msredmond

Truly, truly awful.

Great tool -- just sent it to our designer. Thanks for sharing.

There's been a lot of layoffs in technical company's marketing departments over past few years, so there's PLENTY of candidates out there that understand tech and can market well (and should be affordable). Some tips:

- What KIND of marketing do you need? Sales? Leads? Branding? PR? Know what you want and what kind of marketing skills in general would provide that (e-mail campaigns, buying ads, working with press, A/B web testing, etc.) so you can ask for specific experience in those marketing approaches.

- Make sure the person can WRITE well. There's a lot of good marketing people out there (great at developing campaigns, analytics, etc.) who can't write -- and you don't need that at a small shop; you won't be able to afford outsourcing every project to a freelance writer. Ask for samples and give a writing test.

- Marketing is all about results -- if they can't go into detail about how this project they did compared to that project they did compared to industry average, walk away.

Just like any other job, references are big. Talk to people you trust; they probably know someone who knows someone who is perfect and is just out of work right now because of the downsizing.

I had to send five "what browser are you using" e-mails just last Friday. And people never send the OS when we ask. Thank you, thank you for making this.

Agreed Danso. Although think it could be argued technically that it's not "plagarism," but could be considered to be ripping off the people who paid you for the article. And there is copyright issues depending on who owns it. And, of course, it's sleezy at the amount he did it. So maybe several levels here.

"The point is that even though these transgressions seem minor in quantity, for a professional journalist to have justified committing them requires either a total burst of sudden professional insanity...or a long, undiscovered history of other transgressions." <<+100 -- as a journalist, i think this is the most insightful comment on this thread. I suspect even more will come out.

I'm a journalist -- technically you can't plagiarize yourself, so while not best form, it's not really anything "wrong." And often there's certain phrases that as a writer you are going to use over and again (he took it well beyond that though). So that's why he was still around. But yes making up quotes is WAY across the line. I'm curious if he just up and resigned knowing he would be fired; if I were his boss, I'd rather fire him to make sure people know how serious his transgressions are.

Mind-boggling that people don't realize that the word evolution is a word in and of itself.

Nice --- really like the layout

How many votes up are your posts getting?

If it's only a handful, you're never going to last on the front page for long -- it's part of the standard HN algorithm (something with time/number of votes and maybe something with spread in vote count over time -- at least that's what it seems to be)

This is exactly how I took it.

If you have to have your writers run their material through something to make sure they're not stealing it from somewhere else, shouldn't hire them in the first place. Really, most journalists would never do this.

You basically have the 'old media' practices right, but there's some variances. So yes, let's say your competitor breaks a story -- if they're the only ones and you write it up based on them bringing the story to your attention, you should give them credit, whether or not that's your only verification that the story happened.

However, if you feel that you would have gotten the story anyhow (or, even more likely, you were both working on it at the same time, and they just happened to publish first -- this happens all the time), as long as you were independently able to verify and really didn't rely on them for story, you don't have to credit. And this is a good thing -- you don't want reporters to rush their reporting over something silly like credit. But it's a trust thing, just like sourcing overall is.

Another variance: Let's say, for example, that a clown is riding a horse in Time Square, and for some reason you want that story for your Washington state paper. You really shouldn't write about it until you can independently verify. But you can't because you don't have reporters or sources on the scene, and you don't want to credit just the NYT. So then the Boston Globe reports it, then Wash Post -- and all three say they've independently verified the story (vs. citing original NYT report). THEN you can pretty much assume it's fact, then you don't really need to source the papers -- you can say according to multiple reports (or say nothing at all).

It also falls back to you can't copyright facts, just the language the information is presented. As a journalist you're responsible for making sure the facts are correct (generally held at 3 sources, whatever they are), but once you've done that, you can go for it.

But that's why just not sourcing someone (bad practice) is nothing close to the linked example because plagiarism (exact language = violating copyright) is something you can get sued for.

Probably WAY more info than anyone wanted, but FYI in case it helps.

Nope, no way. Dixon wasn't harsh enough, because he thought it was just a lack of credit, whereas it was actually plagiarism. The reporter took writing that wasn't his that he played off as his own (under his byline, no quotes, no source). Completely unethical and irresponsible for a journalist to do that. The fact that he got in via an e-mail and thought he could just "use" it shows that this reporter has a lot to learn (if that even happened -- I've never met another journalist who would do that, ever).

I got a "cant make that vote" error

Yes.

Does this link actually work for anyone? I'm just getting the sites home page (and don't see that story in quick scroll)

Here's the Peter Kleissner latest comment on it (from his twitter feed): No it's not attacking UEFI or secure boot, right now working with the legacy BIOS only (details will be in the paper)

Unless I'm mistaken, the root of this entire thing is the PRESS RELEASE -- very basic rule is that you don't promote something regarding your company if it's going to be received negatively by a significant # of people. So this was a really bad PR decision compounded by another PR error in the company commenting on the effect of original bad decision. They should just accept that there was a mistake made (by either them or their PR company), not try to defend it -- take your lumps, learn from it and move on.

Hiya -- This may help: http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/07/ibm-mainframes-c... -- Basically, organizations are finding it easier/cheaper to keep the mainframes and transition only partially instead of moving it all over (although yes, Cobol still needed). Also, the manufacturers/software are making it much easier to do just that (e.g., Windows is coming to the IBM mainframe later this year: http://esj.com/articles/2011/05/24/ibm-windows-on-mainframe.... )

BTW: Pages are currently down...all blank

If you program in .NET, Visual Studio Magazine http://visualstudiomagazine.com and MSDN Magazine http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx are both available in print. Visual Studio Magazine is a free sub for qualified Devs, MSDN either comes as package or can be subscribed to separately http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee358702.aspx

Great comments under that article, too.

thanks

Is it ironic that when I go to click on this security site's link I get the following browser warning: "The site's security certificate is not trusted!"

Spoiler: it's IE 6 -- and the copy even says at the end that the surprise is that it's not a surprise. Points for the Ash reference though.

No. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about actual campaigns/strategy to do so. Not that I don't find the topic interesting, but I just never did enough background reading to pull something like that off (unless the Flashman books count ;-), and when you're on deadline, you don't have the time to do detailed research on off-topics. Woulda been cool though -- maybe if women do less reading of that topic, those types of detailed analogies would be used less, but I do think everyone loves a good, violent analogy whenever possible

Yes, actually. I'm a woman, I used to write long business articles for magazines, and I'd often use a war motif for those articles (common thing to use a motif -- offers art choices and/or keeps the writer entertained). War just gives you lots of great word choices ("bombarded" "invades" etc.)that seemed to go well in business articles, esp when you're looking at one company vs. another or a new one breaking into the market.

It's kinda like how you often see "capitulate" somewhere in an article about France (even if not related) -- it just works together ;-)

Tried this earlier and didn't work -- today it did (yeah :-)