Or the “Prissa” conference as the new mayor of Detroit called it earlier today. I thought for a moment that’s how people referred to the organization these days; it has been a while since I attended the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) annual conference. This year, Rose Communications is a sponsor of the event.
Today’s keynote speaker was Craig Newmark of the wildly popular Craigslist. What a humble guy. A self-described engineering geek, Craig talked a lot about “continuous engagement” with his online community and how his success is the result of “doing what feels right.” Upon realizing his managerial deficiencies, Craig shifted into a customer service role. He literally reads and responds to hundreds of emails from site users each day while someone else runs his eponymous company. That translates into about 50,000 responses per year. Yes, I’d call that continuous engagement. When the time for Q&A rolled around, someone apologized in advance and then asked the question surely on many people’s minds, “How do you respond to the newspaper industry’s claim that you’ve dramatically hurt their business?” He said the decline of classified advertising revenue was only one of the many financial challenges faced by daily and weekly newspapers in our country. After this attempt at minimizing his company’s impact, he said he felt the role of newspapers should be to expose the truths that would prevent us from making bad foreign policy decisions (as opposed to serving as a marketplace for used cars, jobs and lost pets, I assume). He said there should be more fact checking. Amen, Craig! But who’s going to pay for it? Most outlets charge less to a subscriber than it costs to print the paper. In fact, Craig mentioned www.factcheck.org as a great, non-partisan source of truthful information about the current presidential election. Yet another sign that the role of the daily newspaper is fading deeper into uncertainty.