Newspapers have been in trouble for some time.  The surge in free online news sources put a strain on all print media, especially newspapers.  Jokes have been made on sites like The Onion where they “reported” that The Boston Globe had tailored its print edition to its three remaining subscribers.  Due to the vicious cycle of low subscriber bases and lower ad rates, newspapers across the country—and even the world—have been laboring to stay afloat.

While many solutions have been posited including forcing very frequent readers of online news to pay a fee or integrating online and print advertisements, no one has found the solution to arguably the newspaper industry’s largest threat ever. Earlier this month,  The Times decided to place a “paywall” on their site after having had enough with providing premium content to readers free of charge. The Times’ paywall works very simply.  When one logs onto the site, it appears as it did in the past.  The top stories of the day grace the opening screen along with categories to go into the “paper” and an average amount of advertising.  As soon as any story, category, picture, video etc is clicked on, an interstitial pops up informing the reader that this site is now available only by subscription.

This type of window is usually dismissed as simple nuisance of online advertising, but in this case, it is no joke.  If the window is closed, the user is returned to the homepage with no hope of finishing that story about the Sri Lankan cricket player or the Prime Minister David Cameron’s latest policy.

By being the first major newspaper in the world to enact such a system, they may have given the rest of the online newspaper community an example of one way not to solve their monetization problem.  After only three weeks, metrics taken by Experian Hitwise show that readership has dropped by an astonishing 90% since February.  (This was all reported in an article in The Guardian, which did not cost a pent to view).  Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who owns The Times, believes that if the new business model takes off, it could prove to be much more lucrative than the advertising model that most online news sites currently run on.

While it remains to be seen what the newspaper industry will do to keep itself alive, it looks, at this early stage at least, like a paywall for any and all information on a newspaper website is a better way to keep people away than attract them.

“Hey you – yeah, you. How would you like to have hot coffee spilled all over your fingers and toes? Why don’t you try catching your breath after being thrown at the bottom of a bag and have junk piled high –right, smack on top of you?  Sounds pretty terrible, eh? You wouldn’t do it to yourself, but you do it daily to your technology. Feel pretty guilty? Well you should.  Luckily, it isn’t too late to make amends! Office Depot is providing you with an easy remedy to show your digital devices that you DO care after all, and will vow to protect us from here on out.”

Pretty funny huh?  These are the first words you read when you check out Office Depot’s new microsite, technologyapology.com, dedicated to teaching consumers how to treat there technology devices with care and concern.  Office Depot recently launched a CARAVAN® survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation for Office Depot (NYSE:ODP), which found that “one in three working Americans is often required to carry tech items while traveling or on the go. However, forty-five percent of Americans have damaged or totally broken a number of their technology items including mobile phones (29%), ear buds or headsets (22%), PDAs or Smartphones (10%) and laptops (10%).”

In response to this recklessness in technological device care, Home Depot has launched the “Technology Apology Contest,” where professionals can formally apologize to the technology that they have mistreated in the past and vow to protect it going forward with a 100-300 word apology. 

This microsite is peppered with humorous videos, and a fact sheet about how to protect your technological advices. What’s interesting is that none of these suggestions are really that innovative—they tell you things like keep your hot coffee away from the computer and don’t let pets get near these devices. And if you look a little closer, you will see that the prize for the contest is a messenger bag for your laptop designed to protect all your technological devices. So really, this is all a marketing tactic to get you to buy their bags—and it kind of works.

This microsite is essentially a page out of the PR 101 handbook and it’s not a shabby effort!  All of a sudden Home Depot is positioning itself as a thought leader in the technology protection industry—breaking out from the walls of the home building industry to provide specific products to protect our prized laptops, cell phones and iPads.   They’ve even gone so far as to launch a survey proving technological device neglect, identifying a crisis they are helping to solve further, solidifying their role as an emerging voice in the technology protection conversation. Great job Home Depot—your microsite is funny and interesting! And in the increasingly wired world we’re living in (as I look at the cracked cell phone sitting on my desk), you’re now a place I may look to for more than just a can of house paint.

General Stanley McChrystal and his staff have succeeded in shaking up how the war in Afghanistan will be run.  It came, however, at the cost of their jobs.  Michael Hastings, a reporter from Rolling Stone Magazine got the opportunity of a lifetime when a volcano eruption grounded him in France with the general and his staff for an extended road trip to Berlin.  They granted him unprecedented access to the inner workings of the high command.  Ultimately, their sharp, uncensored rhetoric lost McChrystal his job.

The assignment, as executive editor Eric Bates laid it out, was a simple profile of the general.  Hastings goal was to give the audience a look at the strategy in Afghanistan through the eyes of its architect.  Hastings wrote that story, but for some reason, McChrystal and his staff in no way censored their average day-to-day banter when the reporter was around.  They made no stipulations as to which conversations could and could not be used in the article, and even seemed to direct their snide comments about officials towards Hastings that they may be included in the story.  What was the logic behind this?  Was there any?  Did anyone stop and say, “We could all get canned for this?”  The reporter found himself asking the very same questions.  In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Michael Hastings seemed to indicate that the general and his staff seemed to have some sort of agenda…that they wanted to shake things up a bit.

So from a PR standpoint, why and how did this happen?  Hastings posited that McChrystal’s press advisors might have accepted the request in order to expose the situation surrounding Afghanistan and the strategy therein to a new demographic.  This is a perfectly sound reasoning to have Rolling Stone come in and do a profile.  The blunder occurred in not monitoring or prepping General McChrystal on how to behave and what to say around the reporter.  One would think that a seasoned military man would know what is acceptable rhetoric and what crosses the line, but as Hastings pointed out in an interview, “When war becomes your life, it makes it difficult to create good policy.”  Perhaps it also prevents you from realizing when you are walking head first into a PR disaster and potentially the end of an otherwise illustrious career.

The city of Chester has a dual image – one touting the future, the other mired in its tumultuous present – and tensions between both sides are coming to a head this month.

On the one hand, the future: A brand-new soccer stadium, touted as the centerpiece for a $500 million riverfront revival. Feeding off of World Cup fervor, PPL Park – home to the Philadelphia Union MLS team – is slated for a sold-out inaugural home game on June 27. The energy and anticipation is palpable from the Sons of Ben, the Union’s fan club.

On the other hand, the current state of Chester: four homicides in eight days. A state of emergency issued, with beefed up police patrols and a 9pm curfew in high-crime areas. Chronic issues of crime, poverty, and unemployment. A population in steady decline, reduced to nearly ½ of its peak population in the 1950s.

Which image of Chester will prevail — will the energy and excitement building up along the waterfront spread beyond the river bank and into a city desperate for change? Or will the city’s woes creep towards the newly christened stadium and tarnish the hoped-for revival? To be sure, the underlying issues are far more complex than simply being a public relations problem, but the tone of the news coverage in the weeks and months ahead will play an important role in determining which image of Chester will prevail.

In a word, No.

Now that international buffoon Tony Hayward has his life back, I’m sure the company hopes it’ll start to turn around its dreadful public image.

But here’s reality – they won’t.

You can’t spin your way out of a disaster this big, especially not when you’ve created such a monumental level of distrust with the public by lying , obfuscating,  and yachting. Just because the quotes and soundbites will now be attributed to BP Managing Director Bob Dudley doesn’t mean the public is going to start believing what the company says.

The cardinal rules in any crisis communications scenario are 1) Validate Concern and 2) Show Action. This is easy to say and hard to do, especially for a corporation with business interests and legal concerns. Executives too often shrink from responsibility in times of crisis. Lawyers tell them not to say anything that could be used against them. So they never admit responsibility, which makes it rather difficult to validate concern.

Throw in the fact that BP’s efforts at action, while frantic, have been bumbling, and the company’s image is just about unrecoverable.

So, as hopeless as that seems, the company has to begin rebuilding the image. This will be an incredibly hard long slog – we’re talking a decade, if they survive. The company needs to double its efforts, and I mean that literally. They need to double the $20 Billion Disaster Fund President Obama demanded they establish. They need to double their efforts at transparency. And more than that, they need to double their efforts at decency – it’ll take several years of truth telling to begin to build back BP’s credibility.

More than all this, BP obviously needs to plug the leak and not worry about the PR – they need to prove their competence and – even though that will likely be a heroic effort – not expect to be treated like heroes.

Without some level of competence, there’s only so much public relations folks can do when the company keeps compounding the crisis, and not even the highest paid consultants can’t polish this turd.