper died." What's really terrible is that the newspapers that survive do so on a staff that's an order of magnitude smaller than ten years ago. You used to lay down your 50 cents for a newspaper, confident that the newsroom producing it teemed with reporters engaged in cut-throat competition to deliver the finest fruits of their investigative energy. (As one who worked in several, I can report they were also dens of in-fighting, backbiting, time-wasting, and tawdry romances, as well as being curiously reliable refuges for boozers and losers.) Now, sadly, on the other side of the veil, there's almost nobody there. Tumbleweeds blow down the corridors. A few empty bourbon bottles clatter in the emptiness. A single, horribly overworked, probably quite young, and certainly underpaid person taps frantically on a computer terminal, cribbing information from the World Wide Web, trying to make it look like freshly killed news.

It's not just that the newspaper died. Maybe we don't need the paper part of it: it's yesterday's technology, after all. It's that the news died. And that's a problem. The death of Real News, gathered from primary sources, checked and calibrated against multiple other, reliable sources, is partly to blame for our ill-judged war in Iraq. If the media hadn't been busy eating its own tail, we might have gotten the real story about the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the world before we invaded on spurious information. (Carl Rove recently called his own lack of pushback "one of the worst mistakes [I] made during the Bush presidency.")

Honestly, though, the blame for the collapse of a relatively respectable news-gathering industry rests not entirely on the head of Mr. Zolli and his ilk. Here's why: It's not such a crazy idea that information delivery companies should rely on revenue exclusively from advertisers eager to reach their millions of consumer customers. Ten years ago, if you took away the huge expense of typesetting, printing, and distributing print-on-paper products, you removed somewhere around 40% of the total costs of producing the average newspaper or magazine. Roughly, this was around the proportion that was covered by subscription and newsstand sales. Advertising was always a major contributor (typically 40-70%) to the financial viability of a magazine or newspaper. There wasn't a major magazine or paper in the country, in the world, that lived and died by reader revenue. If the Internet made it almost free to distribute an article about whether or not Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction, then maybe the cost of paying an international network of investigative reporters to write and edit that article could, indeed, be supported by advertising alone. (Obviously the equation was somewhat different for TV and radio, who still need to spend vast sums on physical infrastructure.) It wasn't a sure-fire thing, by any means. But, perhaps with a two-tier system where you paid only for premium content, it might just have worked.

The trial never happened, though, because of what happened in the boardrooms of major media corporations after the Internet announced its inevitable presence in the mid-90s. Most newspaper conglomerates were owned or run by Dead White Men who quaked in fear at their inability to wrap their heads around the mere idea of the new technology, and how the heck to stop it from cannibalizing their decades-old revenue model, let alone monetize it. They instead leapt into bed and hoped it would all go away. Meanwhile, eager young people who totally embraced the new thang, started providing content on the Internet instead, shifting the readership and audiences - who were eager for the shiny new experience of news delivery their trusted sources were refusing to give them - away from the traditional providers. (It was around this time the movie industry, who were still hoping they might stay in the business of making lots of little plastic disks in China rather than providing movies quickly and easily in an electronic form that consumers actually wanted, started putting out trendy ads about how downloading movies was stealing. This was also around the time I started shouting back at the cinema screen, to the intense embarrassment of my husband: "So, friggin' charge me for it!")

Part of the reason the newbies didn't charge anything for what they uploaded to the Internet for our delectation was that most of the content was, in fact, stolen, so it didn't cost them anything to produce, and it cost them almost nothing to deliver, either (which was precisely the point that the dinosaurs were refusing to get). Another reason was that they were young, it was cool, they didn't need to make much money, and, besides, now you could charge $15,000 a day to go around the country telling the Dead White Executives, who were just beginning to lower their trembling bed sheets and peer back into the gloom of the future of communication, that they needed to get smart, Daddy-O, and stop charging for content. Because this was as much of a mental mind-flip as the mere idea that you could turn on a thingy on your desk and be instantly assailed by text and images from all over the world, the dinosaurs bought it.

Crucially, however, it took a while. Zolli wasn't really saying anything wrong, in theory. But, by the time these lumbering alligators, who'd grown fat and lazy on the fact that newspapers used to be a license to print money, realized there was a fabulous new way to deliver information at virtually no cost, they'd already lost their audiences, so the advertising-only revenue idea no longer stood up. Those advertising dollars were now going to the zippy new contenders - blogs, and Google, and the million little pieces into which the news delivery business had fragmented.

Something else happened around this time that made it all a lot worse. For some reason I'm not equipped to explain, just as they became less economically viable than they'd been in a hundred years, conventional newspapers and magazines became attractive as investment vehicles for companies and people who were not in the information business. There was, it's true, a wild idea in circulation at the time that adding a ".com" to a traditional media company's name would add a similar number of zeros to revenue. A lot of publications changed hands, and started being run by folks who decided their main loyalty was to shareholder value (with themselves as major shareholders, of course) rather than readers. They saw lots of fat, and began whittling costs to the quick. Honestly, I can't entirely blame them. There's a certain amount of lassitude required in a newsroom, so that you can instantly put three reporters on a hot, breaking story; or pay someone to sift through the Governor's travel records for six months. Add to that the fact that the lumbering alligators who waited around to be fed all day weren't strictly limited to the board room, and there was a surprising amount of down-time on view. However, imperfect as it was, that was the nature of the beast.

These brave new corporate raiders believed, correctly, that no-one would notice at first how plain flimsy their newspaper had become.  Like I say, you don't quiz your newsstand seller when you buy a newspaper: "Say, how many guys they got covering City Hall these days?" And, even if you did begin to poke into such matters, it's not as if, any more, there's another newspaper in your town with more gumshoes down at City Hall.

The new Masters of the Media calculated that, by the time readers woke up to the poorer content and started complaining (I'm sure this is going to happen any day now. I really am. I really hope so.), the media company would have been sold at a vast profit, or leveraged to death, and the guys who made all the disastrous cuts long gone.

Meanwhile, without economies of scale in news gathering, despite the vast number of news and information sites on the Web, the actual pool of original sources from which that news and information came shrank faster than the Aral Sea. A lot of people stopped paying money for news, so that revenue began to disappear. The rest of it - the money that came from the remaining paying readers, and from the advertisers - was dispersed among a dizzying number of Web and conventional news providers. Suddenly, almost no-one could afford a Moscow correspondent, or a full-time Arabic speaker to translate for a reporter who actually wanted to cover the situation in Iraq from outside the Green Zone.

The result is that we have, firstly, a whole generation of young people who answered the call to investigative journalism and, if lucky, are detailed to see if they can't dig up something embarrassing about Miley Cyrus, because that's the information from which a quick buck can be made - about the only currency with weight in today's media business. Further, the generation of journalists who preceded them now face, in middle-age, with families and mortgages to worry about, eternal unemployment. Those who do manage to get work writing for a paper or magazine are usually paid rubbish for it, because the great old media corporations are still clinging to the idea that, if you are blessed by having your photo spread published in The New York Times, say, you will get lots of lucrative work elsewhere on the back of it. But elsewhere is now nowhere, or it has even less money to pay you than The Times does. In other words, journalism doesn't pay. It never paid well, but at least it constituted a profession, not a hobby, which is what it is for me now, I'm sad to say.

Of course, the other, more widely troubling result, is that we have execrable news services in the West today - credulous, sloppy, lazily researched, and often just plain wrong. I'm not the first to point out that inaccurate news reporting can be fatal.

There is hope, however. New technology promises to patch and mend where the old-new technology slashed and burned. Fresh formats, such as Kindle and the iPad tablet, make it possible for new locks to be put on content and, it seems, media companies are braced for the backlash against charging people for information they got used to having for free. Cable TV channels such as HBO and Showtime, also, have proven you can charge a self-selecting audience enough to fund the making of high-quality content.

But HBO and Showtime don't report news, and the companies that do are either too flimsy to rely upon, or are the burned-out hulks of former behemoths. It will take a long time to build up the massive international infrastructure of reliable news gathering again. At best, we will look back on the 00s as the Decade That Information Integrity Forgot.

Okay, so maybe I was wrong about Twitter

I love to stand corrected. Really, I do. Sitting, reclining, even dancing - I'm open to correction. Goodness knows I offer it to my nearest and dearest, regularly; when they use the word "comprise" the wrong way, or pronounce a French word badly. So I'm happy to report that I may have been wrong to dismiss Twitter so roundly, a few blogs ago.

The Economist has come out with a truly wonderful and deeply comprehensive survey of social media in the business context, and they seem quite willing to entertain the idea that there's something in all that Tweeting, in terms of useful business communication. Zappos.com, for example, the shoe company owned by Amazon, actually encourages its employees to Tweet. "The argument for using a system that allows the world to see what a firm’s employees are up to is that it helps make faceless corporations seem more human in the eyes of their customers," says the venerable magazine.

There are still causes for pause. A survey referred to in the Economist survey, conducted by the Harvard Business School in May 2009, found that, of 300,000 Twitter users, more than half of them Tweeted less than once every 74 days, and that 10% of Twitter users accounted for 90% of the Tweets. This compares unfavorably with other online social networks, where the most active users typically account for 30% of the content.

Facebook, by contrast, has solidly proven its commercial worth. According to The Economist, Sony found that Facebook ads for "District 9" and "Julie & Julia", which were tailored to the age and gender most likely to watch those movies, were significantly more effective than conventional advertising.

Speaking of movies, I went to see "Avatar" last night. I know, I'm probably the last person you know to see it, but at least I made the full commitment, and paid $17.50 for the dazzling Imax 3D experience. I found the film astonishing from a technical point of view, but then I'm such a greenhorn I caught myself saying "Wow!" at the first 3D trailer that came up. Not the trailer itself, even, just the notice that said "This film has been deemed suitable for..." where the letters were floating in front of the green screen. So, you know, obviously the 3D thing was new to me. Much as the film was overlong and had a plot so thin you could blow your nose on it, I was so taken with the new format, I was all for buying my own 3D glasses (sharing eyeglasses with a previous audience in Manhattan is not really very appealing) and seeing everything in that format I could lay my eyeballs on. However, by the time I got home, I realized my husband had a 3-aspirin headache, and neither of us slept at all well that night. The right kind of scan would no doubt have found all sorts of activity lighting up in parts of our brains that really oughtn't to be that lit up at 1am. The dreams were not nice, either. Still, I'm eager to see Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland", which should be a real trip. And it won't have stupid, knock-you-over-the-head plot details like the rare mineral for which the dastardly capitalists in "Avatar" are breaking up the locals' village being called "unobtanium". I mean. Really.

Best gift you can give this Holiday Season

The true seductiveness of the idiocy that has infested electronic communication came home to me in a disturbingly personal way just the other day. My sister - a Cambridge-educated chemical engineer and all-round smart cookie - sent me an email that contained a piece of writing labeled as "Maya Angelou's Best Poem Ever." It was a list of things "every woman should have" - including a black lace bra and a cordless drill (check) -  and "every woman should know" - such as that her childhood may not have been perfect but it's over (yeah, thanks). My sister said it made her think of me, which was, of course, very sweet. I was tempted to ignore the fact that it wasn't a very good poem at all, and that it didn't seem to read like Maya Angelou, whose work I know imperfectly, and instead just accept the sentiment. But the miserable Web-policing pedant in me was definitively snapped into action by a line in this version that didn't make grammatical sense ("Every woman should have... how to fall in love without losing herself.").

Sure enough, the most cursory Google search turned up a blog on the Huffington Post by a rather bemused and annoyed writer called Pamela Redmond Satran, who did actually write the original poem, back in 1997 in Glamour magazine. Satran doesn't comment on the fact that poem, which has been forwarded a gazillion times, mostly by well-meaning women to other women, has become completely corrupted. Neither does she blame Maya Angelou, who can hardly be held responsible, just as Kurt Vonnegut can't be held responsible for being credited with that excellent "sunscreen" speech, or John Cleese for the "Letter to the American People" that threatens a reabsorption of the US into England.

What's really depressing is that Satran refers to people who bother to check the true provenance of this piece of work as "diligent souls" - as if it were out of the general realm of human consideration for our fellow humans to bother to figure out if something we were sending to a friend or family member was not a spurious piece of plagiarized crap.

As you may have gathered, I have strong feelings about this. Suppose a friend called you on the telephone, or wrote you an actual piece of physical mail (remember those?) that urged you to read something amazing they'd enjoyed themselves, or that would give you cash for forwarding an email, or urged you (gawd help us, will it never die?) to defend the National Endowment for the Arts, or to intervene in the oppression of Afghan women (Hello? We invaded 8 years ago.). You'd be pretty annoyed to find out the poem was misattributed (and corrupted), the money was a fiction, the petition long since delivered, and the women of Afghanistan facing the new problems brought by living in a country under US invasion. Wouldn't you? I'm not making this up. So why is it okay if it's "just" an email?

Okay, that was a rhetorical question, obviously. I've urged you in this blog before to be super-vigilant when it comes to vetting the information you find online. Sadly, the same level of caution applies even to emails from trusted sources. Here are a few tips for spotting the specious:

• If it sounds too good to be true, don't be dazzled by the "wonder of the Internet" aspect. Bill Gates is not going to give you money for sending emails, and he can't track the ones you do send.
• If there's no date on a forwarded mail, it's automatically suspect. It might have been completely legitimate and relevant - 12 years ago.
• If there's a grammatical or factual error in the email, that should raise your suspicions. Even if it started life as a genuine missive, it's probably been added to or edited by someone with minimal brain power.
• Obviously, anything that urges you to "send this to X friends" in order to get good luck, or get untold riches, or avoid being mown down by AK47-wielding terrorists, is offensive and quite likely illegal too. 

So, here's what I want for Christmas, and it's a gift that all of you can give to everyone you love, admire, or are simply related to. Before you send me ANYTHING you didn't actually write yourself, take the 30 friggin' seconds it will require to check that it's timely, accurate, and correctly attributed. Is that so much to ask?

In any case, I wish you all a happy and factually accurate New Year. May 2010 bring useful and appropriate communications to all of you. When you read this, I'll be in Varanasi, India, touting copies of DC Velocity by the side of the Ganges during a well-earned vacation. Catch you later.

Down in the bunker

Those of us involved in the communications business have, of course, been having a field day watching the public unraveling of the reputation of Tiger Woods. Not that the rest of you have exactly been standing aside, aloof and uninterested. One of my friends is opening a book at her office on how high the number of mistresses will go. But it's rare to see a media icon fall quite so spectacularly and quite so quickly from quite such a height. It's not just that his marriage is on the rocks; it's his career, including all that endorsement work; all that media presence. Those of us who travel regularly may well be relieved at the idea that we will no longer be assailed by life-sized images of Tiger doing nine impossible things before breakfast, as it were, in every airport breezeway, but it's a salutary reminder that a reputation can be demolished in a single day.

By the way, you'll notice that I don't say "in this age where a person's image is more precarious than ever," or some such nonsense. I'm getting very tired of hearing that we're living in a time of faster change than ever before. It's such a load of arse, if you'll forgive my Scottish roots. My grandfather lived through the introduction of electricity, the telegraph, motor cars, women's suffrage, and antibiotics, along with a fistful of wars and the landing on the moon. Are you seriously going to tell me that a small screen sitting on your desk is forcing more change in how we interact with each other than any single one of those things? I think not! Neither can it be scientifically measured whether we are more vulnerable to bad-mouthing and spin than before. Four hundred years ago, in London, reputations were similarly made and destroyed overnight by the distribution of pamphlets; often anonymous, scurrilous ones. If you want a truly culture-shaking change in technology, try the wide availability of affordable printing, dude. And gossip, frankly, needs no technological boost to bring a good man down. Shakespeare wasn't just making something up when he had Cassio proclaim in Othello: "Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial."

We gawp and Google and Tweet and text with pretty much the same prurient intentions as the rabble in the Jacobean marketplace, just with shinier toys (I will concede this - things do seem to have gotten a lot shinier in this age, although, again, I'm tempted to point to the court of Montezuma, 500 years ago...). The real question I try to address in these blogs is: Does this have any use in my business?

We're in the middle of a backlash against a backlash against a backlash when it comes to the idea of whether social media should form a supporting pillar of your public relations and marketing temple. Business Week this week decided that we should all "Beware Social Media Snake Oil." Frankly, I don't think we need a feature in Business Week to meditate on whether this stuff might all be woven by invisible tailors. I came across a much more interesting piece of research recently, at an outfit called Catalyst Inc. - a not-for-profit organization in New York that offers research and advocacy related to women in business. What Catalyst found is that, while this recession has been relatively even-handed in depriving middle-management men and women of their jobs, women at CEO and VP level have been toppling like ninepins. In an admittedly small study of high-potential MBa graduates, Catalyst found that women in upper management were three times more likely to get laid off in the last 18 months than their male counterparts. And why? Looking at other Catalyst research, I get the impression that one of the main reasons is that women don't, or are unable to, harness the power of networking in their corporate careers. By the time they get to the top, they're often lone wolves, unsupported by the web of mentors, champions, and patrons their male colleagues enjoy. When it comes time for the chop, you want as many friends in high places as you can get. Weirdly, professional women often lack such advocates.

To me, the message is clear. Social networking, whether over drinks or via Blackberry, is what we should all be doing more of, not just to make our lives more rich and interesting, but to boost our career trajectories. It's the Holiday season. Pick up the phone and make a lunch date with your favorite client or customer, and get him or her to bring along some buddies. Reconnect with that guy you went to college with who runs his own tech startup. Put up a LinkedIn page; a Facebook page. Start blogging. Start Tweeting. Get out there. Nothing's changed, really. We're all intensely interested in one another, and human after all.

Right, I'm off to scrawl something obscene on a Tiger poster. Happy Holidays.

One simple thing you can do right now to improve your PR visibility

Whether or not the economy is in recovery, you can be sure that almost all the media outlets you'd like to see writing about your company are having a rotten time. They're understaffed, overworked, and under pressure from owner-investors to make a buck. Ad revenues are in the toilet, and the future is uncertain. This makes it all the more unlikely that a harried journo is going to have time to look at your press release, or take the time to listen to you when you or your PR person calls with a great story idea.

Here's a tip: think about contributing written copy. Most magazines and Web sites are hurting for material precisely because they're understaffed. Most are more open than ever to running articles written by someone else. You won't get to write a glowing affirmation of your company's service or product offerings, but you might well get your photo and title (along with the name of your company) at the top of the page. Plus, because it's editorial, it carries a lot more clout than an advertisement.

Here's how to go about it:

Target two or three publications in which you're interested. Research the heck out of them. Read at least a few issues and find out where they allow outsiders to write articles. Usually there's a "spot", like "JOC TENS: In the Know" in the Journal of Commerce. Pay attention to the format - in this case, they're looking for ten top tips about how to handle a problem or make an important business decision. Have a think about something genuinely original and useful you might be able to add to the ongoing debate in this publication.

Write a brief proposal for the editor. Bear in mind that the slightest whiff of sales talk will put the editor right off. Nevertheless, don't take the approach that you need to cloak your intentions. The point of the exercise is for the magazine to get some honestly useful insight into your part of the industry while you get a little free publicity. It's a win-win situation.

It's not necessary at this point to spend the time writing the whole piece. The editor may say no, in which case you'll have wasted your time. One or two paragraphs outlining your intentions should do the trick. Of course, should you feel moved to write a perfect 800-word diatribe about something in the industry that no-one else seems to be talking about, go right ahead. Often the passion of the moment really carries momentum and, if it's well written and argued, you'll quite likely be able to find a home for it eventually.

Email the editor your proposal. Make sure you include a sentence that says something like: "In light of the recent debate in your XX spot on the subject of YY, I believe your readers might find the following editorial slant interesting." Be as specific as you can. Refer to former columns and columnists by name. It's important that you sound as if you're genuinely engaged with this publication and its specific needs. Put yourself in the shoes of the person making editorial decisions. Make sure you state clearly who you are and why your particular experience gives you a sound forum for expressing your opinions and conclusions.

After you've emailed the editor, wait a day or so, and call him directly. Finding phone numbers can be tricky, but most publications' Web sites will give you a general number, at least. You can call that number and ask for the editor's direct line.

I can't emphasize how important it is to have a really good-looking headshot in electronic format all ready to go. Sometimes, an editor will leap on a contributed piece to fill a hole quickly, and you need to be prepared. Make sure you have a well-lit, full face, headshot available in several different formats and sizes (jpeg, tif, low-res, high-res, etc.). If you can't afford a professional headshot, get hold of a decent digital camera and ask a colleague to photograph you with good light falling from front and above against a neutral background. Do not stand in front of a window. Make sure the photo is crisply in focus.

If the editor says yes, then that's great. You'll need to get on with writing the full version right away. Don't keep him or her waiting. If the editor says no, engage him in a conversation about what sort of ideas might work for him or her instead. Even if nothing comes of all this directly, at least you've given yourself a bit more name-recognition in the editor's head, and you may well find yourself getting more attention in the future from his staff.

If your piece gets published, congratulations! Make sure you get a nice .pdf digital copy that you can put on your Web site and use as marketing material.

Good luck, and I'll see you in the bylines.

New media - do's and don'ts

Should you join Twitter? Should you build a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile? These are constant questions for the business man and woman. As a public relations professional and obsessive-compulsive networker, my answer has to be "Yes," but it's a cautious yes.

I've actually gained new clients through these social media sites, and also reconnected with long-lost friends (my old high school friend from Edinburgh, Scotland, turned out to be living 30 miles away, which was a wonderful discovery).

I should qualify that and say that nothing; nothing at all of any business use has come out of Twitter. There's a respected writer for one of the country's top business weeklies who Tweets regularly (I imagine she was encouraged to do so by an editor curious about this new phenomenon) and it's disappointingly irrelevant to be getting a blow-by-blow account of the life of a business journalist. Furthermore, there's a weird disconnect between the gushy inanity of her sharing the mundane details of her day-to-day life and the fact that it's almost impossible to get her to respond to a professionally crafted story pitch. I thought her a monolith of seriousness and editorial hard-to-convince impartiality. Instead, it turns out she's picking up the kids from school.

Frankly, the whole business of scrolling through Facebook entries that include minutae of what your friends ate for dinner, or whether they're standing in line for Bruce Springsteen tickets, does nothing to raise one's general respect for humanity. Worse, there's been a rash of new types of messages available on Facebook, presumably to increase traffic, and I keep getting sent a bucket of sheep, or an alleged "drink" (I wish!), or an invitation to sign a petition freeing Roman Polanski or join the Nazi party (okay, I made that last bit up). Perhaps it was better when the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation instead of bleating about it the whole damn time.

Nevertheless, on Facebook you are at liberty to check in on such messages from time to time or ignore them entirely. Meanwhile, it's not a bad way to track down someone you've lost touch with, or wish to make a connection with on a business basis, so I recommend you build a basic profile, connect with a few "friends", and see if anything happens. If anyone sends you an actual personal message, you'll get an email about it, with the message included in the body of the text, plus a link if you want to respond via Facebook.

Tweeting, meanwhile, unless you're a female student at Tehran University, is for the birds.

LinkedIn has a more concertedly business focus, but this renders it a little dry for my taste. You find contacts to include on your network by either searching for them, by responding to automatically generated suggestions gleaned from the resume you build online, or by accepting invitations from people who have found you. It's quite clever and intuitive. The system searches for commonalities in terms of companies at which you've worked, or people who are at one remove. You're at liberty to invite them onto your network or not; and they're at liberty to accept or decline. No buckets of sheep anywhere. You get an email anytime someone on your network moves jobs, or changes their resume. You can also request an introduction by someone you know to someone you want to know. It all sounds great, but somehow it doesn't quite sparkle. Still, if you have 20 minutes to spare to set up an account, I recommend you give it a try.

One tip that might help you manage these processes: set up a separate gmail account that you use only to register for social networking sites or other services you're not 100% sure you want in your life. That way, you can check in on activity when you wish, but won't be interrupted during a conference call by your ex-girlfriend sending you a geodesic dome or a kick in the pants.

Once you're on the virtual Rotten Row, though, be VERY careful about what you put out there. I can't emphasize this enough. This is way, way beyond doing your laundry in public.

Take the example of the exec from Ketchum (one of New York's more prestigious and expensive public relations firms), who "tweeted" a derogatory message about Memphis while on his way to visit mega-client, Federal Express, which has its headquarters in that fine city. The fallout was ugly. By the way, there's an important sub-moral to this story. When you're choosing your online name, try to make it a little on the humble side. Mr. KeyInfluencer, the author of the offending Tweet, whoever he is, is now out of a job.

Sometimes, a hasty post can get you sued, as did a lady in Chicago who complained online about her building's management company. 

One of the most interesting issues raised by the whole social media craze is the increasing way in which our business lives and our social lives are becoming entangled. Are we always at work; or always socializing? It seems neither and both. Perhaps the real answer is that new communications technology makes us all more publicly visible than we once were, whether we like it or not. In my opinion, transparency has become the defining quality of the early 21st century. Our new municipal buildings are being built out of almost entirely glass; there is a CCTV camera for every six citizens of the United Kingdom; Letterman would rather admit he had sex with his staff than be blackmailed. And, thanks to Facebook, I know far more about my realtor's boyfriend's state of mind than I could possibly have imagined ten years ago. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I don't know. But I do know it's a thing, and it's here to stay for a while.

All in all, as with email, remember that any electronic communication is far more public than a letter or phone call, and that you have absolutely zero control over its dissemination. The principle is simple: think hard before you click the "send" button.

What's not on the Internet

Of course you know you shouldn't trust what you read in the wilder realms of the Internet. But what when mainstream journalists fall for a not-even-very-elaborate hoax and pass the information on to you as if it were kosher?

Take the example, last week, of the fun and games created by some German filmmakers, who ran a fake story about a suicide bombing in a non-existent California town called Bluewater.

We simply have to get used to the idea that idle men around the world (and it is always men, I'm afraid) will do this kind of thing just because they can. It's a bit like computer viruses: no one makes any money from causing this havoc, it just gives a sense of power. Be warned and beware.

Meanwhile, shoddy standards of research and journalism abound. I visited a venerable shipping industry publication last week, where one of the reporters confessed the he had hit a brick wall with the curious, and lamentably obvious lie that the Russian ship Arctic Sea was hijacked in the English Channel earlier this year. Anyone who has covered the shipping industry for years, as I did, would know that the chances of getting hijacked in the English Channel are about as high as a masked highwayman waylaying you on the Route 66, brandishing a duelling pistol and demanding dubloons. The reporter agreed that clearly this was a fiction, and that something deeply fishy was afoot, but that he had been able to turn up nothing concrete and so had agreed with his editor that they'd just drop the story altogether. I sympathise with the journalist in question - he's doing the work of three, no doubt. But, really. What a shame.

At least the said journalist was actually, like, making telephone calls and pulling in sources. Many journalists and other researchers who ought to know a great deal better increasingly regard the Internet as the sole source for information. The error of this was brought home to me this past weekend when I attended the biannual conference held by the International Rebecca West Society, which invites academics to celebrate and investigate the works of my great-aunt, who was a fiery feminist writer once described by critic Ken Tynan as the "finest journalist alive" (she's dead now, I'm sad to say). These academic conferences tend to be a bit deathly to us mere mortals, to be honest, but one of the presentations was an absolute sensation. A historian researching a distant relative of mine had stumbled across a reference to my great-grandfather, Rebecca West's father, which lead him on a paper trail all across England that revealed my great grand-papa was a convicted thief and jailbird. Indeed, when he was supposed to have been acting as a stretcher-bearer in the American Civil War (a favorite family story), he was instead up before the Crown magistrate for stealing valuable coins from his Army club. It was an amazing story, including a bizarre episode in which, prevented from gaining further access to the coin collection, he instead stole some letters by Coleridge, but them left them in a taxi. Gosh, I don't come from such fine stock as I thought. My family are all teasing each other about it with great glee, patting each other down for stolen coins. But my point is a serious one: none of the information that lead to these shocking revelations were available on the Internet. There were two of Rebecca West's biographers present at the conference, and you can imagine how embarassed they were to realize that they had neglected to find out that the subject of their weighty and otherwise worthy tomes was a convicted criminal. Whoops.

Be warned. Keep your standards high. Question vigorously. Trust no one. Not even me.

Communications breakdown

What on earth is going to happen to the news media? The truth is that, despite all the bluster, nobody knows. Apparently, we are witnessing the collapse of the traditional print media, which would be fine if there was a snazzy, profitable, online marketplace where thoroughly researched, impeccably reliable, and pithily presented information could readily be bought and sold, but instead we have YouTube. We have traditional publications' Web sites with no dedicated editorial staff, pumping out stories produced by  ever-shrinking, overworked, under-funded newsroom staff. On the one hand we have Twittering from the Iranian elections, which seems sort of useful. On the other, we have the instant, vast, dissemination of anything anyone feels like saying. A person could slip into hyperventilation just thinking about how unreliable our news sources are, or are becoming, these days. It's only a matter of time before some pernicious rumor goes viral and causes a multitude of deaths.

But let's take a breath and examine the forces at work. First off: what's at stake. It's not like the old print media was all that good. No, it wasn't. I know it's tempting to hark back to some fictional time when editors could leave the front door of the newspaper unlocked, as it were, but if the New York Times swallows erroneous allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq wholesale, then you have to think it's time for some new guys to get a shot at telling us what we need to know. Here is a piece of advice I got from an editor when I first started working as a full-time journalist, and wanted to cross-reference a story: You make one phone call on a lead, you get a front-page story. You make two calls, you get a small story for page 9. You make three calls, you've got no story at all. That's the kind of cynical laziness I came up against during my long, rather depressing, journalistic career, and that I still battle daily in my work as a public relations consultant. Journalism, at its best, is a street-pounding, dross-sifting, meticulous exercise in balancing skepticism, curiosity, tenacity and boldness. Back in the day, when newspapers were still printed using hot metal, there were few professionals who personified these qualities; there are fewer today. Reporters and editors have, since the profession began, been egged on to a sense of complacency by the sheer fact that they controlled, or were in bed with the guys who controlled, the means of producing news.

Still, it's not as if I welcome the fact that huge numbers of perfectly adequate, and some even very worthwhile journalists are out of a job. In most cases, frankly, they were ill-served by their corporate masters. The print media had plenty of time to think about how to adapt to (and make a profit out of) the brave new world of the Internet. Fifteen years ago, it was clear it was here to stay. But most publishers and others in charge of the purse strings took the attitude of a deer being borne down upon by an eighteen wheeler. This was despite the fact that, at most publications, journalists were doing their job and identifying that this World Wide Web thingy was actually going to be a terrific way to gather and disseminate information. At one daily paper I know, the only reason the publication ended up with its own name as a url was because a junior journo got fed up with being ignored and bought the domain name with his own money, until his supposedly superiors saw the light. When he came to sell it to them, at cost, he was treated like a criminal. That daily paper is now a thin, ill-regarded weekly with an office in a dodgy inner city location, and I can't say they have anyone to blame but themselves. Nevertheless, it wasn't the fault of the editorial staff now out of work. The same sort of story repeated itself all over the Western hemisphere. Meanwhile, zippy little Web startups came and ate the print media's lunch. Because there were almost no overheads, and no printing and infrastructure costs, the idea got established that information could be free. Before anyone realized that was a serious miscalculation, it was too late. Everyone was giving journalism away for nothing.

So, we're strapped in for the ride, unfortunately. We still have respected media figures such as Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, claiming that "information wants to be free", as if it were water running down a hill. Water's a good analogy,come to think of it. Until you've traveled to the developing world, say, it seems as if the very idea of charging for potable water is absurd. It falls from the heavens - it should be free! Then you visit somewhere full of standing putrid ponds, with no purification plant nearby, and rudimentary sewage arrangements, and it all looks very different. It's the same with information. If you want the good, clean, reliable stuff, that costs money to produce. My belief is that journalism is currently going through an unsustainable transition period. We cannot rely entirely on "citizen" journalists to do the deep digging required to hold elected leaders responsible for their actions, for example; or to challenge multi-national corporations when they put profit before public health. Dedicated reporters need to make enough to eat and keep a roof over their heads. They also need resources to gather and analyze information - plane tickets, hotel beds, global cellphones, translators, even bribe money; and, more than anything else, the luxury of time to let information accumulate in sufficient quantities to give a clear picture of what's going on. If we cannot make these economic realities work in a for-profit scenario, then let us quickly start funding news-gathering as a charitable enterprise essential to maintaining our humanity. Let NGO stand for "news-gathering organization" if we have to!

Meanwhile, do yourself a favor and read Michael Massing's excellent article on why the Internet isn't killing quality journalism, not quite, and not yet. There is, it seems, light at the end of the tunnel.