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Jumping the Shark

In 1977, the television show “Happy Days” ended a three-episode story arc by having the popular character Fonzie perform a stunt in which he jumped over a shark on water skis. The episode changed the show’s direction, morphing it from a sunny and homey comedy about life in 1950s Milwaukee into a melange of anachronistic pop culture references.

The episode marked the beginning of the end for “Happy Days” but gave birth to the term “jumping the shark,” which is now used to describe a poorly thought-out, game-changing and out-of-the-ordinary event that eventually leads to destroying the very thing that it was meant…

Nortel’s PR blogger weighs in on negative financial coverage

It’s not often that a company publicly analyzes its own media coverage, particularly when the news is bad. But that’s exactly what Nortel did, a day after it announced a big quarter loss and job cuts totalling 1,300 staff.
   
In a blog posting on November 11, new media manager Bo Gowan directed readers to links of news articles that, in his opinion, offered “a little more in-depth analysis and commentary that provided some differentiation [from] the typical straight coverage” regarding Nortel’s third quarter financials.

The Nortel Buzzword blog launched earlier this year, and Gowan told PRWeek that Nortel’s corporate communications team made a conscious…

Recycling Scrutinized

While the green era is entrenched among us, one long-held tenet of the environmental movement has come under scrutiny: recycling.

Long the backbone of the righteous, environmentally conscious citizen, recycling got a renewed (no pun intended) look at its efficacy from Popular Mechanics magazine this month.

What could be better than re-using the material from a product that has already been spent, right? Well, what if more energy is going into to hauling material and producing the recycled product? That would certainly take the wind out of the sales of many a green citizen and marketing campaign.

You can read more here.

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Walmart Stores to Provide 70 Million Meals per Year to Families in Need

With the Thanksgiving season upon us, Walmart today announced that its Supercenters and Neighborhood Markets will partner with Feeding America, the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization, to provide an estimated 90 million pounds of food annually — the equivalent of 70 million meals — to families in need by the end of 2009.* Donating nutritious produce, deli meat, beef, chicken, dairy and other groceries directly from its stores, Wal-Mart will become one of Feeding America’s largest donors of food. You can read more here.

J&J apologizes, says it missed the mark with Motrin mom ad

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is reaching out to mothers offended by an ad for the company’s Ibuprofen brand, Motrin, which equated carrying a baby in a sling to a painful fashion choice.

The company pulled the ad Sunday after several bloggers called for a boycott and pages of angry comments filled message boards like Twitter. Some Twitter and blog enthusiasts created their own counter ads. Today, the word “Motrin” and the “motrinmoms” hash tag, which Twitter users attach to a topic to keep track of it, are still the number one and number two trend topics on the microblogging site. You can…