Rex Hammock is president of Hammock Publishing, Inc., a Nashville, Tenn.-based custom publisher of magazines, newsletters and digital media for corporate and association clients nationwide. A former advertising and public relations executive, Hammock spent three years in Washington, D.C. as a press secretary for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Today he is probably best known as the author of the popular rexblog, which focuses on magazines, the magazine industry and custom publishing.
In February, Hammock was invited to participate in a private meeting with President George W. Bush that included other small business owners. The meeting was off limits to the press, but Rex provided a first-hand account on his Weblog, which generated quite a stir in the media.
In an email interview for Micro Persuasion, Hammock discusses the Bush meeting, his thoughts on Bush and Kerry’s campaign Weblogs, the interplay between magazines and the Web, the impact of participatory journalism on public relations and more.
MP: Recently you participated in a meeting with President Bush on small business that was off limits to the press and then blogged it. Do you feel that you were selected because you are a prominent blogger read by media pros? Is it possible that the President had a message he wanted to get across in a relatively controlled environment?
HAMMOCK: The White House knew I was a small business owner and that, since I was suggested to them by NFIB, the 600,000-member small business association, they merely knew that I would be a good representative of a small business point-of-view on the specific issue the President was focused on that afternoon: the effort to make permanent a provision of his tax plan that relates to capital investments made by small businesses. Beyond that, no one at the White House knew I was a blogger. One person may have known my company works with NFIB in publishing its magazine, but even they did not think of me as a journalist or even as a publisher on that occasion.
MP: Your blog post following the Bush meeting sounds like participatory journalism. Why did you choose to blog it? Were you discouraged or even encouraged by the White House to blog it?
HAMMOCK: I view blogging as simply the current version of an ageless tradition of story-telling. When I've tried to describe this phenomenon in "media terms" for the past several years, I've used the phrase "conversational media." I am an avid reader of early American history, which, by the way, comes in handy if one of the magazines you publish is about early American history, so I appreciate the rich texture and vivid color that can be added to a historian's work if he or she has access to a wide variety of personal accounts of an event.
Again, the White House neither encouraged or discouraged me, but (and I haven't mentioned this before because I just recalled it) one of the staffers asked me if I would be willing to talk with a reporter who wanted to ask me a few questions. I said, "sure," but then in a few moments, the staffer came back and said the reporter didn't need to see me. While I didn't ask permission to record on my blog all that I would have been willing to tell that reporter, I "assumed" their eagerness to let me talk with a reporter was an implied permission to share what went on in the meeting. I'll admit also, that I feared that if I asked permission to blog the meeting, the request would have gotten hung up in red-tape. Better in this case, I felt, to get my hand slapped later than to ask permission. Now that I think about it, maybe I WAS thinking of myself as a citizen journalist.
MP: Do you think the President of the United States gets blogging and participatory journalism? Did you mention to him that you are a revered blogger with five readers?
HAMMOCK: With him, I inflated my readership to ten. No, blogging never came up and I feel rather confident in guessing the President doesn't "get" blogging. At the same time, I'm nearly positive he "gets" participatory journalism as it is displayed in the phenomenon of talk radio or letters to the editor or town-hall meetings.
MP: What do you think of the Bush campaign blog? Think he reads it?
HAMMOCK: I hope he's too busy being leader of the free world to read it. When my blog post about the meeting was reported the next morning on the front of Washingtonpost.com (they must read Jeff Jarvis' Weblog), there was a while there when I thought I might be in hot-water with the White House or my friends at NFIB who suggested my name. It was a relief when I saw the campaign's Weblog pointing to my blog with some positive remarks.
I think both campaigns do a good job of using the conventions of blogging: lots of links, reverse chronology ascending (or would that be descending, I never have figured out what those mean in the context of a web page list) posts, RSS feeds. Frankly, PR folks in corporate America could view either one of the campaign's websites as best-practice models of how to pull together almost every web-based tool and trick imaginable under a fairly cohesive, easily-navigated umbrella. Both blogs allow the engaged supporter (or opponent) to see the campaigns real-time reaction to unfolding events.
That said, I think the Bush campaign Weblog is not in the same league with the Kerry blog. First off, I'm not a big fan of anonymous Weblogs and the Bush campaign Weblog is. Kerry's campaign blog is run by Dick Bell who I assume is a real person as he attended the first Bloggercon. Also, the Kerry blog allows comments and the Bush blog does not. I don't necessarily think comments would add much in terms of quality insight to the Bush blog, but it would display a confidence that is missing by not allowing them
MP: Why stick with print media (e.g. custom publishing) rather than go to all blogs all the time, like Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton have done?
HAMMOCK: Funny you should ask. I poured heart and soul and capital (mine and others) into developing a conversational media platform for a website called smallbusiness.com. The content was all user-generated. Frankly, it is a precursor to blogging and in many respects a great alternative to a blog for someone who merely wants a means to share their insight or knowledge about a narrow topic.
But that whole dot.com crash thing happened and while the website and URL remain, our business failed. In the coming months, I believe you will see it slowly reemerge with blog-like features as a core component. I'm not ready for any official announcements, however.
MP: In a public relations sense, is there anyone who shouldn't have a blog? How do you feel about corporate blogging - official and unofficial?
HAMMOCK: Probably there are more companies and other entities that should not have a blog than should. A bad blog is frankly worse that no blog. I think, however, that the conventions of Weblogs that I mentioned earlier will be incorporated into the corporate communications areas of a company's website.
For CEOs who are extroverted, opinionated and passionate (and can write with a voice) I would argue that spending a big chunk of time blogging, even if behind a firewall to an internal audience only, would be time well spent...better surely than sitting through endless meetings.
MP: What is the impact of participatory journalism on custom publishing, the magazine industry overall and PR?
HAMMOCK: I think magazine publishers (including those of us who focus on the custom niche) will be slow to embrace a culture of conversation and participation with readers. It's ironic, however, as there are some tremendous examples of magazine-organized special events and conventions that are organized and branded by magazines. However, it won't be long before the media companies that today own the world's major media platforms will find a way to monetize whatever attracts and retains the attention of individuals.
PR, however, stands to see a bigger impact from a world in which everyone has, at least in theory, a platform to communicate his or her point of view. Where once, an entity was dependent upon the news media or paid advertising to present its side of an issue, today, everyone can refer the world (or the few individuals interested in the issue) to the web.
Again, the place to watch the future unfold in this coming phenomenon is on the presidential campaign websites where each candidate has a team in place to instantly "de-bunk" any negative news from any source. As newspapers offer blog-like comments at the bottom of their stories, having a PR approach that encourages the real-voice involvement in the conversation will radically change the way PR is practiced from when I used to be a member of PRSA a couple decades ago and put APR behind my name.
MP: Why should the next Bloggercon be held in Nashville?
HAMMOCK: That wasn't my idea. It was a suggestion of a blogger from New York, Robert Cox, who discovered while planning a family reunion that Nashville was an easy place to reach from lots of different places around the country. My blogging about Nashville and Bloggercon was merely a welcoming endorsement of his suggestion. Sort of like when we say down south, ya'll come.
MP: Finally, Rex I am only in my thirties, but I'm already going blind from reading the rexblog. Can you up the picas a bit?
HAMMOCK: Wow. I was trying to find a way to make it smaller. Isn't there some command on your browser that makes the type bigger? Perhaps because I wear thick reading glasses, I've been lulled into thinking it was big. I'll have my development team look into that.
