#is spreading to the general public more - the fact that there is a syndicated radio show means awareness has grown

[xcziel]

some anon somewhere submitted an ask about hey like crazy has been charting for more than a full year now, even in the us - do you think they might make a push for radio after all this time?

and i wanted to yell but it's someone else's blog like

THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING FOR AGES

sorry

but like this is how american radio works sometimes y'all

like crazy literally WAS played on the radio last week!!!

on a kpop specific show yeah, but if people flooded the show/station with support with the same fervor that they stream or spam twitter then it's entirely possible for u.s. radio to collectively decide to pull their head out of their ass

the fact that rm is getting sent to radio and now he and jimin are doing joint promo that points to jimin receiving *future* company radio support just makes it even more likely

it would be too cool if fans took advantage and slammed radio with requests for like crazy and got it on the air BEFORE jimin's second album comes out is all i'm saying

[back-and-totheleft]

Total Recall: 10 Best Oliver Stone films

He’s won 10 Golden Globes, nine Oscars, and four BAFTAs during his long and illustrious career — but Oliver Stone has somehow never been the focus of his own Total Recall, so we decided to change that in honor of this weekend’s Savages, an intriguingly cast drug drama based on the Don Winslow novel about a pair of pot farmers racing to free the woman they love from a Mexican drug cartel. Given his lengthy filmography, you know Stone’s got some good stuff in his filmography — and the cream of the crop is right here in this week’s list.

10. W.

The most recent chapter of Stone’s presidential trilogy, W. served George W. Bush — who was wrapping up his second term while it was filmed — with a somewhat muted, surprisingly sympathetic biopic that traced his occasionally haphazard rise from political scion to oil baron and back again. While Josh Brolin earned near-universal praise for his work in the title role, critics found W. as a whole a little harder to take, citing its laconic pace and insufficiently hard-hitting approach as particularly troublesome flaws. For others, however, it proved a warm, fairly witty farewell for the GWB years; as the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips put it, “The film may be ill-timed, arguably unnecessary and no more psychologically probing than any other Stone movie. But much of it works as deft, brisk, slyly engaging docudrama.”

9. COMANDANTE

For a lot of Americans — especially those who grew up during the early years of the Cold War — Fidel Castro is less a world leader than a shadowy boogeyman whose thirst for brinkmanship nearly triggered World War III. But whatever his sins, Castro remains a longtime veteran of international politics and a subject worthy of investigation — hence Oliver Stone’s Comandante, a 93-minute distillation of the three days he spent filming the Cuban leader in 2002. While a sizable number of critics chafed at Stone’s aggressively friendly attitude toward his subject, others saw something of significant, albeit flawed, value; as Alan Morrison argued for Empire, it is “An opportunity frustratingly squandered, but one which still makes for fascinating viewing thanks to Castro’s natural charisma. Errol Morris would have nailed it.”

8. WORLD TRADE CENTER

Oliver Stone is known for his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories, his leftist political leanings, and his fondness for lurid cinematic violence, so when word got out he was planning to direct a movie about the September 11 attacks, some people were understandably nervous. But like any other director worth his title, Stone understands his role as a storyteller, and World Trade Center — starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña as a pair of real-life police officers who were caught in the wreckage after the buildings fell — has no room for politics or conspiracies. Its clear-eyed dedication to the people first affected by the attacks — and the selfless bravery of the men and women who worked to rescue the living — was appreciated by critics like David Denby of the New Yorker, who wrote, “The world may not make sense anymore, but Oliver Stone, a warrior still, celebrating courage and endurance, has, in his own way, come home.”

7. NIXON

In the years immediately following JFK, Stone took detours into war epic territory (Heaven & Earth) and social commentary (Natural Born Killers), but he wasn’t finished with the White House yet. With 1995’s ambitious Nixon, Stone gave us Anthony Hopkins as the disgraced former president and Joan Allen as his wife Pat — and while the 192-minute political epic failed to generate much heat at the box office, both Hopkins and Allen received Oscar nominations for their work in the film, which follows a non-linear path through Nixon’s life and career, taking viewers from his California youth through his resignation. “What it finally adds up to,” argued Janet Maslin of the New York Times, “is a huge mixed bag of waxworks and daring, a film that is furiously ambitious even when it goes flat, and startling even when it settles for eerie, movie-of-the-week mimicry.”

6. WALL STREET

Smart, sleek, and eminently quotable, Stone’s yuppie jeremiad Wall Street gifted Michael Douglas with what arguably became the most iconic role of his career: He was simply perfect as the oily, morally adrift Gordon Gekko, and although Gekko’s signature proclamation that “greed is good” would go on to haunt Douglas, he was an emblematic character for an era in American history when it became acceptable to not only dedicate your life to the naked pursuit of wealth, but to attain it by any means necessary. Stone, who co-wrote the screenplay, based the character on a number of stockbrokers — including his own father — and Douglas embodied Gekko so well that he ended up winning an Oscar for his work. “Like the rest of Stone’s oeuvre, it’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer,” wrote Christopher Lloyd of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “But his filmmaking style is like heavy metal: When he hits the right chords, nobody plays with as much power or brash energy.”

5. TALK RADIO

A rare starring vehicle for monologist/playwright/character actor/cult hero Eric Bogosian, Talk Radio found Stone behind the cameras for a loose adaptation of Bogosian’s play of the same name. Inspired by the real-life assassination of Denver DJ Alan Berg, Radio centers around Dallas radio personality Barry Champlain, whose deliberately provocative style (and decidedly non-Red State political views) make him a target of hate mail and bomb threats even as his show is poised to achieve national syndication. Saying it “has the loony intensity of those impassioned conspiracy theorists who look out at the world and see patterns of corruption spreading in all directions,” the Washington Post’s Hal Hinson declared, “it’s another of Stone’s wake-up calls to America.”

4. JFK

A two-time Oscar winner and controversial, career-rejuvenating smash hit for Stone, JFK reconstructs John F. Kennedy’s assassination and then spends most of its epic 189-minute length sifting through the wreckage, treating the killing as a murder mystery that New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) doggedly attempts to solve at any cost. With an impeccable supporting cast that included Sissy Spacek, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, and Gary Oldman, as well as a screenplay that challenged long-held assumptions about Kennedy’s death, JFK reignited interest in the assassination, eventually leading to new legislation that ordered a reinvestigation and promised that all documents related to the killing would be made public by 2017. And while many critics agreed that the movie could have benefited from a more rigorous approach to the facts, it remains, in the words of the Washington Post’s Desson Thomson, “A riveting marriage of fact and fiction.”

3. PLATOON

The first installment in Stone’s so-called Vietnam trilogy, 1986’s Platoon took a hard look at American involvement in the Vietnam War — and earned Stone Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars and the Golden Globes in the bargain. Taking a grunt’s-eye view of the war, it puts a human face on the conflict, pitting Willem Dafoe (as Sergeant Elias, mentor to Chris, the young soldier played by Charlie Sheen) against a fellow sergeant (played by Tom Berenger) in a dreadful battle for the platoon. It is, as Roger Ebert wrote, “A film that says…that before you can make any vast, sweeping statements about Vietnam, you have to begin by understanding the bottom line, which is that a lot of people went over there.”

2. BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

He earned positive reviews for his role in Rain Man, but to many scribes, the Tom Cruise of the late 1980s was little more than the pretty face out in front of critically savaged hits like Cocktail — likable under the right circumstances, but lacking real depth. Oliver Stone saw something different, trusting Cruise with 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July — and Cruise repaid him by delivering the most harrowing performance to that point in his career, committing so deeply to his portrayal of paralyzed Vietnam vet Ron Kovic that, according to Stone, he came close to injecting himself with a solution that would have incurred temporary paralysis. Not all critics loved Fourth of July, but even those who had issues with the film were forced to take notice of Cruise’s performance — and for Vincent Canby of the New York Times, the end result was “the most ambitious nondocumentary film yet made about the entire Vietnam experience.”

1. SALVADOR

Stone’s films have received a combined 31 Academy Award nominations (and counting), but he picked up his first for his co-writing credit on the screenplay for Salvador, a 1986 war drama about a rather unlikable American journalist (James Woods, also nominated for an Oscar) who’s burned so many bridges that his only professional recourse is to head to El Salvador with his unemployed DJ buddy (Jim Belushi) to try and find stories in what they initially regard as a relatively inconsequential war. Like a lot of films that try and shine a light on war while shots are still being fired, Salvador bombed at the box office — but it found an appreciative audience with writers like Rob Gonsalves of eFilmCritic, who called it “One of Oliver Stone’s best films, and absolutely James Woods’ best performance.”

-Jeff Giles, Rotten Tomatoes, Jul 5 2012 [x]

[peakwealth]

The Year 2020

'Cos when the madman flips the switch The nuclear will go for me The lunatics have taken over the asylum

(Lyrics from The Fun Boy Three, British pop group, 1981)

*  *  *

The world has been in one crisis or another for so long now, it gets harder to remember when things still seemed to be in balance, or when they started to spin out of control. When did this slow agony start, the malaise that won't go away, the chaos and distopia year after year?

Or was it always like this?

I'm not thinking so much about the coronavirus epidemic, but about the other man-made disaster that kept us on edge throughout the year, the US elections.

Looking for answers, my first, intuitive stop remains the morning of September 11, 2001 when the world order was convulsed in that split second needed for an airliner to fly into the World Trade Center. It may be that our understanding of that day is still skewed by the deep symbolism of the visuals: the fire ball, the people jumping to their deaths, the towers collapsing on themselves, the mountain of smoking rubble. Images that came to define our age. But what seems certain is that the big wheel of history ground to a standstill on that day and when it started up again, it had gone into reverse. That regression has not stopped, indeed it is still gathering pace and is very much in evidence as 2020 comes to a chaotic end.

Of course, 9/11 was the outcome of forces set in motion much earlier including the Iranian revolution in 1979 when an unsmiling, bearded imam left Paris and arrived in Tehran. The world would never be the same, but we in the West did not realize it.

Donald Trump's seemingly farcical plea to Make America Great Again can be traced back to either of those events and to the American failure to make sense of them -- the end of the pax Americana, the myth of American exceptionalism, the twilight of the colonial world order that had been in the making for five hundred years. Americans closed ranks and reacted with defiant nationalism after 9 /11. Then they took their revenge to the world and declared War on Terror - just as the terrorists had intended.

Those events are still within living memory. Looking back further, historians like to point to the invention of moveable type which ushered in the information age and, with it, modernity. The first books 'rolling off' Johannes Gutenberg's press were bibles. But not for long. Since the printing press couldn't be controlled, books conveyed a profusion of radically new ideas. They brought democratization and they spread dissent. Think Martin Luther, or Copernicus, great disrupters of the sixteenth century.

But Donald Trump?

Was Trump the accidental result of reality TV, celebrity culture and internet-driven narcissism? Or did his flirtation with autocratic rule herald the necrosis of western democracies? Was Trump merely the symbol of America's irreconcilable differences, of the slow dissolution of white patriarchy or was he the inevitable outcome of late-stage capitalism, as some have suggested?

Where should we look? The Trump years have produced a cottage industry of scholarly attemtps to explain how something like this could happen, how the United States could start to degenerate like that. Where do we find the logic that would lead to this turning point in history?

Without pretending that I could add to this (lack of) understanding, I must admit that the question is compelling. It kept me busy all year, or at least until the American presidential election was finally over.

I have tried to approach the matter from a few angles.

*  *  *

The problem with books. (Bejar, Spain, November 2020)

*  *  *

Attempt A

Multiplication of the box

I remember the deep dark varnish of our first television set, an imposing piece of furniture sitting on rather slender round legs. The cardboard box it had arrived in was large enough to serve as my play house, with a door and windows, until it got rained on one day. The TV set itself started to hum when you turned it on and needed time to warm up before the picture appeared, monochrome of course. From the back you could see the glowing tubes inside and smell the dusty heat they emitted. When one of the tubes failed, the repairman had to come.

There was one channel, run by the Belgian state and broadcasting for a few hours in the evening. It seemed adequate at the time. More would have been too much. Programming was low-tech. The national weatherman stood in front of a flip chart and drew the weather map by hand: rainclouds here, sunshine there (though not so much) and low or high pressure fronts further afield, most likely over the Azores.

In fact there was another state channel but it was for the French speaking part of Belgium and thus foreign to us in Flanders. Furthermore there was a knob to switch the unit from standard definition (625  lines) to the broadcast standard in France which had 819 lines and allowed us, in theory, to capture programming from RTF, la Radio-télévision française across the border. Although we never did, I remember le général Charles de Gaulle addressing the French nation with a grandiloquent 'Françaises, Français!' followed by a theatrical pause. I used to imitate him as a child. 'Françaises, Français!'. I had never been to France.

This went on for some years until we upgraded to colour. The new set also allowed us to watch two channels from Holland. Although the programming rotated between party-political and religious organizations, everything that was Dutch looked more sophisticated. It probably was. Eventually cable TV came along and, like everyone else, we moved to twelve channels, then twenty-four, then hundreds after which the numbers became meaningless. Today the distinction between television and the internet has faded as billions of people have become broadcasters, sending and receiving videos on their phones every day.

In a matter of only two or three generations technology has increased our awareness and our exposure to reality from the very local to the infinitely global. From smudgy local newspapers to single-channel black-and-white TV to the torrent of youTube and Whatsapp. Each increment, each multiplication of channels and choices has fragmented our common understanding of what the world is like. This means not only that every problem in every corner of the world has become our problem, it also signals that reality itself has split into a billion pieces and has become complex, uncertain and unstable. We all live in our own bubble of perception, increasingly removed from the broader context that used to bring coherence to society. While some of us embrace the complexity of the 21st century, to others it translates as confusion and anxiety. It is a reality they have retreated from.

Personally, I put my last TV on the sidewalk fifteen years ago, the very set I had used to watch the unfolding history on the morning of 9/11. It was still working, someone picked it up.

*  *  *

Gone in 2020 but not forgotten.

*  *  *

Attempt B

Entertainment Forever

Long ago, when General Electric was one of America's preeminent industrial giants, it owned the Radio Corporation of America (known by the once ubiquitous acronym RCA) which in turn owned the National Broadcasting Company or NBC. America's first radio network was founded in New York City in 1926 "in the interest of the listening public" and in order to transmit, among other things, baseball scores. NBC television started in 1939 and (fuzzy) colour came in 1954. Announcing the birth of broadcast television in the USA, David Sarnoff, NBC's pioneering founder, described it as 'so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society'.

Indeed it has.

Like Donald Trump, Roone Arledge (1931-2002) was born in Queens, New York. After a stint at NBC television he joined the rival ABC network as a sports producer in 1960. He soon started to rewrite the book on television production, putting his stamp on the world we live in. Starting at the Munich Olympic games in 1972, ABC ran a series of intimate portraits of Olympic athletes, called 'Up Close and Personal'. The words became shorthand for what sports would look like on American TV. The visual grammar shifted from being 'coverage' of events to a one-on-one experience with the viewer, a personal touch.

The formula jumped species in 1977 when Arledge became president of ABC News, one of the three commercial US networks with large news operations. The avuncular news readers of old (Walter Cronkite on CBS) gave way to a personality driven approach. Anyone remember Barbara Walters or Mike Wallace? As production values became a lot flashier, all of television became more like entertainment, including the news - just another 'show' looking for an audience and revenue.

The next milestone on the road to trash TV was 'Entertainment Tonight' (launched in 1981 and still going today, making it the longest running syndicated show on American cable TV). Shockingly and confusingly, it used a news format without being actual news. As the boundaries between news and entertainment started to blur, so did the distinction between gossip and verifiable fact. Credibility and substance faded from televison news, replaced by looks, celebrity, lifestyle, etc. Network comedy shows became major purveyors of political commentary. This cross-pollination of genres is still spreading today as journalists are being replaced by content originators, human today, most likely virtual tomorrow. In other words: commerce is still gaining ground while reality is losing traction.

When 'Big Brother' came along in 1997, so-called reality shows moved to the centre of the entertainment landscape. By that time the medium had evolved well beyond UC&P. Four-and-a-half years ago, I reflected on how reality TV had become "manipulative, sadistic and liberating - from caution, from human empathy and from rational thought. What wasn’t perhaps so crystal clear at the beginning was how trash TV would inflect politics, how it tapped into the disillusionment of a burgeoning global underclass. Barely perceptible then, the phenomenon eventually turned into rage against the political establishment and anything associated with it. The anger came from both sides of the political divide, from the rebelliousness of the Occupy movement on the left and from the fear-driven populism on the right."

Out of this fantasy world of uninhibited entertainment, celebrity and alienation stepped Donald Trump and declared he was running for the presidency of the United States. Four years of monosyllabic misrule later, he left America as damaged goods, a nation at war with itself.

Attempt C

Fact check till you drop

Watching the news on commercial TV at the local coffee shop few weeks ago, I was struck by the rough, frenzied pace of the editing. The stories were cut with an axe, as we used to say in the business. No shot lasted more than a second and the interview clips did not exceed three seconds. Far from being careful storytelling, it was pure media mash, exhausting to watch and obviously designed to keep the viewers hooked and the ratings up.

I wondered how anyone subjected to such visual bombardment could make sense of the news, complicated as it is, and not become neurotic or disoriented in one way or another? OK, I may be a little naive for it can be argued it's been like this since the invention of the cinema in 1895. Our brains have had more than a century to adapt to the stimulus of the ever moving, ever accelerating image. We've had manic TV commercials and split-second music videos for forty years, ever since MTV was launched in New York in 1981. People scroll trough their devices as fast as their thumbs will let them, consuming hundreds of images per minute.

But information programming should be different, or it used to be. News was supposed to be 'readable' as fact-based information viewers could easily de-code to figure out what was happening around them. Except that, for many, it isn't anymore.

Post-truthism didn't start with Donald Trump, but the perversion of reality took an ugly turn with him. The very words, 'truth', 'lies', have come to seem quaint, suspect, disfigured. In the early days of his presidency, armies of diligent fact checkers went to work to expose each and every presidential lie. They toiled in vain. Trump, the real estate salesman and former casino owner, lied without fear or favour, he had nothing but contempt for evidence-based reality and for those whose job it was to convey it. He scolded journalists, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves. His followers loved it. They were grateful for the steady stream of twisted thinking, incoherence and outright lies because they were in sync with their own prejudices - no, make that their own beliefs.

*  *  *

Disinformation and antisemitism. (Spanish pamphlet, claiming George Soros is the driving force behind Catalan separatism, displayed in the window of a local bookshop. Málaga, July 2020)

*  *  *

Attempt D

 Put God back into the USA

"To a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point." 

Farhad Manjoo, writing in the New York Times, Oct 21, 2020.

Those Americans, it seems, believed that Donald Trump was divinely appointed to be president of the USA and to make America great again. God's will had been done and should not be thwarted by voters. Clearly, if they believed that, they believed anything. That the coronavirus was an evil plot or that COVID 19 could be stopped by injecting yourself with Lysol disinfectant or eating pods of laundry detergent. If Bill Gates was funding vaccines that would turn god-fearing dairy farmers into atheists, then George Soros was the mastermind behind it all. Or was it Warren Buffett?  Communists were plotting a coup. Why not?

The mood got more unhinged and delusional as the year unfolded. Pro life, pro God, pro gun. Stop socialism. Put God back into the USA. When election day finally came, Democrats and Republicans rushed to the polls to save the country from the other side. Country hicks to one side, big-city satanists to the other. Although sanity eventually prevailed, it was touch and go. Far from repudiating Trump and holding him to account, more than seventy-four million Americans voted to let him stay in office.

In other words, although Trump and his royal court have been sidelined for now, the threat of an erratic America remains, driven by suspicion, ready to go off the rails again. The unbending fervour of fundamentalist Christians, focused on the abomination of abortion and the deviancy of LGBTQ+ rights has reached an intensity that is ever more reminiscent of Islamist extremism.

Mis and disinformation aren't new. Nor are they specific to any country. Most advertising qualifies as such. But the impaired thinking, the decline of reason and the contempt for manifest reality reached bizarre heights in 2020 and not only because Donald Trump used disinformation with such abandon. It looked more like a crisis of mental health propagated by social media. An American study found that young people were more likely to believe online conspiracy theories while only those over 65 had a secure grip on reality.

Social media drove the loss of empathy and civility, they normalized hate speech, they empowered virus deniers and antivaxxers. Finally they legitimized many Americans in their belief that the election had been ‘stolen’.

It was obvious, four years ago, that a Trump presidency would have incalculable consequences. But it was worse than almost anyone could have predicted. It wasn't about his vulgarity or his philistinism. The power vacuum created by having an idiot king in the White House made the world a more dangerous place where malevolent autocrats could do as they pleased because the West had lost whatever credibility and leverage it used to have.

The new era of impunity pushed hundreds of millions of citizens further into the arms of dictators and autocrats, plunderers and torturers around the world, from North Korea to Belarus, from Egypt to Myanmar because they knew they had a like-minded colleague in the White House. Political rivals could be poisoned and journalists jailed or disappared, it no longer mattered. Rather than restore America to greatness, Trump's monosyllabic rule brought decadence to the United States and ruin to global stability.

It still hasn't been widely grasped just how much power has shifted towards Russia and even more to China. The People's Republic is forging ahead in AI and machine learning, in aerospace, in digital currency, in quantum computing and in G6 data mobility. It is likely to give China an unassailable lead in technology and leave the West standing in the dust, complaining about totalitarianism.

The American election and the pandemic pushed almost everything else off the table in 2020, the explosion of Beirut's harbour, the Chinese clampdown in Hong Kong, quick-and-dirty wars in Ethiopia and Azerbaijan, global warming (open water near the north pole, smouldering Siberia, biblical wildfires in Australia), the popular uprisings in Minsk, Lagos, Kampala, Bangkok, etc.

Until the very end of this most difficult, gruesome year, the president of the Unted States did nothing but talk nonsense. He cared about nothing or anyone except himself.

As the cracks in American society widened and the disenchanted masses turned on each other, Donald Trump played golf and watched America burn. Already the race is on to stop him from being reelected four years from now.

*  *  *

Better luck next year.

[dailynewscameroonusa]

Cameroon: Where is President Paul Biya? | Daily News Cameroon

Cameroon’s coronavirus problem is much greater than the Biya regime is acknowledging. The true number of cases is far greater than the tally from the Minister of Public Health. Senior CPDM officials are sick not only with the coronavirus but are HIV positive.  More signs of uncontrolled infection in the cities of Douala, Yaoundé and Bafoussam have emerged and there are fears things are getting out of control.

Cameroon – info

Medics in the rural areas particularly in war ravaged Southern Cameroons have been incessantly flashing out signals to the World Health Organization that Southern Cameroons may run out of cemetery space if something is not done and done in a hurry.  Last week, the Ministry of Public Health announced that some of the COVID-19 patients were recovering but Cameroon Intelligence Report sources in Douala and Yaoundé have all hinted that the deaths have started coming so fast.

 A senior opposition figure in Yaoundé who hails from the Far North Region contacted by this reporter recently asks, reluctantly, whether both French and British Southern Cameroonians should in fact be relieved, because apparently even when a nation faces unrelenting misery—accelerated by the politics and policies of its government—it doesn’t necessarily break down as fast as Paul Biya’s Cameroon.

South cameroon crisis

Biya and his ruling CPDM crime syndicate have turned Cameroon into a criminal wasteland, with French Cameroun political gangs in tricked-out. A nurse at the Yaoundé General hospital who spoke to our undercover reporter revealed that some senior army officials have secretly collected ventilators from the hospital citing orders from the presidency of the republic. And like the policy against the Nigerian Islamic sect, Boko Haram and Ambazonia Restoration Forces, the Biya Francophone regime is erecting roadblocks to prevent people fleeing the rural areas from bringing the coronavirus with them to Yaoundé. These efforts at containment will of course fail and coronavirus will definitely find its way to Mvomeka’a where the 87 year old President Biya is self-isolating!

 Apart from Biya’s failed leadership, the CPDM government is another palaver. Many Cameroonians would celebrate its passing, and even its die-hard supporters are now seeing signs that the coronavirus is catalysing changes that Biya and his Francophone Beti-Ewondo acolytes resisted long ago.

 Given how many people are dying now in Yaoundé and Douala and with Biya helpless and quarantined at his Mvomeka’a palace, it would be grotesque to think of coronavirus as a lucky break for Cameroonians in support of regime change. With COVID-19, the deep bench of the so-called CPDM Political Bureau and the House of Senate will be depleted.

 National Assembly Speaker, Cavaye Djibril has blatantly refused to announce that he had contracted the coronavirus. He is 80 years old and a chief Biya acolyte to whom he speaks regularly and in person.

 However, the center of all speculation is President Paul Biya himself. The dictator doesn’t appear in public often, even in the best of times, and you’d have to be fairly lucky to spot him in Yaoundé—except on a few occasions where his appearance is so customary that an absence would make Cameroonian allies and enemies, wonder if an illness must have felled him.

 The world is already in the middle of the coronavirus season and Biya is yet to make a televise statement to the Cameroonian people. State radio and television recently reported that the Head of State has created a special fund to combat the virus. But rumours about Biya do not die so easily in Cameroon. Why can’t President Biya just give his speech from his sitting room at the Mvomeka’a palace? Is this not the ideal opportunity to discuss how the funds provided will be disbursed to fight the spread of COVID-19? Is this not also a good opportunity for Mr. Biya to speak of the process of renewal that Cameroon will have to undertake to Emergence 2035?

 After his last meeting with the US ambassador to Cameroon, speculation has been rampant. Surely, say the rumours, Biya is dead—or he is self-isolating! These rumours aside, the perception of distance has made Mr. Biya, already a distant figure without charisma or warmth, seem superannuated and out of touch. We understand Biya is in a febrile delirium in Mvomeka’a but if he does not show up seven days after this editorial, Cameroon Concord News Group shall put up an obituary announcement on him.

 What is keeping the ruling CPDM gang in power now is the simple fact that the whole Cameroonian nation French and British Southern Cameroons are suffering together and it is evidently clear that Biya deliberately weakened all state institutions and tribal zed the army making them unhealthy enough to rival his leadership, even in this diminished state. Today, police commissioners, army captains are dying of COVID-19, just as poor civilians too!

 Coronavirus has exposed and confirmed the incompetence and malignance of the Biya regime, at the same time it has crippled the forces for change headed by Prof. Maurice Kamto.  Popular protests in the streets of Douala and Yaounde simply cannot happen as long as the manpower for those protests remains sequestered at home, and as long as morale is utterly depleted by the task of burying one’s loved ones. Regime change in Yaoundé might have to wait. At least the coronavirus pandemic will eventually end, and with its end, change is one more thing to look forward to.

[blackpjensen]

The Importance of Creating an Online Press Center

What happens when a journalist comes to your website and tries to find information? Can they easily find what they need or do they visit one of your competitor’s websites to get the information they need? Your online press room should be an important component of your public relations, sales and marketing plans. Your press room is open and working for you 24/7. Editors and writers often work late at night, on the weekends and holidays when your PR and marketing teams are not available. Your website and its press room have to be able to provide all the info needed.

News publicity is free

The beauty of this kind of publicity, of course, is that it’s absolutely free.

“Our online press center is intended to be a go-to hub for journalists writing about landscape architecture,” shares Karen Grajales, public relations manager, American Society of Landscape Architects. “We provide a broad array of resources for this purpose, including press releases, social media links and fact sheets.”

The trick to putting together such a digital presence is knowing how to trigger story ideas, knowing how to relentlessly promote what you’re offering and being sure to post the equivalent of a neon welcome sign for members of the press when they stop by your landscape website.

“News publicity costs you nothing,” says Thomas Wong, author of “101 Ways To Boost Your Web Traffic.” “It often produces better results than advertising, because people trust news articles more than sales ads. Press releases often lead to personal interviews on the phone or TV or radio appearances, which can make you and your website very popular.”

Moreover, if that story winds up on the web, your landscape business can often reap the rewards of that exposure for years.

In fact, there are so many tactics and web technologies available for courting the news media. Building a killer online press center for your turf business can become an evermore sophisticated, ever-more publicity generating pursuit.

Press center 101

Here are some tips for creating an ideal online press center:

Offer web-friendly press releases

While some text, quotes and contact info is a good start for a press release, you’ll get better play in the news media if you optimize press releases for the web. This means embedding a relevant keyword in the press release headline, as well as in the text, if possible, so it can be easily found by search engines.

You’ll also want to angle your press release to spark the imagination of the editor or reporter. Before you post your press release, ask yourself, “What makes this story new, different or important for your target news outlet?”

It’s also a good idea to make it easy for others to spread the word about your press release by adding a social bookmarking tool such as AddThis.

Another good practice is to ensure visitors can effortlessly cut and paste your press release text into a Word document. (On some websites, press release text is impossible to copy; others use Adobe PDF documents, which are sometimes tough to cut and paste.)

The website for the American Society of Landscape Architects offers a press center well-stocked with press releases, as does Dirtworks Landscape Architecture, Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council and Kingdom Landscaping. Click on “News” on each of these sites to see their press centers.

A free Google Webmaster’s account will help you optimize your press center for the search engines.

Create a blog

Blogs are tried-and-true content sources that are a magnet for reporters.

Read more: How to Start and Manage a Business Blog

Trigger coverage with other content

Editors and reporters are always hungry for story ideas, so you can never offer too many in your press center. The over-arching guideline here is to clearly state that all — or as much as possible — of the content you post can be directly quoted by editors and reporters. The importance of this practice cannot be overstated.

Essentially, this permission can save the press five days of phonetag with your green industry business and mean the difference between getting covered and being skipped over for a more press-friendly company.

The press also loves transcripts of company speeches they can quote (always include a name and title), transcripts of recent company webcasts, company case studies, industry survey results and customer/client testimonials. (Always include a name, title and company for the testimonial.)

If you’re lucky enough to have been covered in the media, also offer links to previous stories already run.

Add dimension with rich media

Once you’ve implemented the essential elements of your press center, mixing in esoteric rich media like web video, podcasts and even virtual reality can bolster your message in an extremely compelling way. Besides posting video from your business on YouTube like thousands of other organizations, you can also embed a YouTube video player on your own website for free.

Become a media authority

You’ll get even more coverage if you establish one or more key employees at your company as media authorities. Blogs are one of the quickest ways for a key employee to loom large before the press — but only if the blog is interesting and insightful. One of the easiest ways to guarantee this is to simply hire a good ghost blogger.

Another important blog tactic: Invite journalists to freely quote from your blog as they would use quotes from a press release, and you’ll create a journalist friend for life.

Nature’s Perspective Landscaping offers a newsletter in the form of a blog, as does the Global Landscapes Forum — a global association of thought-leaders seeking to promote green consciousness via landscape design.

ND Landscape also offers a monthly e-newsletter that customers can sign up for.

Meanwhile, you can enhance the credibility of your media authority representatives by publicizing them on the various “expert stables” on the web — places where recognized authorities gather to be quoted by the media. Some of the more prominent stables include Profnet, and ExpertClick.

Be charming:

Most turf businesses understand that offering a name, phone and email contact info for all key public relations personnel in your press center is a good start.

But the same contact info for key executives who are open to being interviewed is even better. A promise — and practice — to turn around all press requests within 24 hours will go even further toward winning your turf business instant friendships in the press.

You should also alert telephone receptionists to be especially cordial to reporters. Receptionists need to understand unequivocally that the reporter calling your landscape business can often offer free exposure in a news story for your business to 50,000 to 100,000, or sometimes a million or more, readers or viewers.

You can enhance the credibility of your media authority execs by publicizing them in “expert stables” like Profnet.

Tweak under the hood

During the past few years, Google has released a number of free tools designed to help your press center appear as high as possible on Google search engine returns. Sign up for a free Google Webmaster’s account and all these tools are yours to use for free.

Plus, once your press center is search-friendly for Google, the center will also be optimized for most of the other major search engines as well.

Also be sure to ensure your press center downloads like quicksilver. For speed optimization tips, check out Andrew B. King’s book, “Speed Up Your Site.” Founder of Website Optimization LLC, King also offers a free tool that will check to see if your press center is optimized for speed.

You’ll also want to create a sitemap for your press center — a technical way of listing the pages of your site to search engines like Google, and providing other key technical information the search engines need to process your website as efficiently as possible. Google offers an excellent tutorial on how to create a sitemap.

Optimize the titles of your press center’s images, as well. Since many press centers overlook this simple tactic, your landscape business may be able to rocket past many competitors by simply making sure the press images and press releases you supply (along with photos of your team members, etc.) can be easily searched and categorized by search engines.

Do this by ensuring each image has a name to describe it, rather than using an inscrutable number. Also, save images in the .jpg format if at all possible. And store your images on the folder level — such as http://ift.tt/2r5M11P, instead of burying images in a less accessible folder.

Promote relentlessly

One of the great equalizers of the web is that a tiny, nimble landscape business can leap ahead of the largest Goliath with the right promotion of its press center.

Offering press releases and a company e-newsletter gets this process started.

But you can also offer the same information via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for reporters who like their news delivered via that technology. Fed43, for example, will make your page RSS-friendly for free.

Other tactics that can work:

Circulate your news through a professional press release distribution service like PRNewswire or via free services (search “free press release distribution”).

Post a “send-this-page-to-afriend” button on every page of your press center.

Add a live chatroom to your press center if you have a staff person who can babysit it — LivePerson is one of many good live chat solutions.

Link your press center with your presence on social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Measure your success

The quickest way to an increased press center budget, as we all know, is quantifiable results. Document how traffic from journalists has increased on your press center with Google Analytics, another free program.

Or, if you’re looking for even more robust analytics, check out software like IBM Digital Analytics or WebTrends.

Safeguard your reputation

Once people start talking about your company on the web, including editors, reporters, bloggers and others, make sure they’re not engaging in libel, slander or other image-tarnishing talk. Specific service providers who will help you out with this reputation monitoring include Dow Jones Factiva and BlogSquirrel.

The post The Importance of Creating an Online Press Center appeared first on Turf.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230377 http://ift.tt/2r5Lr48 via IFTTT