The stories about people who make money from others’ garbage never get old. Take this one from today’s New York Times:

Litter speaks to Mr. Goodwin, 37, a studiously disheveled art school dropout, and, to his patrons, apparently, who drop their quarters into a couple of gumball machines around town that dispense plastic capsules containing pieces of trash personally selected by the artist.

…

Success has not changed Mr. Goodwin. Though he has recently announced on his blog that he will ship internationally, he is not raising his price of 25 cents a Trashball. (He pays about 4 cents each for the capsules.) Nor does he plan to quit his day job as a truck driver for a junk hauler.

Head over to Goodwin’s blog for pull tabs, random photos, and other interesting junk.

Here’s an example of a product that was featured in today’s business section of The New York Times.

From the distributor’s Web site:

the cross brush is an emotionally complicated product. for people with ties to christianity, the brush represents an unorthodox, even disrespectful manipulation of a revered symbol. touching a dirty floor with a cross is grade A defacement in certain circles. i think, though, that it can be seen as an example of how the christian cross is constantly being re-interpreted by different cultures. in the early 21st century, this vaguely troubling, slightly wrong-shaped object poses a lot of questions about shared values. it’s also an amusing visual pun of the phrase “cleanliness is next to godliness”, and fun to have around as an engaging (and sometimes shocking) conversation piece. its 16″ x 10″ size also provides a large surface area for scrubbing, if you’re inclined to pay your penance that way.

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

This comes in the wake of Kathy Sierra’s disclosure of what’s been going on over at her blog recently.

We will be adhering to these standards here at PRpulp and encourage you and your organizations to do the same.

The brand marketers over at Bacon’s thought that it was in their best interest to take on that battle. In an e-mail message yesterday from CEO Steve Newman, the announcement came fresh with a new logo atop a glassy bar of blue in the header.

Our new name, Cision, reinforces the distinct but related strength of our worldwide organization. It projects our position as a global leader and our commitment to serving our clients seamlessly.

How does a new logo, name, typeface, and colors do this again? We’re big fans of cool branding over here at the pulp – don’t get us wrong – but that explanation is ripe with empty words that are so non-specific, we don’t even want to read them.

The best brand connection is between you and me, 1:1. Don’t make us feel like we’re minions in a sea of ambiguity.

Bacon’s has (edit: had) so much cool brand equity that it could have played off of really well and communicate its transition to a global leader with innovative products for the PR and greater media markets.

For example, the image that a lot of seasoned PR pros still have of the company is that giant directory of media contacts that you can get for some ridiculous fee. Play off of that – shred that puppy to bits and morph it into a Web-based app. Show how many trees they’re saving now. Send out free bacon-for-a-year gifts to best clients. Have fun. Instead, they were always pumping up the communications cycle and its offerings along the way.

A visit over to the now conglomerate’s Web site is just as stale and depressing as the note from the CEO today. So we stared at the logo a bit more and asked to ourselves: is it pronounced siz-e-on or siz-shun? The best we can figure out it’s like a snipped version of the word decision.

One word: booo.

Right around the same time, Vocus reaffirmed its outlook on the year and is shaking the trees with a follow-on stock offering of up to 60M shares.

We returned from a short sabbatical to hear about Fred Vogelstein’s little moment of awkwardness over at Wired.

The contributing editor got an unexpected e-mail from Microsoft last week while he was buttoning-up an article on the company’s Channel 9/10 developer communities. It contained a 5,500 word “dossier” that revealed the PR strategy behind the Wired story.

Read the full document here.

It’s kind of like the PR equivalent of Microsoft accidentally dropping its pants.

Waggener Edstrom was the agency that created the document and was facilitating the exchanges. Since then, both sides have adjusted the way the story made it to light.

The reporter posted some background on a Wired blog and then the CEO over at Waggener posted his attempt at accelerating the period of disillusionment.

From the Wired blog:

Should I be flattered that they worked so hard, or should I be embarrassed at being co-opted by their spin machine? I’d like to think I would have written the same story no matter what. But now, through the miracle of transparency, you, the reader, get to decide that too.

The question we raise is: how much different is this versus a reporter interviewing multiple sources, observing nuances, and sometimes working with other reporters to feed story information?

The President of Waggener, Frank Shaw, posted (and it should be noted that the post includes the acronym “POV”) to the company’s blog Glass House and contains a nice breakdown of the steps that occur surrounding an interview and the development of a story. The problem is that it reeks of insecurity and forced nonchalance.

Interesting stuff with a lesson to be learned here: be careful with those internal briefing memos – they might just accidentally end up in a reporter’s hands.

For all of Airbus’ woes, today is the day they seemed to all melt away – if for only that moment when the 550+ passenger plane touched down on U.S. soil for the first time.

The company has been plagued by delays that triggered the cancellation of several orders that add up to more than $3.3 billion in costs to the company according to The New York Times.

Today, however, it doesn’t seem to matter. The media have been abuzz with the plane’s massive body. “Flying on football field-length wings, she’s as tall as a seven-story building, roomy enough to fit 70 vehicles on its wings, as heavy as 500 Volkswagen Golfs and big enough to carry 35 million ping pong balls” they scribed. Enough soundbytes to ground a, well, nevermind…

Aside from the cool pictures, the tale isn’t smooth sailing at all. No American airline has purchased a single $319 million A380 and none has any intent to do so. Thousands have been laid off by the public/private Euro partnership and a CEO has been ousted. Airports have scrambled to make accommodations for the monstrosity with taxiways widened, runways realigned, and doubledecker jetways installed. We’ll sit tight too – waiting to jump to any conclusions on the argument that more passengers on fewer flights is a good thing until we get a sense of how much carbon this puppy spits out per passenger mile versus other aircraft.

In lieu of any hard data at hand right now (and a lack of brain cells to care that much), we’ll play along and let the jet enjoy its media tour on the two coast with a pointless flight around Manhattan ooh and aah onlookers who question physics just one more time.

Meanwhile, if you want to assemble one yourself, here’s how:

Via every media outlet under the sun.

There’s more than one way we could call out Disney and it’s über-controlling qualities.

When it comes to PR though, they might want to consider either preparing spokespeople a bit better or loosening the Mickey hat a notch so that spokespeople don’t fear PR wrath should they slip-up during an interview.

Some reporters choose to start an article by setting the scene. This is often referred to as an environmental lede. It’s pretty effective to set tone and mood for an article, but when it starts to creep in elsewhere in an article, but not in the beginning, it’s a red flag that something odd happened during the interview.

Check this out from a feature in Sunday’s New York Times:

He seemed almost dumbstruck by the question. He sat mute for a moment then turned to two attentive publicists sitting close by, searching their faces for an answer.

“I don’t know what to say,” he uttered, sounding mildly annoyed. “I don’t think like that. I trust in my instincts. I’m a product of what this company has created. I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me. I also love my toys. My Hot Wheels, my G.I. Joes.”

And then it happened again…

Mr. Sanders resisted the suggestions, Mr. Lasseter said. So in January he was replaced by another director.

Asked about the episode, Mr. Lasseter abruptly interrupted an interview to confer with publicists, asking “What can I say here?”

After a brief discussion Mr. Lasseter explained that Pixar often added or replaced a director if a film needed help. “Chris Sanders is extremely talented, but he couldn’t take it to the place it had to be,” he said carefully.

Are you kidding? Is this like a life line on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

If you’re asked a question from an NYT reporter, you answer it. You don’t get the chance to confer and respond. That is unless you’re Disney.

When media training spokespeople we’ve always briefed them on the top messaging points, explained the reporter’s background and biased interests (as best we could), drew the boundaries of what can be said and what can’t (and then what to say if the reporter does ask about one of these areas) and then sent them on their way through the interview gauntlet. Stop or stutter on anything we taught, and well, it’s a gauntlet right?

Notice how the PR people were referred to as “publicists” and not public relations professionals. What transpired during that interview probably shouldn’t have – at least it shouldn’t have ever made it into the story.

Over time and with greater attention to the media, picking up on this starts to become a sort of PR sixth sense. Tune in to FOX News and you can’t go five minutes without starting to get the itch.

In more respectable outlets and across different types of paid and unpaid media, however, it’s a bit harder to notice. Throw in a mixture of distractions like photos or slick graphic design to woo your eyes over and it’s even harder to notice what’s not there.

That’s what happened this weekend when we glazed over XM’s full page ad in the NYT.

The piece was an open letter in the front section touting some XM customer promises. They included:

• You’ll continue to get great programming – and the choice to get it from Sirius too.
• Existing programming won’t be interrupted.
• You can expect to receive the same service you’ve been getting.

While media idols like Mel Karmazin battle it out with the FCC to try and convince the committee that the satellite brothers complete with terrestrial radio, customers are more concerned about whether or not their subscription fees are going to go up. Not whether or not we’re going to loose Oprah & Friends in the deal.

Unfortunately the advertorial team at XM didn’t think it was worth mentioning or committing to in this bit of information in the piece. That’s okay, later in the Times was an editorial piece that touched on just that.

As far as price is concerned, Mr. Karmazin made it plain to the House committee that he would be willing to agree to a price cap for the combined service to seal the deal. The pitch is that raising prices isn’t really feasible anyway because most of what satellite radio is competing with out there is free — particularly on the radio.

ONCE more, this seems slightly at odds with statements that Mr. Karmazin made only a few months ago, Jonathan A. Jacoby, a Banc of America Securities analyst, wrote last week in a report. At an investor conference in December, Mr. Jacoby said, Mr. Karmazin talked up the potential for raising prices beyond the $12.95 a month most people pay now.

A click over to Sirius shows that they’re more interested in helping customers understand that their current radio will not become obsolete when and if the merger goes through.

While this is more-or-less an advertorial and Web communications example, the same holds true for pure editorials produced as a result of media relations.

Keep an eye out for what’s not there – it’s often the most important part of the story.

We got a kick out of Jon Fine’s recent piece.

In the piece about citizen ads, he lauds several clichés and we thought we’d repost in agreement.

To start, he shortens “‘consumer-generated advertising’ and ‘consumer-generated marketing,’ down to ‘citizen advertising’ and ‘citizen marketing.’”

Then there’s:

• engagement, interacting with the brand
• community
• authentic
• breaking through the clutter

We’ll add Web 2.0, social-based, and viral to the list.

Sometimes it’s hard to hold back on when you’re surrounded by nightschoolin’ MBA candidates who cite Peter Drucker in meetings to not try and squeak in the latest term to explain an idea. After all, you’re trying to stay on the cutting edge, right?

With experience comes wisdom, but in its absence, hold back. Or find and use tools like Jargon Finder to help you keep your feet on the ground.