And that is the good news. Last year it was #2.

Personally I feel better already.

I think it’s appropriate that my first real interaction with J.D. was over email. We were trading emails in the weeks leading up to him leaving Yahoo! to join Return Path about how we were going to announce his appointment. In one of his emails I noticed a line of type at the top of the email that said MY FROGS ARE ON FIRE. It struck me as very odd because it was in a place that I had never noticed any text before. I was so fascinated that I spent several minutes figuring out how he’d done it. (It was the “flag” field in Outlook which can, as I learned, be customized.)

I was so proud of myself for figuring it out that I replied to his email and changed the custom text to say AND MY SNAKES ARE DROWNING. I can’t remember his exact response but I do recall that I got his trademark *grin*.

In in the spring of 2010 he and I embarked on a large project to launch a second company blog at Return Path called Received:. It was a project that he was very passionate about. We had already solidified our collaborative relationship through my editing of his writing, but this took us to a new level. He was moving from being simply a writer (though that was a very important contribution) to becoming an editor as well. Over the course of that summer, through to launch and for several months after we had bi-weekly “editorial chats” via phone or, when technology cooperated, Skype. In many ways those chats were like recess for me — a half hour to just talk to someone smart about the things were both passionate about. What an absolute treat.

It was also a treat to serve, as humbly as I often felt I did, as his editor. J.D. was an amazing writer (he confessed to me once that if it paid a decent living he’d have become a professional writer — and he certainly had the talent to do so) and he always wanted to be better. He enjoyed the collaboration of the editing process. I am a better editor today because of my work with him.

I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work with J.D. and I will miss him terribly.

You can read much more about J.D. on the memorial site that has been set up to celebrate his life and record the amazing impact he had on the world.

At that time I marveld that HuffPo had outpaced The Washington Post. Now it’s ahead of the New York Times. This is no doubt in part due to the paywall model that NYT now uses. Note that the WSJ is way below all of these properties because of it’s paid subscription model.

Doesn’t mean WSJ isn’t still hugely influntial. And the NYT isn’t going away anytime soon. But the pattern seems pretty clear. New properties are on the rise.

She really needs to work on answering questions off the cuff. She sounds dumb, even when she does know what she’s talking about (although to my reading of her statements, that seems to happen infrequently).

Palin is such an interesting conundrum on so many levels, but especially as a communicator. On the one hand, she has undeniable star power. Watching her give a good speech is electrifying, even if you disagree with everything she is saying. And she knows how to play to her base. The bullsh*it about the “lamestream media” and “gotcha” questions is completely manipulative.

But then you watch her try to answer a simple question off-the-cuff and she completely discombulates.

At the end of the day, she just doesn’t sound like a President. And that, more than anything, will (likely) mean she never will be.

Of course just like you probably wouldn’t want your doctor to do the things she sees on “Grey’s Anatomy,” saying “no comment” in real life situations is a very bad idea.

“No comment” is universally interpreted as “I’m a big fat lying liar.” It also tends to inspire journalists to dig into whatever you aren’t commenting on.

A recent post on Ragan.com offers 5 alternatives to no comment. While there are few good ideas here, I think the author misses a big first step. Why are you not commenting?

Times when you are tempted to say “no comment” fall into three buckets:

1. You are asked a question that you don’t know the answer to and you don’t have access to the answer. I tell people all the time, it’s perfectly okay to say you don’t know the answer to a question. It can get tricky if the writer believes you *should* know the answer. (Example: “Mr. CEO what precautions did you take to be sure this big, bad thing would not happen?” Answering “I don’t know” is rarely going to take you down a good road.) But if you being asked to comment on something about which you don’t have information you can say so, and make it clear that you aren’t hiding anything, you simply don’t know anything.

2. You are asked a question that you don’t know the answer to, but you could get an answer. This is easy. Get the answer. Or give the journalist directly to the person with the answer (working with your friendly neighborhood PR pro, if applicable). This is where you can say “I don’t know the answer to that question, but my colleague Bob will. Let me send him an email and see if he’s available to talk to you.”

3. You are asked a question you don’t want to answer. Ah well. This is really the problem, right? This is where the suggestions on Ragan.com can probably help you, though truthfully I see most of them leading to something like “Mr. BigWig would not comment for this story.” Which is the real point, right? It’s not about whether or not you say the words “no comment” — if you don’t answer the question you will be called out for not answering the question. So at the end of the day you have to pick your poison. Do you answer the question and take the hit (presuming the answer is bad)? Or do you refuse to answer and get portrayed as hiding something? Only you (and your execs) can decide what is the worse scenario.

Like a lot of things in life the best way to get better at public speaking is to practice. But unless you are pursuing speaking engagements as a professional activity there’s only so much real world practice you can get.

But reading – out loud – comes pretty close. Reading is different from talking. And children’s books are great – if you get a good one they have good rhythm and pace. Dr. Suess is great for really loosening up your tongue.

It also helps to read the same story over and over and over (which is very easy to do if you have a toddler. “No Mommy, read this one again!”). After a couple readings you need to do something to keep from losing your mind, so you play with the voices, vary the pace and pitch. You start to play with the story and, in turn, play with your voice.

Try it.

Have you got an unusual trick for improving your public speaking skills? Post it below!

The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ve done the work so you don’t have to.  Here’s my picks for stuff that is most relevant to us:

Cybercom:  (What the Pentagon is — and is not — doing to secure the internet.)

The Long-Life-Span Smartphone:  (Interesting as smartphones get more and more ubiquitous.)

Emotional Spell Check: (Fascinating idea that you could have something to check your email for “tone.” Posits that some companies could prevent you from sending a message that violates their “tone policy.” Ugh.)

Social Network as Social Index:  (Interesting all around, especially the quote about using social networks for market research.)

Lebron James’s “Decision”:  (While noting that James screwed this up, it just shows the ongoing erosion of establishment media. We all own the printing presses now.)

The making of the cover with a QR code made out of balloons: (I confess I still don’t understand what the heck these codes do and I just figured out how to read them, but the cover is very cool.)

Virginia Heffernan’s Medium Column is on Tor, a system for sharing information anonymously: (Very interesting and very cool.)

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm: (Thinking about thinking. Plus, watch consultants who get up to $500,000 per month! Oh, and this one contains a good media relations lesson. Never, never, never ask a journalist not to write about something. Not only will that guarantee that they will write about it, but will also guarantee that you will be quoted asking them not to write about.)

A Physicist Solves the City: (Fascinating anyway, but mostly interesting for the part at the end where the physicist applies some of what he has learned about cities to corporations.

Of course PR people don’t really mean it. What they really mean, I think, is that not all bad publicity is bad. And some is good.

Well, now we’ve got some research to back that up.

As it turns out, negative publicity can be helpful for raising awareness of an unknown brand.  It’s less helpful — and more hurtful — for well-known brands.

But it also matters what the nature of the bad publicity is. Bad publicity about a product or service has negative repercussions. (Think of what has happened to Toyota sales.) But bad publicity that is unrelated to the product has far less impact. The example they give is the Gap logo imbroglio. It’s unlikely that publicity about a bad logo is going to have any negative impact on sales.

What’s the takeaway here? I don’t think it ever makes sense to pull a PR stunt to try and raise awareness for your business. It’s too risky. But it likely means that you can worry a little less about negative publicity if you are small brand. Conversely you need to worry a bit more as your brand grows — you have more to lose. In any event you have the most to worry about if the negative publicity about your products. Of course I don’t think you really needed a study to tell you that.

Who? Why? I have no clue who this person is or what his company does. I’m pretty sure I’ve never spoken to him before.

What is the point of this message exactly?

Congratulations if you ticked off the box next to the notation to “call Tami Forman at Return Path” but you should know that the chance that I will call you back is less than zero.

In any event, it does present a great opportunity to discuss a few media basics.  Here are what I think are the three key takeaways:

1. Reporters are not your friends. Even if the reporter is actually your friend, he or she is not your friend. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see splashed across the front page of the newspaper. Or, as it were, in the pages of Rolling Stone.

2. Nothing is off the record. Again, even if you say “off the record” it’s probably not really off the record (and, it appears, McChrystal didn’t try to put that restriction on in this case). Again, don’t say anything you don’t want to see printed.

3. Don’t let the usual content of the publication persuade you to let down your guard. The Times piece speculates that Rolling Stone got the juicy quotes because of their reputation for only covering music and pop culture. Again, I doubt McChrystal is that naive, but it’s a good lesson nevertheless. Don’t assume any publication is going to do a puff piece.