<![CDATA[Chris warns us of “attack of the magazines”]]>Chris Pirillo is funny with his “Attack of the Magazines” post. Yeah, that’s a good point. I had a professional journalist lie about me a few months back. They never corrected the post, despite having their brand name dragged into the mud. This crud has been going on a long time in the journalism industry. Steve Wozniak, in my first celebrity interview, back in 1989 warned me about it “don’t believe what they say about me in the papers,” he told me. The journalism industry doesn’t self clean itself out. Did anyone in the journalism industry come to my defense or do any homework or do any stories about the guy who used his millions of readers against me? No.

The truth is if you’re out in public you’ll have to have a thick skin and deal with it by staying engaged. I did note that far fewer people link to the “professional” guy who lied about me (or the organization he works for) than used to link to him — yeah, it’s showed up on Memeorandum a couple of times, but it used to be linked to a LOT more often. He (and his bosses) shot their credibility in the head. How do you know that? Cause he never answered me (nor did he answer the questions of bloggers like Thomas Hawk or Rick Segal) and people know that’s the sign that the credibility is shot. After all, if you aren’t willing to answer questions about your credibility, you probably have none.

At Google on Thursday, when I showed off Channel 9 I pointed to the spot underneath the video. “See,” I said, “you can write ‘Microsoft sucks’ right there and I won’t pull it down.”

Most corporate types don’t get that. Heck, even a few business “experts” who write books with seemingly Cluetrainish titles don’t get that. 🙂

There’s a belief in marketing that corporations should only say “we’re perfect and we have no blemishes — our competitors are the ones with the blemishes.” Oh, that’s such crap.

Anyway, maybe we’ll talk about this later today at the Blog Business Summit’s workshop in Seattle. I’m sure the Fortune article will be a hot topic of conversation.

Evelyn Rodriguez has a wonderful post titled: An Internet Fed Mostly by Amateurs is Fascinating. Oh, I agree, but we do need the pros too. I tell audiences this as well. At Google I was talking with the Chairman of a very large media company. I said “see, if that building there started burning down, I’d be better than most professional journalists in the opening minutes of the fire. Why? Cause I have a video camera here. I can write about it before the journalists show up. But, the professionals usually know the beat a lot better than I do. They know the fire captain. They can listen to their scanners for other news and make connections (we can do that too, but I don’t own a scanner so would need to wait until someone else made that connection).

And, news is really about access anyway. I can’t get access to, say, Iraq, or press conferences in Washington D.C. (heck, I don’t even get invited to the press conferences at Microsoft and I work there).

So, we need both pros and amateurs. Someday this will all settle down and we’ll all get along. But, for now attacking each other gets us lots of traffic and PR mentions. We don’t realize the damage we’re doing to each other, but we’ll figure that out someday too.

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