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After about six months off from blogging, I’m back.  Don’t worry, I didn’t have a David Schuster moment.  So to cover the time off, some things I think I think.

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I have to admit I was not amazed that The New York Times knew about the Securities and Exchange Commission filing a civil case again Goldman Sachs before many at Goldman Sachs did.  (According to Politico, someone must have tipped off the Times since they were able to get a 1,200 word story up on their Web site minutes after the suit was filed — updated version here.)  On the other hand, some at Goldman Sachs found out when the story appeared on CNBC. I originally thought Goldman’s DC lobbyists would have known something was coming, but I’ve been hearing they are viewed as lepers and treated accordingly.

This has been a bad year for the vaunted Wall Street investment firm. Suspicions about Goldman’s activities in the AIG and Greece collapses, the ongoing talk that it puts its interests over those of its clients, the so-called revolving door between the firm and the government and other real or imagined black eyes have united the left and right  in putting the firm as the centerpiece of their anti-Wall Street, anti-bailout opposition.

But there have been a number of self-inflicted wounds too.  Whether it was Lloyd Blankfein’s comment about the firm doing “God’s work” in The Sunday Times that quickly went viral, the widely mocked announcement from the firm’s charitable foundation about  making a billion dollar donation to small business around the same time that firm reported it has  billions to release as bonuses, or the firm’s increasingly frosty relations with reporters, the firm has made a number of missteps that the firm’s in-house PR team was slow or unable to counter.  (UPDATE: Another example, CNBC’s Erin Burnett on “Morning Joe” Monday morning said that it took Goldman 10 hours to get out any response the federal charges, which esstentially lost the firm one whole news cycle.)  The fact that Goldman hired an outside public relations firm (not Ogilvy PR) showed that some at the firm were not happy with the results the in-house team under Lucas van Praag was producing.  When Charlie Gasparino, who has both defended and attacked the investment firm, went live on Fox Business to report about the infighting by the board over the outside PR firm’s recommendations, you could tell how divided the firm’s leadership was on what steps the firm needed to take to stop the reputational bleeding.

Now, with the SEC suit, the firm has gone from having a PR problem to having a real problem. Look for the firm to circle the wagons even tighter.  The Obama administration will likely use the SEC suit as justification for pushing harder for financial services reform, which will create more headaches for the firm in the short term.  (What, you thought the filing on the law suit and some of the White House’s harshest criticism of Wall Street was coincidental?)

UPDATE 2: President Obama is going to Wall Street on Thursday to make a speech on financial services reform.

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There was a very interesting story in Politico about the views of the Obama administration inside the Beltway and outside the Beltway.  Here are several key paragraphs:

While Washington talks about Obama’s new mojo, polls show voters outside the Beltway are sulking — soured on the president, his party and his program. The Gallup Poll has Obama’s approval rating at an ominous 49 percent, after hitting a record low of 47 percent last weekend. A new poll in Pennsylvania, a bellwether industrial state, shows his numbers sinking, as did recent polls in Ohio and Florida.

So there are two Obamas: Rising in D.C., struggling in the U.S.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell admits that Republicans won the health-care messaging war and says he has been traveling to dinners and fundraisers across the country to implore Democrats to fight back.

“The spin took hold,” Rendell said. “I expected more of a bounce than he got, but again it all goes to 16 months in which the Republicans have dominated the spin on stimulus and health care. … It’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and say, ‘Game on.’ And the more we do that, the better it will be.”

It’s yet another deficit for Obama to tackle: The Republican Party has closed its popularity gap with the Democrats, and people say they’d be at least as happy with the GOP in charge of Capitol Hill. Wall Street sees a recovery, but everyday Americans think their country is still on the wrong track. And health reform is even less popular now in some polls than it was before it passed.

“Everyone in the pressure cooker in Washington got all excited like the millennium had arrived [when health care reform passed], but I don’t think most reasonable people read it that way,” Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen said. Bredesen said people are worried about the cost and “appalled at the process in the Congress that produced it.”

Bredesen said that in the states, it’s not about power politics and who’s up and who’s down, but about the cost — an estimated $1.1 billion for the Volunteer State from 2014 to 2019, with the costs ballooning just as the state was expecting to begin recovering from the trauma of the past three years. “We haven’t given raises to state employees for three years and probably won’t for three more years,” Bredesen said.

Now there are still six months to go until the mid-term elections and plenty could change if the unemployment rate goes down.   But right now the signs are not good for the Democrats.

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Speaking of November, my first post on The Intersection asked if it was time for MoveOn.org to move on.  One of the things I pointed at was threats by it (and other liberal activist groups) to punish Democratic incumbents they viewed as insufficiently liberal by finding candidates to run against them in the primaries.  Even if their candidates didn’t win, they hoped that the incumbent would tack to the left in the future.  That strategy had limited success in 2008.

In 2010, MoveOn.org and others are trying the same strategy by backing Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in a primary challenge against incumbent Blanche Lincoln.  To help Halter the groups helped raise millions to fund his campaign through their grass roots networks.  Now, with less than a month to go before the primary, the most recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll (April 12-14) shows that Lincoln is leading Halter by 12 points (45-33).

Assuming no major changes until the May18 primary, the question becomes what did MoveOn.org get for its effort? It has forced Lincoln to spend money on a primary challenge that she certainly needs for a general election campaign where she currently trails all five potential Republican challengers.  The primary battle has also driven up Lincoln’s negatives, again something she didn’t need.  She was always one of the most vulnerable Democrats incumbents in a state that has been trending increasingly Republican.  If she loses, it would be fair for the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to place some of the blame at MoveOn.org’s feet.  If the Democrats lose control of the Senate, look for MoveOn.org and its allies to be placed in the center of the Democrats’ circular firing squad.

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If there was any issue where public relations setbacks have slowed momentum on another one of President Obama’s  signature goals, it is the environment.  Even before the Copenhagen climate change conference, it became apparent that the widely-hyped talks would go nowhere.  Despite attempts by the President to rally the talks, all Copenhagen really produced were some largely meaningless announcements and an agreement to try to rally in upcoming talks in Cancun.  Attempts to spin them differently were knocked down by pundits and the press not associated with the environmental movement.

Copenhagen was not the only public relations setback. First, the so-called Climategate scandal put climate change advocates on the defensive for several months.  When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the organization that shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore, was forced to retract a study on the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, the environmental movement suffered another set back.  Industry and conservative attacks on cap and trade as “cap and tax” and a job killer largely stuck and Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham were forced to stop using the phrase since it was a seen as a political negative (much like the environmental movement had to stop using global warming since the public no longer “bought” the phrase).  At the same time, President Obama’s green jobs speeches fell largely of deaf ears.

As a result, and in conjunction with high unemployment, the public has soured on environmental issues.  For the first time ever, a Gallup poll showed that Americans preferred developing energy supplies over protecting the environment by a 50-43 margin.  A March CNN poll confirmed something that Gallup noticed last year, the public thought the country should give a higher to improving the economy than protecting the environment. (Interestingly, this is a generational issue with Americans over 50 largely supporting economic growth, while those under 50 still supporting protecting the environment over economic growth.)  The poll also showed that only two percent of voters thought that the environment would be the biggest issue influencing their vote in November.  Finally, a Rasmussen poll from March showed that Americans had flipped on the cause of climate change in a year:

Nearly half of voters (48%) believe global warming is caused primarily by long-term planetary trends, a number that also has held steady since last July. Just 33% blame the problem on human activity, which is one point below the lowest level measured in over a year. Eight percent (8%) attribute global warming to some other cause, and 11% are undecided.

Belief that human activity is the primary cause of global warming has declined significantly. In April 2008, the numbers were nearly the mirror image of the current findings. At that time, 47% blamed human activity, while only 34% named long-term planetary trends as the reason for climate change.

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has made noises about personally leading the fight to pass a climate bill, the public support for the issue and a cap and trade solution is much lower than it was a year ago.  There is an outside chance that the a less aggressive bill, pushed by Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington could pass, but time is quickly running out on the Senate calendar for action this year.

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Fun post from the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz on Twitter today:

Love that @KeithOlbermann is broadcasting his hate-tweets (kind that would’ve been written in crayon years ago). Very entertaining.

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I understand the need for companies to get their name aligned with a  good cause, some known as corporate social responsibility in PR-speak.  But I pity the ESPN play-by-play announcer who has to  regularly mention the new Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (the old Emerald Bowl  in San Francisco).  Given the number of 250+ pound players on the field, I’m not sure that this is the best use of Kraft  marketing dollars.

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Speaking of sports…college football added an additional game with the new Pinstripe Bowl to be played at the new Yankee Stadium.  The game will feature the number six team from Big 12 and the number three team from Big East.  I’m sorry, but I don’t get it.  I’ve always questioned the need for the Eagle Bank Bowl (Washington in December?) and the Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl (Boise in December?).  I assume the bowl organizers are hoping that local teams Rutgers or UConn make it into the bowl every because — well, have you ever tried to navigate Manhattan or reserve a hotel room in New York on December 30?  Add the potential for lousy weather and I see a lot of empty seats, similar to what we get here in DC for the Eagle Bank Bowl.  Let’s call the game for what it is, another game between two mediocre teams during an increasingly crowded and irrelevant bowl week.

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Finally, it appears that the Nike/Tiger Woods ad backfired on Nike.  According to a poll by HCD Research, the percentage of Americans who had a favorable opinion of the company dropped after the ad ran and went viral.

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In the words of Maury Povich, until next time America….

We held another National Security Strategy lecture as part of Ogilvy Exchange last week.  It featured Price Floyd, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.  Price talked about how the Department of Defense is using social media and his presentation was a big hit.  And rightfully so.  National Public Radio was right when they called Price a social media guru.  You should take a look at the enhanced DoD website. 

You can get part 1 of the discussion here.

You can get part 2 of the discussion here.

If you’re reading this post, you are aware (maybe painfully knowledgeable) of the rapidly changing media landscape.  My colleagues and I are constantly talking about shrinking newspapers and news programs that are devoting less time to news and providing less hard news within the contracted newscast. 

Clearly, the future of the news media is cloudy and that is a shame because we need professional journalists, editors, columnists, photo journalists, producers, editorial writers and op-ed editors to report and provide context.  I know that the digerati believe the social media arena is filling the void and creating new outlets.  I agree (to a degree) but I also believe the social media space is a poor news generation vehicle.  It largely remains a means to circulate news and opinions (some informed and some not so much).

The future of newspapers is a particular concern because it is home to the op-ed.  While a good op-ed can be difficult to craft and unbelievably challenging to place, it is king in the public affairs realm.  There are several reasons why I hail the venerated op-ed.  First, it establishes a company or trade association as a thought leader on a subject, which provides a competitive advantage in the world of ideas, public opinion and policymaking.  Second, it allows a company or association to state its case and advocate for its point of view.  Lastly, it can drive social media. 

Think about this: op-eds are picked up by bloggers, Twitter addicts, Facebook users and people from all corners of the social media universe.  It is the content that the social media sphere craves.  Op-eds are linked to, quoted from, and serve as material for an array of online commentary.

So, social media devotees can join me in hailing the op-ed, which appears to also be the king of the social media empire.

Next up: Some random items that either reflect on previous posts or I haven’t thought of a way to blow out into a full blog post….

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic has an interesting blog post on the politics and press coverage of health care reform.    As he notes, as long as the story focuses on process (and to an equal extent, cost), the Obama administration and the Democrats will be put on the defensive. 

Reuters ran a similar report.  Buried at the end of the story is an important shift in language that the Obama administration trotted out recently (and largely lost in the Gates flap).  It is now talking about “health insurance reform” as opposed to “health care reform.”  If the administration is successful in this rhetorical shift, it could be important as it could calm the fears of people with health insurance who are now hearing that what they currently have could be pared back.  These are the folks who have been showing up in polls as increasingly opposing the administration’s effort.  Since the Senate (at least) will not act on a bill until after Labor Day, that gives the administration about six weeks for its new argument to gain traction.  The ultimate question is, with Americans traditionally tuning out politics in August and the president sinking in the polls (and viewership of his press conferences dropping), can he turn the debate around or is he too late?

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The second quarter GDP report comes out this Friday.  According to Bloomberg, the consensus is that the economy shrunk 1.5% in the previous quarter.  Reuters concurs.  Not good, but certainly better than previous and apparently better than it was thought to be several weeks ago.  Look for the administration to trumpet the numbers as a sign the stimulus is working.

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On the other hand, it will be interesting to see how the administration spins the revision of the budget deficit number.  The number, which Lou Dobbs continually reminds us is overdue (no surprise — given precedent from administrations), may be a harder number to spin if the deficit climbs significantly.  As Jeanne Cummings reported recently in the Politico,  the general consensus is that the administration’s initial estimates were too optimistic regarding growth moving forward.  Any significant revisions could lead to significant increases in the deficit projections.  (For example, if the administration predicts that growth in 2012 is 2%, instead of the projected 4%, that would add another $700 billion to the deficit.)  This could significantly crimp the some of the administration’s plans moving forward (along with its promises to cut the deficit).

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Following up on an earlier post regarding the WNBA, ESPN.com did a series of stories last week looking at the business of women’s sports.  In addition to an overview column, there are pieces on the WNBA, the LPGA, the WTA, the NPSL, and WPS (that’s the softball and soccer leagues if you are unfamiliar with the last two).

For those who are wondering how this relates to the public relations industry, there is a simple answer — corporate America provides the sponsorship dollars that these leagues rely upon for their survival.  Lack of corporate sponsorship is what doomed the LPGA’s former commissioner and what may be helping to keep some WNBA franchises alive.  Obviously retrenchment in the economy has hurt all sports. However, it seems that, to the extent that companies are still putting their marketing dollars into sports, they think they are seeing better returns elsewhere.  It also means that for companies that target women and are beginning to see a rebound, there are a lot of opportunities out there.

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If you thought California politics were already expensive, 2010 could be mind boggling.  Not only will you have an expensive governor’s race with the likes of Gavin Newsom, Meg Whitman, Jerry Brown and Steve Poizner  either able to self-finance or raise buckets of cash, but at least one recent poll shows that California’s junior senator, Barbara Boxer, might be vulnerable to the right challenge.  Like the gubernatorial candidates, Boxer is a good fundraiser, but if the Republicans’ dream candidate, Carly Fiorina, enters the raise, this could be a competitive race.  Yes, I know that businessmen of both parties have a history of crashing an burning in statewide elections, but I think 2010 could be the year you can throw out past precedent in the increasingly tarnished Golden State.

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In a sure sign that the Twitter has jumped the shark, I have signed up and started twittering (tweating? whatever…).  My online handle is gregstanko.  I’m trying to tweat at least once a day with something I find interesting or noteworthy at the intersection of public relations and issues management.   I’ll also try to blow out some additional thoughts here on the blog.  Let me know what you think.

A friend sent me the follow story from the folks at Minyanville that he caught on MSN Money.  It lists the eight sports team and two professional leagues that are most in danger financially and may be required to move or close up shop.  As with Top 10 lists, you could pretty much argue that there are others that belong on the list, such as the LPGA.  But it does bring up a number of interesting points that go to the interesection of public relations, government relations and sports.

In a good number of these cases, the teams are clamoring for new stadiums with government help — see the New York Islanders, Phoenix Coyotes, Sacramento Kings and potentially the Buffalo Bills.  New government funded arenas are controversial even in the best of times.  With state and local governments scrambling to keep the lights on, can these teams count on local governments to help keep them in the current market. Or, in the case of the Islanders and Kings, will they be moving to (or in the case of the Kings back to) Kansas City, a town with an largely empty arena?

By most counts, the WNBA has never made money and, if it did, it never made much.  The collapse of the Houston Comets this year was a black eye for the one women’s professional sports team leagues that has lasted for more than a few years.  If the NBA owners decide to pull the plug on the league or if a number of the teams go the way of the Comets, what does this say about whether the United States will ever be able to support professional women’s team leagues even after all of the successes of Title IX and women’s college team athletics.

A couple of years ago, CNBC ran an interesting documentary titled “NASCAR Gold,” trumpeting the league’s rise from a regional favorite to a national powerhouse.  Now, NASCAR even is in trouble with U.S. automakers in bankruptcy, declining sponsorships, lower attendance and shrinking television rations.  While you can blame the first two on the economy, as Michael Hiestand, the TV sports writer for USA Today, has said more than once, it doesn’t cost you much to sit on your couch and watch the race.  CNBC regognized this last week with a new documentary that looked at NASCAR’s troubles.  The thing that is even scarier for the association and the France family is that the situation will get worse before it gets better.  NASCAR.com wrote recently about whether there will be a future for the two feeder series — the Camping World Truck Series and the Nationwide Series — with lots of cars running without sponsors and teams laying off crew and pinching pennies.  Is this a temporary retreat for NASCAR or has the NASCAR bubble popped — with sponsors and fans?

Interesting article on the problems at My Space and at Fox Interactive Media.

Yesterday, the New York Times‘ Doug Quenqua had an interesting piece on dead blogs.  Included in the piece was a statistic from Technorati:

[O]nly 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Now admittedly, many of these blogs are personal blogs, not corporate ones, but I am sure that there a fair number of those too.  This leads to an interesting question about how does a company handle a dead corporate blog?  It could be that the blogger was promoted, transfered to a new job inside or outside the company, retired or terminated.  Or it could just be that the blogger ran out of things to say.  But in any case, what does a company do?  For example, what will General Motors do when Bob Lutz retires?

Have an opinion?  Let us know.

For most PR professionals, there is nothing earth shattering in this piece from McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required).  However, it is refreshing to see other business professionals reiterate many of the same things that companies such as Ogilvy PR attempt to sell into the c-suite.

I know, I thought it was called SPEED Channel…

Sports Business Journal has an interesting article regarding the potential of NASCAR creating its own cable network after its television contracts end with FOX, TNT and ESPN/ABC in 2014.  It is an interesting concept since there is an existing cable network (News Corporation-owned SPEED) that largely does the same thing. 

Lots can change in the next few years, but given NASCAR’s faltering attendance and ratings in the past two years (FOX’s NASCAR ratings are down at least 10% year-over-year so far with two races left in its package), one wonders if NASCAR’s decline in popularity is a temporary hiccup or a sign of a larger problem.  The downturn in the economy can explain away many of the empty seats at various tracks as fans, who often drive many miles to see their favorite racer, choose to stay at home to save money.  However, as Michael Hiestand, the TV critic for USA Today, has said, and I am paraphrasing here, staying away from the race track is one thing, but it doesn’t cost someone to sit on the couch at watch the race. 

Another concern is the lack of sponsors this year.  Again, some of this is understandable given the economic environment, but there have been signs that some long time sponsors, such as Kodak, think that big ticket sponsorships of racing teams, which cost somewhere between $15-25 million, are no longer worth it.  This has led to lay-offs and mergers among the race teams and cars (some in the Sprint Cup Series, and many more in the Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series) running without sponsors on the hoods and back panels.  The lack of sponsorships has also affected the TV networks who have been challenged in selling ads and have been cutting production costs (notice a lack of blimp shots recently?).  Finally, consider the future of General Motors and Chrysler.  In short, the “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” strategy of Detroit is under serious challenge.

In short, NASCAR has some problems it needs to solve in the near term.  How it solves those problems will help determine whether the channel becomes a reality.

After several years of public relations campaigns and battles at the Federal Communications Commission, the league and the cable provider finally reached a truce today that will see the NFL Network show up on the cable company’s basic digital package later this year.  In the end, the compromise meant that the league agreed to a reduced fee in order to gain additional carriage in Comcast homes.  Next up for the league is to try to gain carriage on other cable systems — Time Warner Cable and Cablevision among the largest.

Having followed this for years (yes, years), it’s not hard to say who won and lost in this battle of the titans.  In the end, I give the nod to Comcast in this one.  They were able to use their market size and the threat of ever decreasing carriage to get the league to lower its proposed fee.  The NFL, which had a much weaker hand, saw that its efforts to put pressure on the NFL via the fans (its “I want my NFL Network” campaign), Congress (Arlen Specter et. al.) and the Federal Communications Commission (Kevin Martin) fail, forcing it to cut its fee.  As I’ve written before, the League’s hand was weak because its product — the NFL Network — was weak, primarily because of its lack of live games.

This, however, is not the end of the game for the NFL.  It still has to deal with other cable providers who currently do not carry the channel.  That will not be easy — one only needs to look at Time Warner Cable’s ongoing fight to keep MASN, the regional sports network that carries the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Nationals, off its cable systems in North Carolina, as an example.

Nor is it the end of the game for consumers worried about higher cable bills.  Even though the NFL dropped its demand of Comcast from 70 cents to somewhere between 40 and 50 cents, look for Comcast to pass along this cost to consumers (previously Comcast made the channel available to those — like me — who were willing to pay an additional $5 or so a month for it and a variety of other sports channels such as NHL Network and NBA TV).  It may only be a buck or two a month, but I have no doubt my bill will be going up as will the bills of those who did not pay for the package .  Moreover, given way the leagues control television rights, I can’t get around this by watching on the Internet like I can with say “Family Guy” or “Bones.”  But that’s a story for another post.  Back to work….