EQUALITY MEDIA Newsletter ::: Newsflash to WIRED Magazine

READ Citizen Culture's EXCLUSIVE Interviews with Presidential Candidates
JOHN McCAIN and MITT ROMNEY

Friday, November 9, 2007
7:30 a.m. PST

On the Issues...
Earth to Anderson (and "WIRED")...
Diversity Requires a FREE FLOW of Information

Chris Anderson, editor of Conde Nast’s Wired magazine, has been having a big week. First, he pulls a high-profile media stunt that proves he’s outgrown his journalistic britches; and then he gets an Ad Age story all his own.

Last week I received an unexpected note—on Facebook, no less; the wave of the future?—from a media colleague whom I had recently seen at the 2007 American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton. (Mr. Anderson and I are colleagues through the American Society of Magazine Editors, of which I am the youngest member, though I don’t believe we’ve personally met and I’m fairly certain he failed to attend last week’s conference.)

The note contained a link to Anderson’s personal blog. I braced myself for exposure of the unexpected kind.

What I found was distasteful, distressing, and downright inexplicable: a list of all the emails that Mr. Anderson didn’t know and therefore had deemed SPAM. The act was designed as a very public tongue-lashing—ideally with defamatory consequences—excoriating the so-called “lazy flacks” from whom Mr. Anderson had received unexpected e-mail. Of course, this rant was not railed against fake pharmaceuticals or penile implant adverts; it targeted public relations executives.

Excuse me, Chris, but I’m not a publicist, and I made your list. Don't you feel silly?

Within hours, the New York Times was all over the story—unfortunately legitimizing it—and reasonable people (including “the hand that feeds me”) will disagree as to whether Anderson deserves to be flogged for his flogging, or not.

But let me be crystal clear about my problem with Anderson’s faux pas:

As author of “The Long Tail,” a book often spoken in the same breath as Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” for its meta-analysis of social change in a new information universe, shouldn’t he have at least a smidgen of understanding about the way our modern information economy works?

How about the fact that, in our modern (read: Western) world, a free flow of information is the Great Equalizer?

(Plus, does Conde Nast know Anderson besmirched their magazine’s good name?)

It obviously failed to register that the freedoms of speech and of the press are founded upon the very real change that not everyone reaching out with something to say—whether by email or by "Federalist Papers"—is “pitching.” Sometimes they ask for nothing but a moment of your time.

Sometimes, the Mr. Andersons of the world (suddenly, I feel like I’m in The Matrix are lacking information. And as much as we talk about diversity in this space, all the professional inclusion in the world is meaningless if the marketplace of ideas is Members Only.

Consider: In addition to this blog, I publish a complimentary newsletter called the “CITIZEN CULTURE’s Equality Media Newsletter,” that delivers news about diversity in media, marketing, and corporate America to journalists and community organizers nationwide. Concise digital packets of information are laser-targeted, opinionated, paperless, and distributed weekly with relative unobtrusiveness. (After all, one can always delete or unsubscribe.)

Like every one of my Advertising Age "Big Tent" blogger colleagues, I am out to influence minds at the pinnacles of power. Amid an increasingly fractured media mix, it is my responsibility—let alone my pleasure—to do whatever it takes to slip beneath the radar and into consciousness. (Isn’t that what Advertising Age is all about: strategic, effective outreach that increases value, brand relevance, and impact?)

But I am not pitching. I’m flattered and honored when I receive any response, but I’m certainly not looking for anything but social change for the better.

With a multiplicity of voices comes a barrage of information, the constant din we all know, revile, and contribute to.

In an era of information overload, it can be tempting to forget that behind all “user-generated content” is a “user”—a human with something to say. Like a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness proselytizing at your door, all you have to say “No thank you, I’m not interested.” Slamming the door in their smiling faces does not make you look bigger—just bitter.

No legitimate marketer, journalistic, PR exec, or otherwise, strives for annoyance—that would be utterly counterproductive, not to mention illegal. Companies like newly-public Constant Contact (which I use for my newsletter) keep a vigilant eye on the federal CAN-SPAM law.

Technology rightfully places the onus to be interesting upon the purveyors of information; messages need to be worth letting past TiVo and junk filters. But once that goal is accomplished, our utopian vision of diversity requires the recipient to have a curious spirit and a willingness to be touched, even by those he doesn’t already know.

Thoughts? Send me a response.
Or consider writing a piece for the newsletter.