public relations

The Committee to Unprotect Journalists

If you think American journalists are under government siege, their plight pales in comparison to the way Russia deals with its investigative scribes (or any other malcontent). They just murder them, or so it appears, based on today’s news emanating from that increasingly despotic regime. AP Moscow reported moments ago that Ivan Safronov, the military

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Flaming the Fans

March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. On this first day of the month that ushers in spring, we’re seeing some lion-like behavior aimed at two vital critics at arguably the most influential newspaper in the nation. The first incident involved the braggadocio restaurateur whose too-real reality show didn’t help

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Life’s a Beach

I’m not a big MySpace fan, but there are plenty who are (for now). I much prefer FaceBook for my boys given some of the safeguards in place there. Relatively quietly (unless you consider Ynetnews.com a mainstream media outlet) the State of Israel has opened an outpost on News Corp’s dominant and youthful social network.

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Scribes & Shooters

I’m not obsessed with paparazzi. Though one couldn’t help but notice the $200 million that Getty forked over last week for celeb photo agency WireImage. (Would WireImage’s shooters even consider themselves paparazzi?) The paparazzi do however play an incongruously glorified role in today’s complex ecosystem of news gathering — especially when one considers the ever-widening

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Million Dollar Motion

It was fun seeing Ellen doing some man-on-the-aisle (versus MOS) interviews last night during the Oscar telecast. She handed a screenplay to eventual Oscar-winning director Marty and posed for a close-up with Clint after giving her digital camera to Steven Spielberg. She even had the temerity — and good comic timing — to ask the

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Coal-Fire Sale

Talk about doing a 180. When the news first broke that fabled buyout king Henry Kravis would embark on his(tory’s) biggest deal ever, the first write didn’t exactly position the target in the most favorable light. Following the superlatives from NYTimes deal reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, there, in the second paragraph, was the rub: “The

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Getty Gobbles

We all know how much money an exclusive image of an A-lister out-of-context, or preferably out-of-control, can command from consumer-facing media. But the market value of the companies that intermediate between the shooters and the media came further into focus yesterday with news of the sale of Wire Image to GettyImages for…$200 million. The news

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