Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

This is what I like to call “non point source information.” According to the latest survey from the Pew Internet and American Life project, more than 9 out of 10 Americans “graze” on news from multiple sources throughout the day.

The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio.

Almost as important, about 3/4 of online news consumers use email and social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to forward links around to their friends, family, and coworkers.

Expect this basic trend to continue for the foreseeable future.

I thought this mashup of Big Brother and traditional journalism was silly at first, but upon reflection, it’s actually an important experiment. MSNBC is reporting the following:

Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

It will interesting to see if these journalists shed light on the future of environmental writing and journalism.

Click the link below to see the full story:
Reporters put Twitter, Facebook to ‘Big Brother’ test

So first check out the headline on this piece of environmental writing from the archives on the New York Times: “Waterways, Waste, and Words. Polluters’ Activities Obscured by Muddy Phrases.” And then, check out the date: October 20, 1968. Wow! Some things never change. Here’s the quote the kills me:

…euphemisms are sometimes used to camoflauge unpleasant facts, lulling the public into a false sense of security

Well, fast forward 40 years and that’s still true: The polluters are still trying to lull the public into complacency by hiding the ugly truth behind jargon and euphemisms. They can get away with anything they can paint in abstractly scientific terms. But now, there’s a whole generation of nature protection and pollution control professionals who have been trained in natural sciences rather than social sciences – and we’re lulling the public into complacency ourselves, totally by accident!

Here’s a nice use of the Words That Work, even if the context is a different kind of liquid than what we usually focus on here. The federal government and a partnership of “adult beverage” industry associations are running a social marketing/behavior change campaigns aimed at raising awareness about teen alcohol abuse. They’ve set up a website at www.dontserveteens.gov and are promoting it with billboards, newspaper psas (pictured above), and other advertisements.

Let’s evaluate the campaign against the Water Words That Work method and see how it fares:

• Begin with Behavior. Check. The goal is to persuade adults to not buy booze for teens.
• Foolproof Photos. Check. A family discussion. You can see the mom’s face.
• Swap the Shoptalk. Check. No jargon from the substance-abuse profession anywhere
• Use Words That Work. Check. The key message points use three — “unsafe,” “illegal,” “irresponsible.” The photo caption uses another, “do you part.”

Nice work!