It’s downright unthinkable and puzzling that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, of all people, wouldn’t think through potential consequences before taking action.  Unless, of course, he has a different agenda…

In the recent profile published by the magazine, titled “The Runaway General,” McChrystal disparaged administration officials, mocking Vice President Joseph Biden and criticizing special envoy for Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry, with whom McChrystal is supposed to carry out U.S. policy, potentially fracturing the unified front that Obama has sought to build for the war and the international coalition.

Oops…

Was this blatant naïveté on the part of McChrystal to simply speak off the cuff and blast the administration or just flawed judgment?  Apparently McChrystal, who spent much of his military career in the world of special operations, didn’t have as much experience dealing with the media, as did other top commanders, such as Gen. David H. Petraeus.  Still, he had “handlers” –civilian press aides assigned to him by the US military.

According to a report in The Washington Post, his now-resigned civilian press aide, Duncan Boothby said that, “he was heavily involved in arranging access for journalist Michael Hastings to McChrystal and his staff, so that Hastings could write the profile.”  Was Boothby aware of the bent that the story was to take?  Did he research the magazine and the reporter? Did he take steps to veer the story in such a way as to forestall any potential damaging results from the interview?  Was the reporter given too much access to McChrystal and his “anonymous” aides, with too little control? Did Boothby media train McChrystal at all?  Were McChrystal and his aides not aware of the administration’s policy that military officers must respect civilian leadership and keep their advice and views private?

Something doesn’t make sense…

It gets more dumbfounding.  Both Boothby and McChrystal fact-checked the story.  What did they read and approve? Did McChrystal intentionally speak out against the administration and choose a popular publication as a platform in which to vent?  If so, poor judgment, that triggered a public spectacle (or circus) with consequences that were easily predictable – a very public firing — reminiscent of the firing of General Douglas MacArthur, who played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II and who was fired for insubordination by President Truman.

McChrystal issued an apology yesterday saying that,  “It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened.” How about that old adage, “think before you speak? “

Poor judgment, indeed.  Sometimes — “It is all a matter of judgment”

Princess Diana’s death put the news media on trial as many blamed them for creating the market and incentive that led to her death. Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage, media was put in the dichotomous position of reporting a story of which they had to become a part.

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We introduce our first guest blogger of our new monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary.

David Houle, author of The Shift Age is one of the top futurists in the country and a much-sought after speaker.  Houle spent more than 20 years in media and entertainment having worked at NBC, CBS and a member of the senior executive team that created and launched MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1 and CNN Headline News.

This new decade, 2010-2020, will be known as the Transformation Decade. The definitions of transformation are several: the act or process of transforming, the state of being transformed, change in form, appearance, nature, or character.

Don’t those definitions feel like what has been already going on in your life and the world? Many of us have already been living in this state. Many of us have only recently felt the impending alterations, disruptions and reorganizations that have begun. Everything seems to be in a transforming state of shift.

We are entering the first full decade of the Shift Age, even though it has already taken root in the last 4 years. This new age has launched incredible shift and upheaval already. This current Great Recession can only be fully understood when seen as the reorganizational recession between two ages, the Information Age and the Shift Age. It is not unlike the recessions of the 1970s, which was the decade of transition between the Industrial and Information Ages. Almost everything is in a state of shift, in a state of being transformed.

To those that may think we are still in the Information Age let me ask you a question I often ask audiences: raise your hand if you don’t have enough information in your life? Of course no one raises their hand. Value, to some degree, is base upon scarcity. If there is too much information, it no longer has value. What will have value in the Shift Age and this new Transformation Decade is attention. The information you put your attention on is what becomes valuable. The question PR professionals must dynamically answer is how can you create attention that therefore creates value?

Think about all that is going on in your life and in the world. The way we communicate has and will continue to change in form, appearance (our gadgets are vastly different that even five years ago) and character (how many of you text or tweet regularly versus even three years ago). The shape of our relationships is changing. The shape of how we work, how we live and how and in what we travel are all changing. The economy and the workplace are changing and being reshaped.

In the next ten years there will be a level of transformation probably unmatched in human history. Just take a look at some disruptions that will transform the PR business:

• Humanity’s relationship to communication technology is rapidly changing and will bring on-going transformation socially, culturally and economically.
• Media will be completely different than it is today. We are only at the initial creative destruction phase of it now
• The workplace will be transformed as the place part becomes less and less relevant. Human beings will only need to be in the same place to collaborate, as work is increasingly defined as collaborative.
• The Internet and our rapid fire use of mobile digital devices to access it has created a pulsing, synaptic place of unprecedented interactivity that on a global scale is starting to feel like a global brain. It is a live, morphing place called the Neurosphere that is not only transforming us now, but could well be the technological model for a new level of human consciousness in 10-20 years. That is an evolutionary level of transformation. An evolution shift of transformative effect.. It may be hard for you to envision, but we are rapidly moving in that direction.

The list could go on and on as to what will be transformed. Take a snapshot look at your life now with all your relationships, ways of thinking, ways of living and ways of looking at the world I promise you that when you take the same snapshot in ten years you will astounded as to the transformation that will have occurred. The speed of change is now both constantly accelerating and environmental. It may feel uncomfortable as familiar things and ways of living are disintegrating. Transformation, to varying degrees, is always uncomfortable. We are and will be transformed in the next ten years.

We have entered the Transformation Decade.

Google’s tug of war with the publishing industry plays out everyday. It’s familiar and goes like this… Google offers free search tools that allow people to find content that publishers publish, while publishers want to get paid for the content offered. It’s that simple. But once the cat is out of the bag, what’s there to do? Say no, no, you can’t read this for free anymore?

So somebody in that very smart organization figured out as to what remains attractive to readers in actually reading a newspaper offline, say over a morning cup of coffee or on a commuter ride to work. It turns out that it is not the rustling or feel of the pages as one might have thought, but rather the freedom to flip pages at will, that matters to readers.

The silliness of this boggles the mind, but apparently it is true that being able to read a paragraph or two of an article before flipping pages to read the rest of it, is what makes newspaper reading satisfying and efficient of a reader’s time.

So being a clever player, Google took this tidbit of information seriously enough to create the experimental news hub called Fast Flip in Google Labs, a visual search engine that lets readers flip through webpages of more than three dozen magazines and newspapers – of course, hosted on Google. In return for permission from publishers to show full pages, rather than short snippets, Google agrees to share advertising revenue with publishers.

Fast Flip is an outcome of what Google had considered a major problem with news sites: slow to load, and as such, potentially turn off many readers. They reasoned that browsing news on the web is slow and that when it is fast people will look at more news and more ads. Really?

The service is being initiated with the cooperation of about three dozen publishers, including major news outlets like BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek; magazines like Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, Esquire and Good Housekeeping; and Web-only publications like TechCrunch, Salon.com and Slate.

Ok, they may have cleverly found a way to flip pages online, but no one can seriously think that this will present a new revenue model for publishers or replace newspapers’ plunging advertising revenues. It is a pittance and a nod to the publishing industry that Google wants to stay wedged in as publishers continue to search various models under which they would charge for content. Apparently Google wants to be a player in those plans, too.

With Fast Flip, Google aimed at getting closer to the experience of scanning through physical newspapers or magazines. What they have done in fact, and with much hullabaloo, is simulated online what we already have offline.

That’s the real tug of war…

In Camelot, it was the knight in shining armor that saved the princess, locked away in the tower.

With yesterday’s unveiling of Amazon’s Kindle DX, a new multi-purpose version of its digital eBook reader, the beleaguered newspaper industry may very well have its “own knight in shining armor” as quoted from a pre-launch article by Brad Stone in the International Herald Tribune (IHN) and The New York Times on May 5.  According to Stone’s report, Amazon is first in line to potentially save newspapers as in “throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies.”

Maybe…

As opposed to the launch of Kindle 1 last February (labeled as ‘experimental’ by the firm), which had skeptics wondering about large-scaled adoption of the device, the Kindle DX was launched with a “safety net” so to speak.  Even before yesterday’s announcement, several high-circulation newspapers including The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post had planned pilots with Kindle DX for this coming summer, where they would offer the device at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available, and who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Kindle edition of the newspapers.

But I don’t get it.  How do you continue to convince people to pay for subscriptions when most publications have their material freely available on the Web?

Reality is, freely available or not, many of us still pay for subscriptions today, anyway.  Print publications have always offered something tangible and comfortable — as in holding a newspaper or magazine in our hands with our morning coffee, or sharing an article with a fellow commuter, or simply enjoying the rustling sound of turning pages, folding down corners to mark a page, etc.

Old habits die-hard.  Time will tell whether consumers will migrate to reading from tablet-like devices or not, and how quickly…

However, for newspapers, the potential for huge cost savings from the discontinuation of printing and distribution alone, may be just the “second chance” that they need.  Several similarly-positioned devices are due to hit the market in the next 12-months, with other offerings reported to be in the works by the likes of News Corp., the magazine publisher Hearst, and upstart Plastic Logic.

The concept becomes very attractive when you hear Amazon’s Chief Executive Jeff Bezos’ comment, “With the Kindle DX, you get to carry all your documents and your whole library in one slender package.”

How convenient and efficient.  These, may just be the drivers for consumer adoption…

It’s really a given that the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or the ever-disappearing daily newspapers, but rather from surfing online, giving us the leeway to essentially behave as our own editor, seeking out news that best coincides with our own point of view, rather than hear, watch and read what is offered up by mainstream media.  Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. cleverly coined it ‘The Daily Me’  — a fictitious online publication of our own making.

According to an editorial by Nicholas Kristof printed in last week’s edition of the European Herald Tribune, he makes a scary point –  “there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices.” And then Kristof adds, “The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers.”

As depressing as it sounds, I believe that there is nothing new in that.  In fact a version of ‘The Daily Me’ exists both on the Internet and in mainstream media, for the public has always hunted for news outlets that agree with their own positions.  For example, with mainstream media, we either read liberal publications or conservative ones, but rarely both. We either select to watch Keith Olberman or Bill O’Reilly, but never both.  In surfing the Internet for news, we are not really changing what we have always done – hear, watch and read like-minded columnist and broadcasters.

I agree with Kristof’s suggestion, that of the  ‘Daily Mental Workout’, akin to a trip to the gym as our only salvation from digging ourselves deeper into one-mindedness.  According to Kristof, “if you don’t work up a sweat, it doesn’t count” meaning it will take that extra mental effort to put a halt to our preference for editing out the opponent’s point of view.

As difficult as this may be, it really is our only deliverance from the divisiveness that has engulfed us.  It will take individual discipline to really adopt a ‘Daily Mental Workout’ and sweat through our own narrow-mindedness and pre-conceptions to effect a change.

This past week’s news reports were hard on anybody’s digestion, what with the economy spiraling in the wrong direction again, a Turkish flight that crashed in Amsterdam’s airport, President Obama taking on Congress, the re-thinking of troop withdrawal from Iraq, the tremors running through the national financial sector as to the “nationalization” of US banks, not to speak of the frightening and escalating percentages of foreclosures.

Being in Europe at this time, and reading local German news, gave me a moment to reflect how very serious and analytical the reporting is around here.  Sure the Germans have their outlandish tabloids, but the respected mainstream media does take itself very seriously indeed.

So I found it superficial at the inordinate amount of time that CNN’s Jeanne Moos chose to spend making sure that Joe Biden’s latest blooper — about asking for a website “number” rather than the URL or address, becomes top news.  OK, I understand that Jeanne Moos’ style was true to her “brand.”  But it is a judgment call as to whether CNN should just have “shrugged” or maybe let Biden have his usual sheepish smile and gotten off the subject or whether a Vice President of the US should be called out and subjected to far-reaching ridicule for using incorrect lingo.

The Biden “bloop” circled around the web with the “speed of sound,” mercilessly, I would say. One thing is to show the lack of Internet currency on a campaign trail, as was the case with McCain, a time when competency can be a competitive advantage — and another, is to subject the current Vice President of the US to mockery, just so that the media can inject a moment of light-hearted fun.

It wasn’t fun, rather a frivolous waste of news time.

There is no question that the news via user-generated, would-be photographers, and opinionated bloggers, travels at an unfathomable speed and, more often than not, trips up venerated mainstream journalists and photojournalists.  (Witness the images of US Air Flight #1549’s water landing taken by a person who just happened to be on a nearby ferry and who snapped a picture with his iPhone , then uploaded it to his Twitter stream, before US Airways was able to issue a statement.)

The idea of getting a “scoop on the news” is more or less out of reach today for professional journalists, with few exceptions such as frontline international news made in the hinterlands of the world, first hand government initiatives, diplomatic maneuvers, etc.

Ok, that’s today’s reality, so what’s the problem?

Would-be journalists are not trained to be reliable sources for news.  Their “news” is often subjective and, in the speed with which it is dispersed, is rarely fact-checked.  If understood as such, it makes a fine addition as a mass communication avenue.

But it becomes a problem when one takes note that there is a whole segment of the public out there that takes “amateur” journalism at face value with little consideration for the difference between them and the venerated journalists, who know how to frame the news within context, have a talent for building a story while understanding the complexities of its terrain, and who have the grasp for giving us contrasting points of views, allowing the reader to form an opinion based on our trust in them.

I think I will stick to the professionals for staying informed.

There were many contrasts in the media this week.  Talk show hosts were all over themselves with newsmakers, never mind as to worthiness of such platforms.

Consider first, the good…
The heroic Captain Sullenberger, of US Airways Flight #1549, has the media all over him, especially in his first sit-down chat with Katie Couric. That’s good.  We like heroes. His courageous landing of the jet airliner in the Hudson River, will earn him a key to New York City, as announced by Mayor Bloomberg.

Then it got somewhat worse…
Watching the late night show of Dave Letterman this week, I could not help but wonder why that famous talk show host would want to afford the impeached Governor of Illinois, a national platform to rant about his innocence.  Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to just let him fade into the woodwork, or rather behind bars, if so judged?  It made me think of the age-old adage “there is no negative publicity,” but it rankled me that apparently the Governor is holding court , outside the court, with the help of the media.

But then came the madness…
Octuplets were born through in vitro fertilization to an unemployed single mom of six.  That’s fine, if mom so chooses to have a large family.  It’s a personal matter and best kept a personal matter, past the initial wonder of it all — the miracle of having eight children at one time.  But watching the escalating media frenzy and, in particular, Nadya Suleman’s interview on the Today Show, made me think that the media is being “played well” by a woman who could easily become, not only a celebrity, but also very, very rich, simply by virtue of having had a record number of children.

It isn’t staying personal…