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My buddies at Jackson Fish made the New York Times, with a picture even!

Congrats! They couldn’t have picked a better set of folks to be the “poster children” for the Seattle startup scene, although Jackonfish is pretty atypical as startups go…

John Cook did a very good write up of the meat of the panel discussion last night.

One of the comments on his post points out that all the journalists said pretty much that the best way to get coverage was to provide one journalist a scoop. From my experience that is close, but its not the whole story.

The key isn’t a scoop, its a unique story. Journalists don’t exist to just write the same thing over and over repeating your message to the word (that’s what bloggers do.. oops). If its a truly huge story (”Microsoft announces next version of Windows”) everyone will print it, just in the off chance that their segment of the audience missed it everywhere else. But for most of us, its only going to work if the journalist feels that they have some special take on it.

So when you work with each journalist, think about what interesting thing you would like them to say. Keep in mind that in the book world, stories have conflict, and while not everything that gets printed in the press has conflict, it sure does make it more interesting. Guy Kawasaki published a list of the nine best story lines for marketing from Lois Kelly. This is a pretty good list, although it doesn’t rank them by how easy of a story they are to spin- David vs. Goliath is one of the most obvious ones and it works for almost any company and is a pretty easy one to believe. Its a good way to get coverage, but its not necessarily the best way to keep the focus on you and the wonderful thing your company does for its customers. Still, its a good one to think about since it tends to come out even if you don’t plan on it.

Of course this all varies quite a bit by the publication. TechCruch tends to favor writing straight profiles of companies. Wired tends to focus on what Kelly calls the “Avalanche About To Roll” of technological/societal change stories (although they do have a good measure of the other types thrown in too). Other publications will focus more on the business aspects.

I thought I’d share a few random thoughts about the Naked Truth event today in Seattle. First of all it was really cool that this event was pulled together with such a heavy-hitting panel of journalists. A big thank you! to the Redfin and Madrona Venture Group folks for pulling this together and sponsoring it. It was a beautiful evening for an outside event and it was a great excuse to get together with a bunch of entrepreneurial folks to chat. I’d also like to mention that I was impressed to see so much of the local VC community show up. It makes a difference when they are present and part of the discussion at events like this.

I felt a little bit disappointed with the panel discussion but in retrospect its probably more about my expectations than the panel itself. With a title like “Naked Truth” and panelists like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, Fred Vogelsten of Wired (who was involved in the recent “naked” issue), and John Cook who writes for the Seattle PI business section and (to me) more importantly writes the John Cook Ventureblog, I was expecting to dig a bit more into how the Internet as a communication medium has changed the relationship between the press and the industry. It felt like the panel mostly covered some great PR basics (and reading the announcement again thats all that was promised). All of it was really good stuff and it was great to hear this stuff from real journalists.

Of course the great thing about “the Internet as a communication medium which has changed the relationship between the press and the industry” is that we can continue the conversation beyond the event itself and I can post my thoughts at more length on here.

One question from the audience was something along the lines of “should you try to get your story told in the WSJ or just aim for the local press”. On one level the answer to that is fairly easy. If your story is newsworthy enough to make the WSJ, you would be a fool not to get that coverage. They have huge reach, and the credibility of being mentioned in the WSJ can be critical. That is pretty powerful.

Yet, let me make a counter argument. If you go to the “Naked Truth” page, there is an interesting distinction between the 5 reporters. 4 of the 5 have their names linked to their blogs (ok, Fred’s is a bit stale and Tricia shares a blog with 4 other reporters as far as I can tell). But Rebecca Buckman’s link is to her name on Technorati. Follow it and you find lots of mentions of her (and for right now of this event) but nothing BY her.

Now, the WSJ isn’t completely an old-media dinosaur. They have a huge web-site and can proudly say that they are one of the few in the world that have managed to run a profitable content-subscription business on the web (it is rumored that the NY Times is about to give up on their Times Select subscription). But the subscription site puts all their stuff behind a closed door. How often will anyone ever link to it? It has power on its own since it comes with the strength built up over decades of the WSJ, but it doesn’t exist as part of the web.

Compare that to John Cook’s blog. Frankly, for a long time the business sections in local newspapers (IE- not the NY Times or WSJ) have been in a rough spot. Most business professionals read one (or both) of the two “national” papers, and it seemed like too often local business coverage was trending towards the equivalent of “human interest” pieces. Not that there is anything wrong about those, just they aren’t going to be considered important.

I found out about John Cook, not from his newspaper writing, but from his blog. Blogs of course have that interesting characteristics that they all link to each other, and I started seeing links to John’s blog and pretty soon I subscribed to it. Because of the lightweight mechanism and frequent updates I’m sure he gets to cover a bunch more than he would be able to write in the newspaper. For me, I get this much better picture of the scope of venture activity in the Seattle area. It puts him and the whole PI business section on the map, and that’s the map that covers the whole Internet, not just Seattle.

I don’t mean to overstate the case and suggest that mention by John is more valuable for a company than a mention in the WSJ. Just that its not so clear cut anymore- the same thing that has put the power to publish in the hands of non-journalists also is a powerful tool for the pros. And its worth saying that I think there continues to be an important role for professional journalists- I’m not at all in the camp that seems to be saying that somehow a bunch of random people typing away can do just as well as someone with real training and experience at finding out the real story.

I’d also point out that there is a business dilemma here. Professional journalists deserve to be paid for their work. Especially given blog readers which don’t show your sites ads, its much harder to get paid for writing on a non-subscription blog. I’m a proponent of the right to charge for software that has value and this content should be regarded in a similar way. Yet the right to charge for software isn’t always the same as the practical ability to charge for software. As an entrepreneur you are faced with the unpleasant reality that pretty much any consumer facing web-site is going to have to be mostly free and you need to figure out how to monetize it some other way. The usual technique is to follow the lead of the 1st National Change Bank.

The other topic that was mentioned, but I would love to explore more is ethics. Arrington did mention this a bit, both in poking at the WSJ’s potential massive conflicts if they get bought by Murdoch as expected and also being straight up about his goal of making a buck for himself. It feels like one of those situations where both the traditional journalists and the new-style ones are struggling with what is appropriate in this new medium. Bloggers run with different rules than the traditional journalists have, but I’d have to assume that the professionals feel some pressure to adapt to compete for that hot story. At the same time they feel the pressure of the corporate consolidation of their industry and the pressures that inevitably flow to the editors.

Finally I’d like to mention a foundational question that doesn’t get asked enough. Why does a start-up want to talk to the press? Getting lots of PR seems like a given for most people (”there is no such thing as bad press”) but without thinking about your motivation a bit it is hard to focus to get the right kind of coverage that meets your goals.

Press can give you two things- the first is distribution. In the old days distribution was cutting the deal with Egghead so your boxes showed up in every store and some people might buy them. Today getting mentioned to millions of people is more valuable since for many businesses they can reach you from any web-browser if only they have heard of you and have some reason to type the name of your site.

The second thing they give you is credibility. If someone randomly visits one of my sites, the chances are pretty high that they will head somewhere else without even a single click, and are overall fairly low that they will trust me enough to sign up for an account. On the other hand if Wired just wrote a glowing article about some great new service and someone is going to check it out, they are much more likely to check it out carefully and sign up for that account.

Talking to the industry press is more about developing business contacts and financing than attracting customers to your site. Of course, these two points still apply.

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.