By Paul Vetter, Vice President

If you believe everything you read on the Internet these days, it’s a given — the media is dying.

I went to see State of Play over the weekend, spurred by an interesting Ad Age article suggesting it was “The Last Hurrah of Hollywood’s Hero Journalist.”

It’s a good movie — a pulse-pounding political thriller with plenty of plot twists. Russell Crowe plays Cal McAffrey in the lead role of heroic investigative reporter at the fictional Washington Globe, which is in the latter stages of collapse. As Ad Age put it, he’s the “last of a dying breed.”

Part of the story involves generational tension between the cagey veteran with his old-school gumshoe journalistic techniques and a young, snarky blogger who cuts corners. Not to mention she has a much newer, better computer than his.

As a plot element, it played on a key tenet of the media-is-dying storyline. The older generation cares about real journalism. Young people just care about silly stuff on YouTube and Digg.

When the lights came up and everyone started shuffling out, it all started to make even more sense. Most of the audience was older Baby Boomers who came of age in the golden era of investigative journalism — people who grew up waiting to see what the Washington Post and New York Times would uncover next about Watergate, the My Lai massacre and other scandals. Clearly, the film had hit its targeted demographic group.

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By Dennis Brown, Vice President

I’ve been blogging for about six months now and I have to say it has changed my life.

Well, maybe not changed my life, but at least propelled me deeper into the blogoshere, which I find a fascinating place. I’m not talking about the parts of the blogosphere where political battles are fought or celebrity gossip is rehashed. I’m talking about the places where the smartest people in public relations, marketing and related fields share their thoughts, insight and experience on a regular basis.  

The key for me was finding the good stuff amidst all the junk. Fortunately, there are sites that make that relatively easy. I’ve found AllTop to be really helpful, especially with the recent introduction of MyAllTop, which allows me to create a custom page with subscriptions to the blogs I want to read regularly.

(After a couple of hours building and playing with my MyAllTop page, I was reminded of a scene from The Office in which Michael Scott threw off this line as he was trying to get one of his people to admit to some time-wasting activity: “It’s okay. I remember when I first discovered YouTube. I didn’t work for three days!”)

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By Paul Vetter, Vice President

Traditional media takes on the rebel alliance.

In case you haven’t noticed, the embattled institution known as traditional media declared war earlier this month on bloggers and aggregators (aka Google) who feature news content on their sites. Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson recently said:

“Companies that aggregate mainstream media content without paying a fee are the parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet and will soon be challenged.”

Parasites? Tapeworms? That’s some trash talk worthy of the NBA playoffs.

The Associated Press used tough language as well, complaining about “misappropriation” of its content and Google’s “wacky algorithm” for ranking news coverage that “does not lead people to authoritative sources.”

AP also went beyond talk to threaten legal action against sites that use content “without paying for it.”

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By Hartley Mikus, Account Executive

If not, maybe it should.

Each year as the weather breaks, people throughout central Ohio can be found in T-shirts and flip flops when it is barely 50 degrees. We are thrilled to throw our winter coats into the back of our closets and enjoy each sign of spring. We wash our cars and clean our homes, eager for a new beginning.

Since we are already conditioned to take advantage of this fresh start that comes each April, why not incorporate the concept into our professional lives as well?

We all say each year that we need to be better about reading the news or developing new skills, fine-tuning existing ones or becoming more knowledgeable in a particular area. And since we are PR people, we have the gift of gab and keep talking about it. Now, it’s time to make our carefully planned and strategic volitions actual realities.

Where do you want to improve? My answer to this question is always “all areas listed below,” or something to this effect.  If you are like me, or even if you only have one area you need to improve upon this year (doubtful, but I’ll give you the benefit), check out the list below.

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By Ray Hancart, Associate Vice President

Research is not the sexy part of public relations.

The simple truth of business with consumer products, and most other industries, is that market share is always up for grabs.

No matter what shape the economy is in, there’s always a competitor waiting to take a sizeable chunk of the market share and shelf space your sales and marketing team has worked so hard to earn.

Research, particularly competitive research, is not the sexy part of public relations (is there one?). Because of that, it’s often skipped over in favor of the next big marketing idea. However, without good consumer and competitive research you might as well put a “For Sale” sign on your premium placement at Target because you have no strategic way to position your product for success. You can’t adjust your messaging to respond to a competitors move because you don’t know it’s happened. You can’t realize you should change your packaging because it’s confusing to customers - you’re blindly throwing darts and hoping to hit a bull’s-eye.

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By Jenny Fuerst, Director, Corporate Communications

Fahlgren Mortine clients would refer a friend.

We just completed our first annual satisfaction survey of our more than 50 clients. The results are in, and we want to share them because — even though there’s always room for improvement — we’re pretty proud of what we found.

Of the 55 survey recipients, 36 answered our 27 questions hosted by Zoomerang. We asked for rankings on our professionalism, quality of work and accountability — the three pillars upon which we are evaluated individually twice a year.

Overall, based on a Net Promoter Score average of 15 for professional services firms nationwide, Fahlgren Mortine scored a 79! That means on the question “How likely would you be to recommend Fahlgren Mortine to a professional colleague?” eight out of 10 clients gave us a “definitely would recommend” rating of 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. And, the rest gave us a score of at least 7, which according to the NPS model means we have no demoters of the firm.

We scored really well on demonstrating professionalism in our work with 81 percent of respondents scoring us a 9 or 10, in addition to good scores on promptly attending meetings and returning calls. Our writing and media relations work products earned high marks, which we’re thrilled about because those two offerings are why most of our clients seek a public relations firm.

But, if quality writing and media relations are why clients hire us, our strategic thinking and understanding of their business are why they become fans. For strategic thinking, we’re pleased to report that 60 percent gave us a 9 or 10 while 72 percent gave us a 9 or 10 on understanding their business. 

It seems we need to do a better job of introducing our clients to our other offerings most notably investor relations, crisis communications, corporate responsibility and community relations. Click here to learn a little more about our capabilities in these areas. 

We are happy with these initial numbers. They far exceed industry averages, but as self-proclaimed bar raisers we’ll be striving for better next year.

Thank you to our clients who took the time to thoughtfully complete this survey for us. Your input is valuable and serves as our guide as we look to continually enhance our service offering by providing our associates with the professional development opportunities we need to continue to grow.