Controversy on the Wired Article
posted in Business, PR |A fair amout of Controversy has erupted around the Wired article and specifically the leak of the Microsoft briefing document on Fred Vogelstein and the article. I’d been planning on writing a few bits on PR from the perspective of the small-company technology person (ok, from the perspective of me). This whole thing is just the encouragement I need to try to break the whole thing down and rather than writing a long manifesto, I’ll try to get this out in multiple smaller posts.
First of all, in the spirit of “transparency” I should mention that I spoke to Fred while he was working on this article. To the best of my knowledge I didn’t contribute anything material to his story, but I’ll just say that Fred has the admirable quality of wanting to get the context right when he writes about something and I’m under the impression that he used multiple sources to try to understand how Microsoft actually works. To me this is just good, professional journalism, but in an environment of tight deadlines (pushed faster by the web) and a typical push for good juicy (juicy == sensational) stories it can be a rare thing.
One of my favorite aspects of being a manager at Microsoft was the opportunity to interact with a bunch of interns every summer. The intern program is a great thing on many fronts (at least in the majority of cases where it is managed right- I’ve heard of a few horror stories but they are rare). The interns get to spend a summer in beautiful Seattle, get exposed to all kinds of upcoming technologies, network with a bunch of people around Microsoft, and hopefully contribute to some real, eventually shipping product. Meanwhile Microsoft gets to check out the best and the brightest of the new crop of students with a 3 month interview.
One of my favorite experiences with interns has always been to expose them to some PR basics. They come in and having read about Microsoft in the press for years get to see the real thing from the inside. It is always fun to talk to them about how big the difference is between the reality on the ground and what the public sees. But it is also important to understand that this difference is usually not just caused by sloppy journalism. It is often a combination of both poorly we had communicated the real story, plus just how hard of a job it is to synthesize all this flood of conflicting information into a concise article. This gets to one of the reasons that I really like to talk to the press when appropriate- given how everyone is trying to spin them and how hard it can be to collect good information, it seems like a good thing to do my best to get accurate information out there.
I’d also like to be clear that I’m not an advocate of full-100%-transparency. For example, lets take the Microsoft memo on Fred into context. There is really nothing in that memo that I find too surprising. Most of the contents of the memo are the kind of stuff that we all have floating around in our brains, just here a team of people needed to collaborate on something so they wrote it down. Sure I have a different interpretation of bits- the piece where they say “it takes him a bit to get his point across” I’d more interpret as an aspect of his care in getting the story right. But it also goes as a perfect example why certain things like a briefing for a meeting or someones review document shouldn’t necessarily be made public.
In David Brin’s book “Earth” privacy has been essentially banned. Everything that anyone does is public record unless you do some explicit registration under the secrets act. This creates an interesting situation, but at least most people are aware of this environment and this makes them more careful about what they say/write. Transparency can be very destructive if it is thrust on you when you are unaware. For example, even though I doubt there is anything interesting in them, I would not be happy seeing Fred’s notes of our chat published. I’m not willing to publish the entire content of my email inbox, and clearly anything I post on here goes through at least some basic filter of what I think is appropriate for public consumption. Duh.