Google is in advanced talks to pay around $500 million for Yelp, according to a story from TechCrunch confirmed by the New York Times, which described the talks in straightforward business terms: "Google has been showing greater interest in the local business market in the United States."

But Yelp isn't just any online content startup. It wields disproportionate power over local merchants, from restaurants to auto body shops, and said merchants have repeatedly told tales of Yelp offering to let them re-arrange reviews if they took out ads — and of disappearing positive reviews in retaliation when they complained about the ethics of the situation. The San Francisco-area alt-weekly East Bay Express ran a series of articles on such practices, and the story eventually went national.

One business owner got so frustrated with Yelp users — and Yelp Inc.'s passive aggressive handling of her — that she ended up in a wrestling match with a reviewer she had flamed on email.

The company is also known for its raging, drunken, fleshy user parties, which are thrown, alternately, by the company itself and by the restaurants subject to its users' reviews.

Google has already seen its reputation as the "Don't Be Evil" internet company erode significantly, most recently after CEO Eric Schmidt said people should consider not having secrets, a story that spread widely online and in the news media. If it's going to seduce Yelp, Google should make sure its remaining friends know the company plans to reform its new toy rather than join its caddish pursuits.

(Top pics: Yelp co-founder Russel Simmons has fun with an employee at a Yelp holiday party, from this Valleywag post.)

"Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery," declares a Chicago Tribune headline [via PRNewser]. What is this amazing mystery that has been unlocked? For Edelman—the world's largest independent PR firm, and one that loves to market itself as a "digital" expert that will help you, the corporation, navigate the wilds of the internet for a large, large fee—the mystery is, "How can we get people to pay us so much for this shit?"

"I am so all over this Delish thing," Cabot bubbled, punching up delish.com on her computer in her office at Edelman, a Chicago-based public relations firm.

"Oh, you're doing so well!" Spohn said delightedly, counting the recipes Cabot had collected on the food lovers' Web site. "Look, you've got so much!"

Her pride was as evident as the exchange was notable. Though Cabot, 56, is Edelman's central region president with more than 30 years in the business, she is the student. Spohn, a 23-year-old account executive on the firm's digital team, is the teacher.

Hahaha. Do you see what is going on here? Edelman, like many of its peers, is a PR firm that will charge your company a hefty fee for all the digital insight that its 23-year-old account executives can deliver. Because the people in charge aren't really so good on this "internet" thing. Which would be fine if they were not the same people in charge of convincing you, the client, to spend tens (or hundreds!) of thousands of dollars with Edelman for their expert strategic online influencing services. Their mentoring program for the olds is called "Rotnem" because that's "mentor" backwards and you must be a backwards-ass fool to pay money to a bunch of 23-year-olds to teach you how to make a Facebook page and shit at an Edelman markup, when you could get them off Craigslist for much, much cheaper.

"Edelman strongly advocates that companies participate with and engage online influencers." Did you know that Edelman, a massive corporate PR firm, started a blog called "Authenticities"? Edelman, how much do people pay you for your services? Because I am totally going to undercut your prices by one dollar, once the last media outlet finally stops paying employees. Please engage.

[Pic of Edelman's Global Head of Digital Strategy via Flickr]

Fun with reporters desperately seeking sources! Here's a HARO request from Fox News, looking for help for a story that could be big:

18)Summary: Allergic to Wi-Fi?
Name: Karlie Pouliot
Category: Health/Fitness
Email: [Redacted]
Title: Health Producer
Media Outlet: FOX NEWS
Specific Geographic Region: N
Region: New York City area
Deadline: 01:07am EASTERN - 31 July

Query:
Do you ever feel sick, dizzy and confused? You could be allergic to Wi-Fi! Were looking for patients who suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and doctors who specialize in treating it.

Journalism in action, ladies and gentlemen.


Here, via Guest of a Guest, is a photo of Thrillist boss Ben Lerer at some Thrillist-sponsored beach party thing in the Hamptons last weekend. Yep.


This story about how Swiffer set up a "lounge" at some convention to attract blogger coverage is a good reminder that we're all just dancing monkeys for corporate America. Write your Twitter about your Swiffer Lounge experience, monkey. Dance.


Navy-besieged Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg's peers speak up: "On a personal note, I had to laugh at Gordon's complaint about "Carol's attempts to bully other reporters and establish dominance" on the base. When I traveled to Gitmo in January for our story on the base's final days, Rosenberg helped me from start to finish with my reporting and asked nothing in return." Conversely, none of the Navy commander's peers have come forward yet to say he is not a crybaby.


The Washington Post has replaced sourpuss TV critic Tom Shales with Hank Stuever. But they're giving Shales a column in the Style section where he will "will illuminate, pontificate and eviscerate, on TV and other subjects" and generally continue being self-important. Michael Calderone has the full memo.

How did breaking the rules finally net Wales some good press? The Times disclosed Sunday that Wikipedia helped actively suppress news that a Times journalist had been captured in Afghanistan. If the capture was widely publicized, the paper worried, the reporter would be more valuable to his captors.

Wikipedia editors actively froze out edits reporting the capture, and allowed Timesmen to do the same. The reporter eventually escaped. The ethics of the censorship are debatable. The benefits to Wales are not: The Times depicts him leading the suppression effort, even though a woman named Sue Gardner actually runs Wikipedia. Wales thus re-cements his image as the face of Wikipedia and gets another round of lucrative speaking engagements (he has historically pocketed the fees).

Better still for Wales, he can point his critics to the Times situation as an example of how Wikipedia rules should not be absolute. When you're busy saving journalists, who cares if you bend the rules for some nice young ladies while you're at it?

UPDATE: Wales wrote in to dispute an earlier version of this article, which stated he "nearly lost his job," citing a January Valleywag report that his Wikipedia board seat was renewed just three days before it expired. Wales said "I was never 'almost out of a job' last December" and that there was never "a board struggle and a struggle between me and Sue Gardner."

(Pic by Re: Publica)

The deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal went so far as to call out individual board members on Twitter. "Gore, Jung, Schmidt, York, Levinson - where are you?" Alan Murray wrote. Yesterday, before the hospital confirmation, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera accused the directors of "dereliction of duty."

Like a hung computer operating system, Apple's board is neglecting pressing information-retrieval work. Data on the effectiveness of liver transplants for Jobs' condition is, at once, scant and unpromising. Yet some specific information about Jobs' condition would be useful in evaluating his prognosis, according to an anonymous surgeon's blog (see prior link, via).

The kindest and most generous characterization that can be made is that that the evidence for treating neuroendocrine tumors metastatic to the liver with liver transplantation is mixed at best.

But obviously Jobs' is recovering nicely if he's going back to work next week, right? Perhaps, but it's not clear how hard he'll be able to work; recall that Jobs may be working part-time, per a Journal report earlier this week. Or he might not. He might be already back to week, per an anonymous (read: probably spoon-fed by Apple) report from CNBC's Jim Goldman. Or he might not be returning until June 30.

It should go without saying, but apparently needs to be said: Apple shareholders deserve to know who is running Apple — and who will be running Apple a month from now.

It seems every day brings more stories that help paint the listings website as a cesspool of scams, killers and sexual exploitation. Here's just a random smattering of the coverage from the past week or so:

• Queens woman allegedly rents same apartment to seven people via Craigslist (NY Post)
• Woman reports buying fake tickets to Chesney (Fargo Inforum)
• Two busted in Craigslist hooker scam (NY Daily News)
  
• Nebraska Mom Attempts to Sell Her 18-Month-Old on Craigslist (AP)
  
• Hawaii Craigslist Sex Ring Busted; Woman Wanted (KGMB)

Twitter has been credited with lubricating social change in the religious dictatorship by no less an authority than the U.S. State Department. Maybe the hype has gone too far:

"Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground," says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society...



"The people I know mainly tell me they hear about these protests from friends or by SMS," [Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council] says.

Whille Twitter might not be drawing large crowds to marches, it is unquestionably useful for publishing news in an atmosphere of suppression. This disproportionately benefits foreign news organizations and the American digerati, so it's no wonder these elites are the ones most loudly trumpeting Twitter as a crucial instrument of communication on the Iran situation.

Still, these benefactors would do well to remind their readers that, with regard to Twitter and actual Iranians in Iran, the medium has not yet become the message.

Johnson, at least, has received a more clear explanation for why his account was summarily deleted with no warning: Heather Champ, Yahoo's VP of customer service, told him he had been "spamming" the White House photostream. (Johnson has said he posted an initial batch of approximately 10 comments, then another 10 or so when those were deleted. Yahoo has declined to address Johnson's case directly with us.)

Champ also told Johnson the image he attached to his second batch of messages was too graphic. The picture, which you can see here, was from the Abu Ghraib prison and was linked over by Johnson from another Flickr account. Johnson, who has attended his share of political protests, was trying to draw attention to Barack Obama's support for a controversial bill that would have suppressed government torture photos.

Champ broke out both the carrot and the stick. She offered Johnson a $25 gift card he could use for a new Flickr Pro account. "She tried to shower me with platitudes like "Oh I know you are passionate about this issue,'" Johnson told us.

But she also told him there was no way to retrieve his old photos; that seems unlikely, as it implies Yahoo has no backups of Flickr's content. Champ also blocked messages from Johnson's new Flickr account on the internal FlickrMail system. Following a phone conversation with Johnson, she had posted a picture indicating her day wasn't going well, and Johnson had commented underneath the picture, "this is like watching a slow train wreck." She then blocked him.

So Johnson turned to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield (above), seeking help in reaching Champ. Butterfield left Yahoo last year, but he said he could tell what was going on from a distance: Johnson must be in the wrong. Their correspondence:

Yahoo's cuddly new head of PR, Eric Brown, might want to start exercising some message discipline over this situation. Does the company regret its actions (gift card) or stand by them? Does it really have no backups of old pictures? What are the guidelines for commenting on the popular White House photostream? People will inevitably criticize Yahoo's answers to those questions, but at least they'll have them.

(Picture by Dan Farber)

Bartz's tongue twisting came, unfortunately, as the CEO battles the idea she's unsuited to the job of running Yahoo, since her last company, Autodesk, makes software that runs on personal workstations rather than servers.

We sympathize: The criticism of Bartz's background seems more like thinly-veiled swiping at her age and gender than at anything substantive. Eric Schmidt escaped such second-guessing when he moved from PC software company Novell to running Google.

Fortunately for Bartz, her reputation for verbal aggression should deter critics from making undue hay of her lack of comfort with the word "algorithm."

Highlight above; full interview below.

Speculation had been thick that Jobs would put in a cameo at the conference. Late last week, the Wall Street Journal reported the CEO would likely return to Apple at the end of June, as planned, and might drop by today's event.

Instead, Jobs left senior VP Phil Schiller to handle his second major Apple event without the CEO.

Even barring a brief on-stage appearance, Jobs, at the tail end of his medical leave, had other options. He'd have been great for demonstrating the video camera on the new iPhone, for example, via a recorded greeting for the conference keynote audience.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But if this is Apple without Jobs, it doesn't look so terrible. Early indications are that the company's new products will receive the customary lavish attention in the mainstream press, even though anyone who's got the old model will have to fork over at least $500 for the upgrade (read the fineprint) and the best new software features are still useless for American customers. Just like Apple's stock, the company's products can still muster cultlike interest, even in the cult leader's absence.

An internal memo about the new VP of Corporate Communications, Eric Brown, was obtained by Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. In it, Yahoo is careful to describe Brown's "bad habit of eating ice cream in bed while reading my Kindle and surfing the web."

Also, his "partner's name is Scot, he has a Pomeranian named Clio, a passion for cooking and travel." So adorable!

Less cuddly: Brown is tasked with enforcing his boss Carol Bartz's edict that anyone caught leaking information will get "dropkicked to fucking Mars."

Like former Autodesk honcho Bartz, veteran Wilson comes from a business software background, specifically storage company NetApp. Hopefully for his sake he developed a passion for "dropkicking" there.

Full Bartz Memo:

Marketing & Executive Teams,

I'm very pleased to announce that Eric Brown will be joining Yahoo! as Senior Vice President, Global Communications, reporting directly to me. In this critical role, Eric will oversee our Global Communications function, including public relations, product promotion, executive communications, public affairs, internal communications, corporate reputation management and social media outreach.

Eric is joining Yahoo! at a particularly pivotal time, as we update our corporate position and message, develop and execute a renewed global brand strategy and launch major new products and solutions. Eric will be tasked with more closely integrating the global communications team with broader marketing initiatives and the company's overall business strategy. A critical objective will be to set the communications agenda and drive Yahoo!'s message to our various constituencies–the media, analysts, consumers, employees, and key industry influencers who create buzz and can have a significant impact on how our brand is perceived.

Eric is a Silicon Valley communications veteran with 18 years of tech experience. Most recently, Eric and I collaborated at NetApp, where he spent the last nine years helping to transform the company into a multibillion dollar global enterprise. As Vice President of Corporate Relations, Eric managed a large global team and strategic communications program. He was the core communications executive responsible for the company's recent revamp of brand strategy and execution. He also played a significant communications role in helping the company gain recognition by Fortune magazine as the "Best Company to Work for in America" in 2009. Prior to NetApp, Eric was the head of PR for Adaptec responsible for B2B, brand and consumer communications, and held additional leadership positions in both corporate and agency environments.

On a personal note, Eric's partner's name is Scot, he has a Pomeranian named Clio, a passion for cooking and travel, and a self-described "bad habit of eating ice cream in bed while reading my Kindle and surfing the web."

Eric will join us in early July, so please join me in giving him a warm welcome. I look forward to his leadership contributions in this vitally important role at Yahoo!.

[All Things Digital]

The execs are telling the newsroom how the imperiled paper is planning to move forward in the digital age and whatnot. Jenny 8. Lee and Michael Luo appear to be the most active Tweetpersons on this. Summary: No micropayments, but a paid membership plan for online access seems likely. The nonprofit model is out. More paid mobile apps. And the NYT "significantly outperformed" the market in display ads last year, allegedly.

From Michael Luo's Twitter:

From Jenny 8. Lee's Twitter:

The gist seems to be that soon you'll have to pay to read NYtimes.com like you do now. Press release... TK.

UPDATE: A bit more clarity: Apparently the NYT does not want to have its standard content be paid per se, because they feel that it would hurt online ad revenue too much. The paid online plan that's being floated sounds instead like some sort of backdoor way to get revenue out of those readers who love the NYT so much that they'd be happy to donate money to it. So—and all of this is still in the planning stages, it seems—the idea would be to keep access to the current content free, then devise some sort of program offering superlatives or rewards to people who want to pay to be "members." Keep ad revenue high and add additional revenue streams, rather than gate content and risk seeing traffic plummet.
(Which is kind of the Holy Grail of online news that nobody's really mastered yet, so it will be interesting to see if this thing they develop is a huge success or a spectacular failure!)

The regional subway system is clashing with protestors after its transit cops recently shot and killed and unarmed black passenger. Its directors are so terrified of the paint thing —- WHERE WILL IT STOP?? NEON YELLOW FACE GRAFFITI? — that audience members at their board meetings are now subject to frisking, can't clap or boo or bring signs or banners into meetings.

And just to make sure the First Amendment is well and truly screwed over, people covering the meetings can't get on Twitter any more:

Good luck tweeting without a "mobile device" or "communications device." If you even hear about the meeting in the first place.

Since BART is indeed a government entity, there's little chance any of these rules will hold up to court scrutiny, since they blatantly violate not only the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution but probably also the "non-disruptive recording" provision of California's Open Meeting Act. But they might just live until the worst of the shooting controversy blows over, which is likely what the BART board is counting on.

In the meantime, the idea of a "Twitter ban" may well spread to private organizations not so encumbered by the Constitution. Shareholders meetings, arts performances, restaurants, sports games — Twitter banning could well go viral. Come up with the dominant "no Twitter allowed" icon and maybe you can make a buck off the trend.

[California Beat via dto510]

(Top pictre via Indybay.org; rules text image via this BART PDF)

Assuming, that is, that "time for bed, it's a school night!" is a joke about Kutcher's relative youth. Points to Moore, also, for the dorky old picture of herself.

Notice, below, that Moore is already using the microblogging service to connect with a range of new and interesting people. Like her stylist.

CNBC's change of tune is a classic cautionary tale. Reporters trade favorable coverage for access to products and executives all the time. But Jim Goldman, the network's tech reporter, has turned access journalism into a cringe-inducing parody of itself.

When the iPhone launched in the summer of 2007, CNBC didn't get a review unit. NBC's Today show did, but a staged call between hosts Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer famously failed. Later that day, a CNBC reporter went on air for an On The Money segment and launched into a tirade about Apple's botched PR, its unshowered fanboys, and its trouble with the SEC over stock options. (That reporter was not Goldman, as we incorrectly reported in an earlier version of this post; Goldman tells us he was "livid" with the segment.) The rant was acidic, funny, over the top — and, for a cable-news network, shockingly accurate.

After that, CNBC insiders say, Apple's PR operatives called up executives at the network and threatened to cut off access for good. The show's producer was called onto the carpet, and soon afterwards left the network; to this day, many employees still believe he was fired under pressure from Apple. (He actually wasn't, but he told an acquaintance that the Apple incident left a bad taste in his mouth and hurried his exit.)

Goldman, on the other hand, has been carefully toeing the Apple line, and was rewarded last summer with a face-to-face interview with Jobs. The Apple CEO's scarily gaunt appearance was on everyone's mind, including Goldman's. But the subject never came up. Goldman later wrote that he was privately horrified by Jobs's "sickly" state but thought better of probing into it.

Which brings us to the latest Jobs health scare, which turned out to be well-based in fact. Goldman sputtered on air as he had to explain the denials he was spoonfed by Apple PR — and acted outraged when a coworker made a joke about Jobs's hormonal imbalance — the root of his weight loss — being like PMS.

And who wielded the spoon? Steve Dowling, Apple's top corporate flack under Katie Cotton, was Goldman's predecessor as CNBC's chief Silicon Valley correspondent. We hear he left the network on bad terms. If so, that surely made the revenge of turning his replacement into Apple's pet all the sweeter. Do you think that if Goldman's really nice, Dowling will hire him, too?

Adweek takes an in-depth look at the HARO phenomenon, and does a little calculating to figure out that Shankman makes more than $3K every day selling ads on his two daily HARO emails, that go out to more than 30,000 flacks and other wannabe media sources. For an hour and a half of work. Okay, that's kind of slick.

But you know who thinks HARO sucks? The people at Profnet! HARO's deficiencies:

• It's not from a neutral source—Shankman is a PR guy with his own clients, and gives them first crack at the good media requests.
• Other reporters can totally monitor HARO and steal your ideas.
• Profnet is the recognized leader in masturbation advice and smelly genital information.

I used Profnet many times in my former life as a trade mag reporter; when you needed to round up five geographically disparate sources with slightly different takes on the pluses and minuses of PR agency day care plans, there was really no substitute. But I have to admit that the real takeaway from this debate is probably this, from Sheldon Rampton of PR Watch:

"We're living in an environment where reporters are less and less willing to do independent research, so that's created an opportunity for PR people to step in and do the research for them," Rampton says...

"My personal take on ProfNet is it's not all bad, but there's more bad than good in it," says Rampton, who is less familiar with HARO. "It's one of various ways that the news product is getting cheapened."

See, Julia has actually prospered (in a publicity sense, okay?) by not following the advice of PR agencies:

For instance, one PR company that I met with advised me not to give any more interviews after the Wired piece came out. They said, ‘Your reputation is atrocious and the only way to redeem is to stop talking to the press.' That just didn't ring true to me. I thought, ‘Yes, I'd made some mistakes, and talking to Gawker at certain points has been not smart.' But ultimately, I think that saying yes to things is smarter than saying no to things. But it depends on what you want to achieve obviously.

Most PR agencies want to keep their clients from looking ridiculous, which would entail Julia not doing what Julia does. But her wisdom—which paid advisers fail to grasp—is that, in this wild world, the microfame-to-macrofame road is not supposed to be smooth; it just needs to be 51% positive:

The best way to handle bad press is to overwhelm it with other press. If you try to refute, and think that's an effective way for that to go away, it's not. All it will do is increase that particular angle in your Google search. The only way to deal with is to keep on going and take in other press for good things. I wouldn't have the Wired cover if it wasn't for Gawker, but Gawker has also closed a lot of doors for me. But if someone wants to be a well-known writer, I can't say that I'd recommend that strategy.

She'll be on retainer at Edelman before you know it.

[PRWeek]

We laughed at useless rich girl Brill for her dramatic(-ally blogged) declaration that "even my weekend in bedford wasn’t entirely restful because i still felt ‘on duty’ because i knew i’d be writing about it." Ha! But! Consider this from taser-loving, reporter-helping, cult-like-following-inspiring professional PR man Peter Shankman's long new blog post about how much he hates hearing the phrase "Why Don't You Do Some Work?":

Was having a conversation the other day with someone via IM. She asked me where I was, and I told her I was talking from the lobby of the W hotel in Times Square, waiting to have a drink with someone who runs a marketing firm.

“The W Hotel?! What a tough life! Will you please do some work?!” she IM’d back. It was around 3pm. She didn’t know I’d closed two deals, brought three new advertisers to HARO, and gotten one client onto CNN. Not bad for someone who, according to my friend, had to be nagged to “do some work.”

Shit. Do we really want to open this floodgate? Can you already see where Shankman is prepared to go (at incredible length) with this? That's right, into an exposition of the awesomeness of Peter Shankman and his awesome work-play life balance!

I’ve heard virtually identical comments resulting from Facebook or Twitter updates that have included “Driving from LA to SF, stopped to get gas outside some wind farm,” “Sitting in the lounge at Gatwick, munching on a bagel,” “Singapore–>EWR flight delayed, hitting Duty Free, anyone want anything?” “Sitting on the hood of my rental car, watching the sunset from the desert outside of Eloy, Arizona,” and of course, “working from the Ranch, waiting for them to fuel the plane,” which of course, is code for “handling a client issue via conference call, with my skydiving rig on my back, hoping I’ll finish the call before the next load goes up in the air.”

Just in case you didn't catch his Twitter updates: he goes skydiving! Have you ever been? No? Well some people just aren't born adventurers, don't feel bad.

So Let’s translate “why don’t you do some work” into what it really is: “How come your job lets you fly all over the place, and have meetings in really cool places, and why can’t mine? Your job certainly doesn’t seem like work, why does mine?”

My answer to them? Because you don’t want it badly enough. If you really did, you’d have it. You’d take the risk, and play the game. (In actuality, that’s all it ever is - one giant game.) Face it - Having a job where you’re not the boss is, well, safe.

Peter Shankman thinks you're a pussy, no disrespect intended.

Like to read thousands more words about how Shankman can close client deals on his cellphone immediately before parachuting out of a plane and Twittering about it on the way down and, upon landing, running a road race that ends in a TV studio where he is doing an on-air interview? Read all you want!

"An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind."
—Walter Bagehot

"Everybody's talking trash these days, so why not keep quiet?"
—Dennis Rodman

The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.

This is not of course, happening in the US. But maybe bloggers should rethink their opinions about accepting free shit in return for positive reviews. Word of mouth marketing online is big business here, but most companies and their marketing agencies are smart enough to realize already that disclosure can save them a world of scandal and bad PR.

So far the exact penalties haven't been spelled out, and it will likely take a test case, reported to the Office of Fair Trading and prosecuted, to make clear the size of the penalty and whether jail time is really likely.

Flogging?

Also, here we gratuitously bring up once again Edelman's famous fake Wal-Mart blog. If only it had happened after May 26, and in the UK.

[Ad Age]