Canuckflack

The President of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies appreciates the role of blogs in building general buzz for independent reporting. As he mentioned in his “State of the Association” speech this week:

And, this year, we did something AAN hasn’t tried in years — commissioning shared editorial. Not only did Jason Vest’s report on a closely-held memo from an operative inside the Iraq Occupation get AAN lots of attention — from random blogs to Harper’s magazine — it filled a lot of news holes around the country with solid reporting . . . for free.

Every year, alternative newsweeklies from across the US apply for membership in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. After careful review, some are accepted, some are mentored, and some are mocked and belittled. Like the Fayetteville Free Weekly:

“From the cover stories that read like middle-school reports to the weak home-decorating column, this publication is an abomination. Inane writing, bad editing, zero design. You can’t even read the crossword.”

The review committee’s advice is a mixture of frank professional assessment and tough love.

“This paper has great potential in a rapidly growing if conservative market. First things first: start doing news, get an art director and simultaneously a new printer. Quickly.”

Is it all bad news? No. Los Angeles City Beat, a unanimous choice for admission, is “So sharp, it draws blood”.

Read the committee’s comments. Line after line, they underline the high levels of professionalism, creativity and originality the Association demands of local newsweeklies. Does your hometown rag rate as well?

Once upon a time, lonely campers could only rely on a weekly mail call and the occasional long-distance phone call to break the solitude.

Parents and campers alike had to communicate through the Camp Director - a nice, traditional command and control communication system.

Obviously, times have changed. There are fewer filters influencing communication among staff, counselors, campers, parents and alumni.

Phone trees, bulletin boards and mimeographed newsletters have been replaced by sophisticated web sites, e-newsletters, voice mail broadcasts and alumni affinity programs.

This means transparency and the rapid flow of information are essential if a Camp Director and camp staff are to deal effectively with campers, parents and alumni in times of calm and crisis.

After all, why should the campers, kitchen staff and Head Counsellor’s drug dealer be the only ones to know that Cabin B has a wasp’s nest, the Assistant Director is sleeping with the crafts teacher, and the school bus failed its last safety check?

That’s why the advent of electronic communication has proved to be a boon for small businesses like camps:

The Blackberry has become ubiquitous among hacks, flacks and political hangers-on, in Canada and the US. It’s proven indispensable in maintaining the rapid flow of facts, party lines, rebuttals and counter-spin as Canada’s political leaders bounced from the Atlantic to the Pacific these past five weeks.

Which is why all concerned were probably quite disturbed to discover the Rogers Wireless Blackberry network went offline for several hours yesterday morning - election day.

Rogers is one of only two national Blackberry networks. Email sent to their subscribers backed up as RIM, the maker of the device, moved to fix what Rogers described as a “a software issue … at the RIM server level.”

Every Blackberry user has experienced one of these “issues.” Eventually, your hip is flooded with 25, 50 or 75 messages, and you realize the gadget had been misbehaving. I have to imagine three national political campaigns trying to drive a get-out-the-vote effort on election day were a little non-plussed at the failure of a now-essential piece of equipment.

RIM, for some reason, did not return calls from the Ottawa Citizen for comment. (sub. req.)

In July, clear blue skies greet you each morning. The morning dew burns up under brunt of the growing heat. At night, porches are filled with noisy teenagers, and every morning, lawns are covered in bottles.

What ever happened to shipping the kids off to camp for the summer? The belch of diesel as a school bus coughs to life, a faint wave as Mom starts up the Ford Family Truckster, and little Timmy is gone for two, four, maybe even eight weeks.

This week, Canuckflack will take a look at the public relations challenges facing the staff at day camp, overnight camp, adventure camp, computer camp, basketball camp, even band camp.

Camp Directors, in their daily work, call upon many of the skills routinely demanded of a well-rounded communicator: promotions, advertising, media relations, staff communications and business development.

And they deal with some really disturbed people along the way.

Crooked small-town supplier: pulls up in a V10 supercab pickup, but can only provide Israeli canned tomatoes and Russian chipped beef. Preferred form of communication: No small talk, just cash.

Idiot Savant Camper: can wire pirated cable to the cabin, but never uses soap or a comb. Preferred form of communication: just IM his Treo.

Competitive parent : their kids arrive at sports camp with a copy of “the seven habits of highly effective people” and autographed photos of Pat Riley and John Gruden. Preferred form of communication: daily email, weekly newsletter, constant phone calls to the director, and regular visits to watch every sporting event.

Crazed groundskeeper: whether Carl Spackler at golf camp, or Groundskeeper Willy … there’s always a hint of mischief in their eyes - and the whiff of home-grown. Preferred form of communication: Quick verbal commands. Don’t get pushy, and don’t expect quick action.

Unwilling camper: can be spotted by eternal frown at the back of the pack. Prefers retro tshirts with suggestive logos. Preferred form of communication: Loud verbal commands and understated hand signals.

70s throwback music teacher: her license plate reads “JHN DVR” and she insists “Macarthur Park” and “Kumbaya” be sung at every campfire. Preferred form of communication: Passive and non-confrontational conversations.

Head Counselor: an unusual combination of natural leadership and subversive impulse. Can take forty kids on a three day canoe trip, and find a forty-pounder of vodka for the end-of-summer party. Preferred form of communication: A loud shout-out across the campgounds.

Lonesome Camper: easily spotted by the 180 page diary clutched to their chest. Preferred form of communication: Mix tapes with Liz Phair, the Indigo Girls, Elvis Costello and Alanis.

Camp Casanova: upturned collar on the Lacoste tennis shirt. Sebago deck shoes. Brings cologne on the canoe trip. Preferred form of communication: Plenty of empathic body language. Rhythmic verbal cadences. Handwritten notes on linen.

45 year-old Fantasy Camper: wants to know where he can hang his suitbag, and whether he can switch to a room with a mini-bar and broadband. Preferred form of communication: that young lady at reception.

Unless you’re just a grumpy landowner, you’ll agree that lawn signs do have a place in a political campaign. Those little wire and plastic signs will, in an incessant and subliminal manner, help raise general awareness of your candidate’s name, affiliation and well-deserved elected position. And on election day, who knows, they may swing a few votes during the drive to the polling station!

Most creatives and political organizers question whether lawn signs help move votes in a campaign dominated by issues, rather than name recognition. As one Toronto advertising executive commented:

“They defy every rule of advertising that I would abide by,” he notes. “But at the same time … they work, I think.”

Still, they can provoke negative reaction from voters feeling overwhelmed by door hangers, stickers, pamphlets, flags, trade show pop-ups and free standing inserts. The Missouri Press Association asked a sample of readers what tactic is the most offensive form of political advertising:

Shhh. Can you hear that? It’s the sound of David Ogilvy, hooked up to a turbine in the grave, generating enough power to light Six Flags over Georgia.

Almost two thirds of procurement directors questioned in a survey by spend management company Ariba said their marketing departments were “suspicious” of their activities, while 20% claimed they had been accused of interfering in client relationships. (MediaWeek)

Effective experiential/guerilla/street marketing depends upon the surprise and amusement of the general public. An imaginative campaign will draw the grudging admiration of a shopper, pedestrian and possible consumer, even if they are normally irritated by what they perceive as over-the-top marketing efforts.

I have to think the growing practice of building buzz by telling reporters about your impending “surprise” marketing tactic will eventually cause consumer skepticism to grow, and make this marketing genre backfire.

Sometimes an integrated marketing campaign isn’t worth it - especially when all you plan to do is flash people.

Outside Grand Central Terminal tomorrow, for example, six men and women will advertise a New York Health and Racquet Club class by spending hours flashing their underwear at strangers, who may notice that the club logo and “Booty Call,” the name of the class, appear on the garment.

“Our street team will be going around and mooning the message to the masses,” said Darren Paul, managing partner at Night Agency in New York, which organized the event. (NYT)

Come on - the least the agency could have done to earn the commission is hire J.Lo impersonators. Or RuPaul impersonators. Or RuPaul, I hear she needs the work.

A DJ for the British Classic Gold digital radio station has been suspended for repeatedly straying from the approved playlist. The Guardian got their hands on some internal emails:

We shouldn’t be playing Cliff Richard,” [Program manager Paul] Baker wrote in an email sent on Tuesday. “As I said on Monday, we might carry out research on him, but for now we have a policy decision that he doesn’t match our brand values, he’s not on the playlist, and you must stop playing him.”

“Requests is [sic] not an excuse,” he added.

An unrepentant [Tony] Blackburn read out the email at around 8.20am this morning then tore it up live on air, threw it in the bin and played two Cliff Richard tracks back to back, thought to be We Don’t Talk Any More (.mov)and Living Doll.(.mov)

And here for you, the dedicated Sir Cliff Richard fan, is the secret of his Dick Clark-like eternal tan and taut skin. (RealAudio)

How can you measure the impact of your blog? When do you really know that your astute and incisive analysis is really having an effect on people? Paul Wells, of Macleans magazine, knows:

This is the edgiest campaign I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of the 1995 referendum. The other day I was walking up Bank St. and some guy leaned out of a minivan and shouted, “Your blog sucks!”

Despite the enormous up-fronts for the major networks, advertisers continue to scramble to find alternate vehicles to promote their brands and products. While we know what ad sales staff will do for a buck, some creatives appear quite willing to make room on tabletops, in kitchen cupboards and in carports - for an extra cheque or two.

Steve Martin, for example, set his novel Shopgirl in the Beverly Hills outlet of Saks Fifth Avenue. Now being produced as a film, Shopgirl is set in Neiman Marcus.

For Martin, the tweak to his artistic integrity appears to have been relatively painless. As his book climbed the bestseller lists, he said: “I wrote a novel this year called Shopgirl, and several producers came to me and wanted to turn it into a movie. And I said: ‘If you think you’re going to take this book and change it around, and Hollywoodise it . . . that’s going to cost you’.”

Some marketing execs, though, seem to wonder why they should pay for the cow if they’re getting the milk for free.

“We never pay for placement,” says Jeff Bell, marketing chief for the Chrysler and Jeep marques. “We call it brand casting.”

DaimlerChrysler won thousands of media hits for their Crossfire after it was “cast” in the finale of the Apprentice. The cost? A few free cars.

Today, the FT discusses the relative value of different placements on television and in film.

Apparently, the BBC wasn’t fully briefed on how to handle Presidents hawking their new biography. Ask probing questions, but don’t push too far, you know?

Former US president Bill Clinton lost his temper during a BBC interview after being repeatedly asked if he was genuine in voicing regret over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton, revving up a publicity campaign ahead of the release Tuesday of his memoirs, bristled at relentless questioning about the affair with the White House intern by veteran BBC interviewer David Dimbleby, according to British newspapers …

“As outbursts go, it is not just some flash that is over in an instant. It is something substantial and sustained,” said a BBC executive who viewed the interview, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

The week of June 28, I’ll be running a series of posts providing PR and Marketing advice for Camp Directors. They’ll follow the same vein as my “PR for Santa” series last December.

It was twenty years ago this summer that Labatt changed the drinking habits of Canadians by introducing a longer-necked beer bottle with a twist-off cap. With the careful control of production, marketing and advertising, Labatt also managed to knock constant competitor Molson on its heels.

The latest salvo in an intense war with Molson for market share, the twist-off cap was a ground-breaking innovation in a national market just getting used to long-necked bottles. This was a secret product that had been developed, advertising produced and factories retooled, over a year: Molson could not be allowed to piggyback on Labatt’s work, especially through the beer-heavy summer months.

Labatt’s management counted upon deception to win the battle: a new ad for Labatt Lite was broadcast in Alberta, touting the benefits of a new, longer-necked bottle. At the same time, Labatt bought a million tall bottles - without a twist-off.

Molson, judging that Labatt was making a longer-necked bottle the marketing innovation of the summer (remember - Canada was still a land wedded to the stubby), bought millions of bottles - without a twist-off.

Naturally, they were non-plussed when a new version of the Labatt Lite ad ran in Alberta, one that began with a traditional bottle opener shooting off the screen and closed with the bottle being opened with the twist of a wrist.

“They deked us and we fell for it,” said Molson’s Norm Seagram, then president of Molson’s Alberta operations. “It was beautifully executed and it worked perfectly.”(From Paul Brent’s Lager Heads)

It seems that Henry Kissinger is quite adept at making himself unavailable to media when trouble’s brewing. His tactics usually involve extended travel. Jack Shafer thinks personalities and executives should be more honest about the still-common habit of jetting off on business travel as soon bad news begins to emerge:

Now, I’m not suggesting that any of these folks used travel as an excuse to avoid the press … Wait a minute! I am, too! The ubiquity of cell phones, e-mail, BlackBerrys, and satellite phones means that in all but a few extreme instances—during a hike though Denali National Park or a snorkel adventure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench—no big shot is out of his office’s reach unless he wants to be. Why report that someone can’t be reached when it’s more likely they don’t want to be reached?

I imagine that the “traveling … couldn’t be reached” construction is a stylistic holdover from the days when long-distance telephony was an on-again, off-again miracle. Travel really did make people unavailable. … reporters should force the issue and ask offices for alternative ways to contact their bosses. If the boss has made himself inaccessible, say so … : “Mr. Kissinger could not address the controversy because he has temporarily taken himself off the communications grid.”

The ready availability of information is radically transforming small town life in India. Old and moldy traditional authorities, once rife with personal corrpution, caste prejudice and economic injustice, are being undermined by the computerization of basic data like land deeds:

Computerizing land records may not seem like much of an achievement; most developed countries did it years ago. But in rural India, where the majority of people are semi-literate and live in remote communities unconnected by road or phone, it’s almost a revolution. “With equal access to information, a lower-caste person now has the same privileges as an upper-caste person,” says Rajiv Chawla, who oversaw the $3.7 million program …

In Karnataka alone, for instance, deed fraud once cost poor farmers $20 million a year; today, the problem has been virtually wiped out, according to the World Bank. With all the information digitized, land reform — which had slowed because limited access to records made it hard to prove ownership — could now be restarted.

Read over the jump for an example of how computer kiosks are changing the lives of rural farmers.
(more…)

More evidence that corporate marketers and management are looking for detailed financial and performance data as an indicator of success. At the AdWatch: Outlook 2004 conference yesterday, AdAge noted an emphasis on stats in identifying business opportunities.

With so much data available, sorting the useful from the less so is tough. One source of inspriration, said [Pepsi CMO Dave] Burwick, is a book by Michael Lewis called Moneyball, which details how the general manager of the Oakland A’s assembled a winning baseball team by analyzing numbers on player statistics collected by amateur baseball enthusiasts.

“Our entire plan for 2004 is based on thoughts that came out of that book, which is all about figuring out which metrics matter,” Mr. Burwick said. “We learn from our mistakes,” he acknowledged.

The parallels are startling: traditional advertisers, marketers and public relations executives are griping about increasing demands for strict quantitative measurement, just as old-school baseball veterans railed against Moneyball and the prophecies of Sabermetrics.

Almost a year ago, Lewis picked at the traditionalists’ reliance on old war stories, gut feelings, and historical precedent: this criticism could apply to our industry as well:

What’s taken for success on a baseball field is often just good luck (the double that is actually a fly ball lost in the sun) and what’s interpreted as failure is often just bad luck (the home run pulled back into the field of play by the gifted center fielder.)

All this and more can be shown by the close analysis of baseball statistics — made possible, or at any rate economical, by cheap computing power. For anyone willing to shun the conventional gut-feel approach to the market for baseball players and find more accurate ways to price players and their skills, there’s opportunity …

The financial markets have helped to make brains more respectable to men of action. They have hammered into the minds of a generation of young, ambitious people the connection between “inefficiency” and “opportunity.”

The FT has given us a quick glimpse at the growing acceptance of gay and lesbian life in North American advertising. What’s driving this trend? A growing recognition of the broader purchasing power of this demographic group.

… evidence is emerging that - contrary to popular perception - gay and lesbian buying patterns closely resemble those of the general US population. A recent study by MindShare, a division of the WPP Group, with the Poux Company and Lightspeed Research, revealed that the gay market is not in fact dominated by buyers of up-market goods. Half the respondents said they regularly shopped at Wal-Mart and about one in four owned a Sears card.

The recent US Census results provided advertisers with the detail they needed to pitch more business:

And for the first time, new U.S. Census data about same-sex households is providing a look at gay demographics, via a new “unmarried partners” option in the 2000 survey, as detailed in a new book, “The Gay & Lesbian Atlas,” by Gary Gates and Jason Ost.

It discovered same-sex couple households are present in 96 percent of counties nationwide, totaling 1.2 million individuals. One in four gay households have children, more than one in 10 gay homes have a senior over 65, and male couples prefer cities while females prefer the suburbs.

Bob Witeck of Witeck-Combs Communications, a Washington, D.C., gay marketing firm … is enthusiastic about the census results, pitching three new clients with it. “We needed to know the geography for the community. While there’s a ‘duh factor,’ there were also surprises in where people live. Also, you can mine the data. It’s richer and deeper than surveys.”

MarketingSherpa’s just run a case study on the blog set up by the President of CoreStreet. The key: a PR person who pushed and pushed the idea of blogging until the boss caved. (see his blog here)

“Chuck was kicking around the idea of using a blog as a corporate communication device. I never got that excited about it being an official thing because a lot of corporate blogs are thinly disguised press releases dressed up to look hip,” [Phil] Libin explains. “We have better resources to get out press releases.”

But, PR guy Chuck Tanowitz persisted …

… Tanowitz has been able to plant opinion pieces that are cleaned-up versions of Libin’s original blog posts in both ZDNET and CNET. Libin says: “It’s great - something I thought 100 people would see was seen by closer to 100,000.”

I can’t let the new Starbucks Double Shot ad go without comment.

It speaks to me. In a spandex pants, faux silk shirt, blown bouffant/mullet sort of way. The ad is imbued with the sense of energy and inspiration supposedly delivered by a double shot of espresso. Unfortunately, it also reminds me of junior hockey games and sweaty boxers from Philadelphia.

Did you know David Bickler, the lead singer of Survivor, is the voice for the Budweiser Real American Genius radio spots? (archive courtesy of KS1Tokyo-3)

A limited survey conducted for UPS Canada reveals that small businesses are nervous about their ability to succeed in an e-enabled environment. Ipsos-Reid surveyed and analyzed the responses of 400 small business owners/managers:

Generally, small enterprises do not seem very well prepared for e-business. Less than one-fifth (17%) feel they are adequately funded to support developments in this area, and only 29% believe they have an adequate technical platform in place to support e-business. Finally, just 28% think their employees have a clear understanding of the potential for business through this channel.

I was going to make a sarcastic comment about the observation that “four in ten (37%) owners/managers feel that the Internet will have little or no impact on their business over the next 3-5 years,” but I couldn’t actually imagine a business that would not be affected by e-commerce over the next five years.

Shoe shops, used book stores, holistic health boutiques, stamp dealers and maple syrup manufacturers: they’re all on the web or reachable by email.

Who are these 37%? I guess parking lot attendants, construction site lunch trucks, and roofers might be counted.

Those who do imagine impacts were most likely to mention marketing and company exposure (18%), communicating with customers and clients (13%), and growth in sales and profits (10%).

This information would indicate there’s a real opportunity to provide personalized IT infrastructure and advice to a large number of small businesses - an opportunity that could be well exploited by an international organization that has established relationships with small business and can pull in corporate resources to provide reliable and local IT products and advice.

Damn - that would be an opportunity for FedEx/Kinkos. Sorry UPS.

It may be the Canuck in me, but I really like the theme for Euro Cup 2004 - Força by Nelly Furtado.

There’s some acerbic prose and vivid imagery running through Fortune this week, including two very different perceptions of the state of the advertising industry: it’s practically a Nightmare on Madison Avenue:

Peter Sealey, a visiting professor of marketing at Stanford University, describes the state of Madison Avenue in starker terms. He argues that the average ad agency CEO is as blissfully unaware of the perils his industry faces as a French cavalry lieutenant in 1914. “You ask him how things are going, and he says, ‘Fine. Look at the horses. You like the horses?’ ” says Sealey. “Meanwhile, there’s a goddamn German 200 miles away building the first tank.”

“I love this business,” says Donny Deutsch, CEO of Deutsch Inc., a New York ad agency. “If you landed here from Mars and you looked at the elements of society–commerce, pop culture, humanity– advertising defines us more as a civilization than anything else out there. It’s selling in its most grotesque obviousness. It’s human manipulation. Yet it’s charming. It’s something we all participate in. It’s what makes all the engines go. It’s what allows television to exist. It’s what drives people to stores.”

It’s frank, it’s incisive, it’s a must read. Take a look at the judgement laid on the AAAA’s planned Advertising Week in September:

It wouldn’t hurt Madison Avenue to be a little reflective, though. So much of Advertising Week celebrates a vanished era when eccentric craftsmen ruled the business, media buyers knew their place, and 90% of the public watched prime-time television. Yes, that was a better time for many people in the industry. But it’s gone.

Picked up a funky little 9″ portable TV over the weekend. The back of this avocado and chrome TV proudly proclaims: “Manufactured in August 1976″

It picks up all the stations: 6, 8, 13, 48, 64, all in black and white. I think I’m going to force my kids to watch the Bugs Bunny and the RoadRunner show on it.

Andy Richter is getting ready for a new gig as the amiable dad of quints in a new Fox sitcom. This is on the heels of his appearance in the latest Olsen twins movie. Generally considered to be a very funny man, he seems to have let his standards slip. As he told the NY Post:

My feeling is that the quality and funniness of the jokes is the main thing in a sitcom. The concept doesn’t matter. There are no new ideas where sitcoms are concerned. This show is a Honda Accord with an 8-cylinder engine. It’s built to sell.

Ooooh. An Accord. With the leather seats and halogen fog lamps? Judging from the latest ratings book, the networks’ reality programming divisions are pumping out Dodge Vipers and Ford F350 Supercabs. Not that Andy doesn’t recognize the humour in stupid stunts:

I just saw “Jackass: The Movie” on cable, and that thing is full of huge laughs. They really know what they’re doing. There’s no set-up: they just cut to a midget kicking himself in the head.

Derek Ferguson is the CFO of Bad Boy WorldWide Entertainment Group, and he is looking into the crystal decanter for future revenue streams at the house that P. Diddy/Puff Daddy/Mr. J.Lo built.

“Music is so powerful that we’re looking for other ways to monetize the medium,” says Ferguson. Indeed, the surprise impact of hit songs like “Pass The Courvoisier” has not been lost on companies desperate to reach the lucrative youth and urban markets (sales of the cognac jumped after the song’s release).

“We are definitely leveraging the acts that sponsors are interested in,” he continues, describing how Apple paid to have its iPod placed in a P. Diddy music video and displaying a CD that features Sprite’s brand name in the liner notes. “Some extremists think that recorded music will be free in ten years,” he comments. “Companies will make money by selling sponsorship around the content.”

As if the threat of outsourced positions wasn’t enough, lawyers took the opportunity on Friday to brief Reuters staff in London on their legal obligations under the Financial Services Authority’s market abuse directive.

As the Guardian recounts, Reuters has had the opportunity to break unreleased or embargoed market news and company financial information in recent months, to the consternation of the FSA.

“We were basically informed that we should not break market-moving news. We are merely supposed to write up press releases,” said [one Reuters] reporter.

“We were also told not to snoop around on the web looking for news. We must not put out anything before a company would wished it to be released.” Another said: “The lawyers had no idea what journalists actually do.” (reg. req.)

Dan Lett of the Winnipeg Free Press has reviewed the use of technology by actors in the current national campaign, and he isn’t impressed:

At a time of dwindling turnout in elections and escalating cynicism about politics, where is Canada’s Howard Dean?

… In Canada, the main political parties are virtual digital dinosaurs who are using the Internet to push their messages but not a whole lot more. The question arises: could Canada produce a Dean revolution of its own? (WFP is behind a subscriber firewall)

Canada’s political landscape presents several logistical hurdles to a fully wired campaign: election dates aren’t fixed, so a national campaign is announced and executed within six weeks; Canada’s political parties (and governments) haven’t embraced the opportunities for two-way communication available in the wired world; and the electorate is increasingly disengaged from the process, so they aren’t demanding clearer and more personal communication channels.

… [One informed observer] said the Canadian election is so volatile that most Canadian parties would be foolish to spend their money on so-called “quiet media'’ like the Internet.

In a close race like this, politicians need to focus on using mass media, television and newspaper advertisements to reach a wider audience, he said.

The Dean experience demonstrated the limitation of relying largely on quiet media campaigning.

I don’t really agree with that last observation: the limitations only exist if you haven’t had the foresight to install the technical infrastructure and train the right volunteers to deploy social software and implement effective web tactics.

In the current campaign, the candidates on the stump depend upon their BlackBerries to communicate with campaign managers and central war rooms, feeding questions in and receiving party lines in return. The web sites could have been coded in 2000 or 1996: they provide HTML and PDF files, with little else. There are some blogs present, but there hasn’t been a commitment to frequent and transparent contributions from party leaders.

Apparently, Michael Moore is staffing up a quick-response team in anticipation of attacks on his soon-to-be released Farenheit 9/11. Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, veterans of the Gore campaign and Clinton White House, are manning the mobiles and thumbing the BlackBerries.

“Employing the Clinton strategy of ‘92, we will allow no attack on this film to go without a response immediately,” Moore said Thursday. “And we will go after anyone who slanders me or my work, and we will do it without mercy. And when you think ‘without mercy,’ you think Chris Lehane.”