When Blogs Get Out Front of a Story
I try not to cross-promote my blogs but will make an exception about a story that appeared on my Nortel blog last week because it illustrates how blogs can get ahead of the media and a corporate PR team.
Last Thursday, I saw a Google Alert about a Nortel executive, Joel Hackney, who admitted to being guilty of assault on a female, false imprisonment and communicating threats after a road rage incident in a parking lot following a basketball game in North Carolina. Initially, I wasn’t sure whether to blog about it because although it involved a Nortel executive, it wasn’t really related to Nortel’s business. But it did involve a senior executive who is a member of the company’s new and improved management team so it seemed newsworthy. (and the story had been picked up by a North Carolina newspaper. the News Observer). So, I wrote a post asking whether Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski should keep Hackney.
The number of page views (more than 10,000) and comments (80 and counting) have blown away any blog post I’ve ever written. How come? For one, it is a bizarre story featuring an executive who works for a high-profile company with more than 25,000 employees but I think the real reason is there’s an information void. Other than a handful of local outlets covering the story, there has been no media coverage, including none in Canada where Nortel has its headquarters. Meanwhile, Nortel has been silent.
With little information available, many people have turned to my blog as a way to find out what’s happening and what other people are thinking, including many Nortel employees. The most striking comment was a person who said: “One of the more depressing aspects of this affair is Nortel employees having to communicate with each other through an external blog like this, in full gaze of the world.”
For someone who spent a long time as a business reporter, including five years covering Nortel, this “story” is interesting because it’s another example of how blogs are increasingly becoming places where people get their information. I will be curious to see whether the mainstream media picks up on it, and whether Nortel issues a public response.
March 9th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
The biggest story I know of today, is also a story where bloggers lead, while the mainstream media is deathly silent. The story is the Security and Prosperity Partnership, which was signed by Paul Martin, George Bush and Vicente Fox in Waco Texas, March 2005. The SPP is quietly being implemented - with “implementation by stealth” to quote its backers - from an office in the basement of the U.S. Commerce Department (which also houses the NAFTA offices) and from luxury resorts like the Banff Springs Hotel. It is a quiet putsch by big business to take over the continent - something we might want to be concerned about.
It is being pushed through by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives - the big business lobby in Canada which represents the heads of the 150 biggest corporations in the country, and by the executive offices of the Canadian, U.S. and Mexican governments - behind the backs of Parliament and Congress, with a total media blackout, and behind the backs of the people of these three nations.
The SPP working groups in these three nations are extremely busy “harmonizing” 300 areas of law and regulations. The business elite that is backing this has already appointed its own de facto governing body for the new North American Union, which the SPP is in the process of creating. A new continent-wide council will “brief” Parliament and Congress as to their decisions about our collective fate. Our new government is to be the NACC: the North American Council on Competitiveness. It is a council of 30 CEO’s, 10 from each nation, representing the biggest corporate players. We already have a list of names.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know who our new corporate government is? Maybe we should be hearing about a plan to fully integrated the military, security, economies and laws of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Or is this not newsworthy? Maybe we should be discussing this. Perhaps a concern about the future of democracy is in order? I think so. Presently, only bloggers and a handful of websites are covering this story. Time to break through the silence.
For more information on this subject see:
http://jtoddring.blogspot.com/ or,
http://jtoddring.wordpress.com/