Justin Bieber, Vanilla Ice and email

Detroit — During a recent lunch with few communications professionals, I came away thinking about two questions that stood out hours after I finished my mint-chocolate chip gooey brownie dessert: “Do you like Justin Bieber?” and “Can I email you story pitches?”

After thinking about those questions for the remainder of that day, I can now say with a great deal of certitude that I like Justin Bieber a lot more than I like getting email story pitches.

This is nothing against public relations professionals, communications specialists, or even my Detroit News editors, all of which email me on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis.

Blame the system.

Email is still the most popular form of digital communication, but — to stick with musical comparisons — it’s more Vanilla Ice than Justin Bieber. Email, like Vanilla Ice, hasn’t gotten much better since the 1990s, has miraculously found a way to remain relevant and probably won’t die anytime soon.

If email had a face, it’d probably look something like Vanilla Ice.

Not to take this debate To The Extreme, but I — like most in media and communications — receive thousands of emails every week. Most of them have nothing to do the automotive industry, casinos, and surprisingly, free food in the break room — things relevant to me. There are hundreds of misguided pitches and new spam, so much so that I’ve occasionally missed important emails.

We send emails about everything. We send emails without body text. We forward emails like we’re passing out Halloween candy. We all contribute to the unintentional spamification of email accounts everywhere.

Even my junk inbox has a junk inbox. There’s so much crap in my garbage bin, that if all that crap actually existed, every city in America would refuse to pick it up Thursday mornings because that bin would exceed the maximum weight limit.

And the problem is only going to get worse as the number of sent and received emails will continue to rise.

So what’s the alternative? (Remember, think Bieber, not Vanilla Ice.)

There are plenty of effective ways to use email but those ideas have not been widely accepted. So let’s use some mediums that have.

• Twitter: While this may be a byproduct of being a Millennial, a tweet — or even better — a direct message, will have a significantly better chance of getting read. Probably a 10-times-better chance of getting read. A quick note: send me a direct message on Twitter (which at 140 characters will keep even the most inattentive engaged) and I will receive a notification on my phone. Send me an email and my phone will vibrate in my pocket, just as it does when I don’t get an email.
• Phone: Unbelievably, a majority of Americans now own smartphones. And fewer use those smartphones to place phone calls. But unlike most email clients, which provide a near-endless amount of space for emails, the number of voicemail messages the average person can ignore is somewhat limited. And the phone, unlike email, will keep the constant alert of a missed call or voicemail in plain sight until you acknowledge it.
• Text message: As phone call volume declines, text messaging continues to accelerate. The length of text messages can vary, but rarely will challenge the length of emails. Plus, unlike terribly timed story pitches and other email junk, you wouldn’t dare send me a text message at 3:30 in the morning.

My answer to the communication professionals was a combination of all three — but specifically not email.

Don’t get me wrong, email is not irrelevant. But it should no longer be the main or primary method of digital communication.

For Pete’s sake, it’s 2012.

We have smartphones. We have Twitter. And yes, we have Justin Bieber.

So catch up, and get used to it.

Follow Karl Henkel on Twitter, friend him on Facebook.

ODNR wins PR battle, but won’t avoid local media’s critical eye

Detroit — The thing most don’t understand about journalism is that the media’s job is not just to weave facts and anecdotes together to create stories chocked full of information.

That’s what we’d like to do, but more often than not, it’s a lot tougher than that.

We’re faced with politicking.

And in the instance of the much-anticipated Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ report on injection-well induced earthquakes in Youngstown, ODNR out-politicked this writer and managed to feed its public relations feast to a much higher power.

The Associated Press.

And the AP had itself a sloppy, slow-cooked slab of the finest public relations meat that ODNR could serve up.

You see those in the local media, especially when dealing with a hot-button local story, tend to be critical of announcements or reports, and vet them as much as possible.

But ODNR has taken a beating since October when The Vindicator first reported on an earthquake-injection well correlation.

So what better way to get out their positive but blind message of “tough regulations?”

The answer is the national media.

The Associated Press, which had the story well in advance of the release and certainly well before anyone locally laid eyes on it, did what it does best: turned a release into a story in near-record time.

The AP in turn distributed it for use among nearly 7,000 newspapers and television and radio stations.

Here’s the first sentence of the AP story:

A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth, Ohio oil and gas regulators said Friday as they announced a series of tough new regulations for drillers.

Tough regulations, eh? We’ll get to that in a moment.

The fact the AP had a story before the 11 a.m. announcement means one of two things: 1) ODNR provided them with an advance copy, contradictory to its statements to the local media or 2) the AP did not fully read the report and therefore took the “tough regulations” aspect for granted.

(The ODNR preliminary report was 24 digital pages.)

For those curious about the difference between the local and national media, I’ll provide you this analogy.

The national media is like a sugar-buzzed, impressionable adolescent. It will generally believe whatever you tell it, asking few relevant questions and trying to draw as much attention to itself as humanly possible.

Most of the time, it works, especially when it comes to the other candied-out cool kids on the playground, the national television media. (For instance, Rachel Maddow linked back to a copy of the AP story.)

Now we see how ODNR won this public relations battle with the media.

By electing not to advance the report to the local media as anticipated, ODNR knew the Associated Press would run with whatever excerpt they put at the top of the ODNR report’s executive summary.

By electing to release the report on a Friday, they minimized publicity, because, quite frankly, by the time Monday rolls around, the story’s prominence will wear off.

As for the actual regulations, the ODNR report failed to touch on many important aspects, including its highly criticized definition of brine — in simple terms, ODNR does not distinguish between lightweight and heavy brine — which could have impacted the D&L Energy Inc. Youngstown well, which operated at a higher pressure than any other injection well in the state.

Those tough regulations, some could argue, were regulatory oversights.

(I could go on, but I will need something to write about Monday when I return from vacation.)

It’s facts like these that will get vetted by the local media but will generally be ignored by the national media.

ODNR spoonfed its message to the national media in one heaping mound.

But that dish now heads in the direction of the local media, which will narrow the focus on the real details of the report.

Follow Karl Henkel on Twitter, friend him on Facebook.