so i figured I'd post my response to Richard's Serious Case of Malpractice post here:
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You say: "First, the comment is personal, not substantive. Jarvis is alleged to not have a life and is called a worm."
I thought the whole promise of the blogosphere was its admitted (and cherished) bias (opposed to MSM's pretend non-bias). Of course the comment is personal. The kid was sifting through spam trying to find a relevant post on his client (we call that blog monitoring, right), probably at 7:30 a.m. before the office opened because the interns are the only ones you can get to do media monitoring before the Senior VPs are out of bed, and all he found about Dell was gripe after gripe from Jeff.
He did the intern equivalent of going postal without actually going postal. I'm not saying it's right, but don't pretend it couldn't happen inside of your doors.
If I were to counsel the young intern on how to gain a foothold in the blogosphere and become an opinion maker like Jeff Jarvis, I wouldn't change anything except for telling him to start his own blog and tutoring him a little on grammar.
Chris: "In this case, a summer intern's rantings are given virtually the same credibility as an AP reporter."
And that's the beauty of what we do here, isn't it? Except--OH WAIT!--Jeff and everyone else has a chance to respond instantly in this environment. It's a lot more difficult talk to the subjects of an AP story that's released on the wire.
As David Weinberger has said, the Internet is self-correcting. It also has a long memory. Who's a worm and who's not a worm will be sorted out-- but not until after this message from our sponsors....
Tags: PR, Public Relations, Edelman, Tech, Blogging, Blogosphere, Business, Media Monitoring, Blog Monitoring, Chris the Intern = Powered by Qumana
