Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

It’s not every weekend that Kerri Gristina, a schoolteacher living in the Bronx, manages to round up her three daughters and load them into the car for a Manhattan outing. When she does, she’ll take them to a Broadway play, to a museum or just to frolic around Central Park. But no matter what else they do that day, the busy mom always manages to carve out some time for one special stop along the way.

“They have natural options, organic options,” Ms. Gristina, who writes a blog called Raising Three Savvy Ladies, told The New York Observer of her favorite place to buy beauty products in NYC. “It’s like a designer store. Maybe it costs more, but having more variety is worth it.”

No, it’s not the Laura Mercier or Bobbi Brown counter at Bergdorf’s. Ms. Gristina’s guilty primping pleasure is Duane Reade.

Seriously.

“I can’t always go to a Sephora with three kids,” she said, praising the chain store’s LOOK Boutiques, where quickie makeovers are provided for free by professionals. “At Duane Reade, I can still get a mom moment—a me-time moment.”

And Ms. Gristina isn’t the only one singing hymns at the altar of the mega-chain. “I have been in NYC less than a month and they recognize me when I go there. It’s like Cheers. It’s awesome,” reads one recent Yelp review. “A girl I dated once called Duane Reade her secret lover for all that he provided for her,” another enthusiast wrote about the franchise’s 42nd Street location. “At first a joke, I started to get jealous after a while.”

“They really are like a literal urban oasis,” said Mary Elizabeth Williams, a culture writer at Salon who has spent the past two years battling stage IV melanoma. “They have this neutral quality of an airport lounge,” she told The Observer. “When you’re in a real crisis moment of your life, the mundane becomes the most important.”

Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

But Duane Reade has done more than just master the mundane. This is a drugstore whose flagships offer everything from sushi and fro-yo stations to juice bars and in-store nail and hair salons. If you need assistance, you can ask a hologram floor greeter. Or you can help yourself at the digital makeup counter, where, via a computerized snapshot of your face, you can see what new products would look like without ever having to use a tester.

The 40 Wall Street location in particular, which opened in 2011, resembles a futuristic shopping mall or an underground Japanese city more than a place to pick up prescriptions. The reaction to a chain store opening in a landmark location could have gone either way, but this ribbon-cutting proved an unmitigated success: customers loved it, the store won a prestigious design award, and the critics were raving. The New Yorker and Women’s Wear Daily both gave the store high marks, but really, the litmus test was the fact that such publications wrote about the opening of a franchise drug store in the first place.

The party thrown for the opening of the 40 Wall Street flagship—attended by bloggers, journalists (The Observer included), design students and busy attorneys alike—wasn’t just a game-changer. It was a mood-changer.

Duane Reade's juice bar. (Shao-yu Lin.)

If ever there was a store in need of a makeover, it was Duane Reade. The problems the franchise faced—both before and after it was acquired by Walgreens in 2010 from Oak Hill Capital Partners—have been well documented. Former CEO Anthony Cuti and CFO William Tenant were sentenced to three years in prison for fraudulently misrepresenting the companies finances. The pharmacies were ranked dead last in customer satisfaction, according to J.D. Power and Associates, and the stores frequently received low health grades. (Duane Reade was once forced to pay $200,000 out in civil court for peddling drugs and products past their expiration date.)

The blog I Hate Duane Reade, founded in 2007, served as a mouthpiece for customers and employees who had complaints about the mega-chain—and they had many. The combination of photos of the understocked, overcrowded stores and relatable tales of misery made the site a viral hit, garnering mentions in The New York Times, Gawker, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. It was the quintessence of what was wrong under the old regime.

The most damning bit of criticism came from Martha Plimpton in a 2007 New York magazine interview. Asked what she hated most about the city, she replied: “The dead-eyed pharmacy people at Duane Reade ... It’s always a journey into the heart of darkness.”

The founder of IHDR (who wished to remain anonymous) told The Observer that the idea came while sitting with friends and comparing horror stories about the drugstore. “[We] realized that we all had the same issues. We wondered if everyone else felt the same way. Turns out they did.”

Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

The Walgreens buyout had an immediate effect, curbing the criticism. IHDR published its penultimate post in February 2010. And four months after the purchase, Walgreens boasted in a quarterly meeting that sales were up, with Duane Reade contributing 2.8 percent to the total increase.

Still, altering the essence-du-Duane took more than a quick-fix change of ownership. It’s been a long road back to Gotham’s good graces for the store that boasts the most sales per square foot in the industry.
While still under the aegis of Oak Hill Capital Partners, Duane Reade began its facelift, courtesy of the strategic branding firm CBX. The mission: redesign its stores and rehabilitate its personal brand. No easy task.

(Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

Joe Bona, president of the retail division at CBX, worked closely on the in-store redesigns and in-house brands. “People need to still walk in and recognize that it’s a Duane Reade,” he said of the new and improved stores. In other words, it was all about atmosphere. Or as the franchise’s revamped slogan put it, “New York Living Made Easy.”

“One of things we know through research,” Mr. Bona said, “is that when you create a wider aisle, [customers] feel less pressured and they tend to linger a bit longer.”

And relaxation is a key theme at the new Duane Reade: a luxury that hints at the store’s new upscale aspirations. After all, as any New Yorker knows, time equals money. So if you have time to meander and browse instead of rushing to the express lane, you must have minutes—and therefore cash—to burn.

When Ms. Williams ducks into her favorite Duane Reade location, right next to Sloan-Kettering, where she receives cancer treatment, for example, she is always amazed to see how many customers just seem to be loitering. “At least 50 percent of the people are just hanging out,” she marveled.

“I guess that’s what’s in it for me too,” she added. “I need to regroup.”

Ms. Williams’s reaction to Duane Reade is no accident: through wider aisles and warmer fluorescent lighting, landscape windows and perfumeries, Duane Reade represents the latest triumph of psychographics, a research field specifically tailored to the psychological states of customers in retail environments.

The nail bar. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

Dr. Archana Kumar, an assistant professor in the department of marketing at Montclair State University, might be described as a psychographicist. In a phone call with The Observer, she broke down this almost-subliminal messaging.

“Blue, green and violet are calming colors,” she said, explaining that to create a “calming effect,” a store like Duane Reade would have to change its color palette from “agitating” colors, like red, to warmer ones that are “associated with feelings of peacefulness and happiness.”

Is it any coincidence that Dr. Kumar’s calming colors are the exact three that Duane Reade happened to choose for its redesign? Probably not.

Other subtle changes have been effective as well. By designing and promoting the Duane Reade food-and-beverage brand DR Delish as a more expensive alternative to its other off-label brand, Cityscape, for example, CBX was able to convince customers that the store’s self-made tiers correspond to product quality. It sacrificed one label to the hordes of coupon-clippers so that DR Delish might fare better against the big-name brands.

But here’s the weird thing: sales of both DR Delish and Cityscape doubled between 2009 and 2011. People, it seemed, were ready to pledge allegiance not only to Duane Reade as a store, but to its products as well—and across all price points.

Some of Duane Reade’s newfound fans may also be attributed to the store’s vastly improved social media presence. On Ms. Gristina’s blog, she’s penned such lyrical posts about the Walgreens-owned chain that you might believe she was being paid by the company.

Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

In fact, she attempted to become one of the store’s 10 “VIP NYC Bloggers”—a contest whose winners would receive $200 a month in store credit in exchange for blogging, tweeting and Facebooking their love for the store.

While some might read this contest as part of a cynical branding attempt by a faceless corporate entity, Duane Reade seems to be investing a huge amount of time and considerable effort to draw in digital consumers, most of whom are happy to receive the love and give it back.

Last year, the Duane Reade Twitter feed—which often promotes local events like readings at Housing Works—surpassed even its parent company’s by skyrocketing from 15,000 to 390,000-plus followers in seven months, making it the most popular drugstore on Twitter. (Pretty impressive when you consider that Duane Reade only has stores in the New York City area.)

(Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

There have been celebrity endorsements too, like when Glee actor Cory Monteith, who is based in L.A., tweeted “Yeah, I actually started following @DuaneReade. so what? what if I need a heads up on everyday products I need.” That comment has been retweeted more than 350 times.

As silly as this all might sound, these efforts have translated into revenue: when the store put forth another Internet-based contest last year as part of its “Show Us Some Leg” campaign, sales of Duane Reade-brand hosiery jumped 40 percent.

Still, none of this Web 2.0 magic would work if people had a negative impression of the stores themselves. But the rehabilitation is working, and once again Duane Reade feels like an integral part of the city. What’s more, individual store locations have taken to embracing the character of different NYC neighborhoods.

At the Soho location (on Spring Street, another repurposed former bank), for instance, you can find obscure art and fashion magazines. The Times Square location sells a ton of “I Love New York” memorabilia. Wall Street has its shoe-shine parlor and nail salon. And in Brooklyn, as much as they fought it, hipsters have found the growler bar and walk-in beer fridge in Williamsburg a highly persuasive reason to shop at a chain.

As Ms. Williams put it, “Duane Reade provides a safeness: If you’re picking up your cancer medication while someone else is picking up tampons and there’s a guy picking up a six pack, it’s like this great big circle of life.”

And that’s something you can’t put a price on.

The late Anna Piaggi (Patrick McMullan)

A glance at Twitter these days might prompt one to wonder why all of our celebrities are suddenly expiring en masse. It used to be said that deaths come in threes—now the daily news cycle arrives like a plague, cutting down one cultural luminary after another.

Of course, notable deaths aren’t on the upswing—but chatter about them certainly is. We perform our grief on social media, the personal tributes flooding Twitter in the moments after each passing. To the traditional accoutrements of mourning (the mountains of stuffed animals, the candles and roses, the dimming of the lights on Broadway), we have added the tweet, the retweet and the "like."

This past week, composer Marvin Hamlisch, fashion editor Anna Piaggi, art critic Robert Hughes, and author and raconteur Gore Vidal all passed away. Then, even as we were writing this, film critic Judith Crist joined them. In a past era, their deaths would have have merited a Times obit and a mention, if time allowed, at the end of the evening news.

In the age of Twitter, though, there is no such thing as a muted response to a celebrity passing. At press time, the top trending topics included Hamlisch, Hughes and Piaggi, as well as A Chorus Line and The Sting, Hamlisch’s two best-loved works. “Rest in peace, Good man. #ChorusLinealldaybaby” wrote one Twitter user apparently planning to enjoy Hamlisch’s work. “My cat loves this one,” wrote another user, of a track Hamlisch wrote for The Informant! Piaggi and Hughes earned tributes no less heartfelt, with a Canadian reporter speculating all three were together in heaven, “trading stories over a plateau de fruits de mer and rosé.”

Twitter is perhaps the ultimate tool for celebrity death announcements—better, even, than celebritydeathbeeper.com (“Now checking for deaths every 10 minutes”). The collective digital keening represented by the subject’s ascension to trending topic-hood opens up a realm of deeply personal and hyper-specific emotional projection. For instance, it allows those who once personally encountered the subject to advertise that fact. As one devastated tweeter noted of Hamlisch, “I rode a hotel elevator with him in Phoenix once.”

It also imparts which of the celebrity’s books, characters or songs is the most beloved among one’s circle. Turns out, everyone has read Crazy Salad and The City and the Pillar, and adores “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”

These days, failing to retweet a celebrity’s passing, ideally with a hastily assembled Spotify playlist, an animated GIF or a lovingly curated series of YouTube clips, is a sign of one’s heartlessness. Chiming in, after all, is how we know we’re still alive (for now); to sit one out is to risk irrelevance. While eulogies are still rightly offered by those who loved the deceased, Twitter conveys death’s effect on those who “liked” him.

Wading through the sheer volume of remembrances of Hamlisch or Piaggi, one feels as though it could go on forever—or at least until the next celebrity dies. And with every tweet fired off, staking out the sender’s claim to a very fleeting and high-tech grief, one feels the tweeter’s anxiety, as though his enthusiasm could stave off the inevitable.

And someday, the tweeter no doubt hopes, his own followers will eulogize him—something appropriate, just a few characters and a shortened link, in memoriam.

All of this recently culminated in that telltale culture-news saturation point indicator, a withering segment about them on The Daily Show. And on Friday, The Jim Henson Company—which makes Muppet toys for Chick-Fil-As kids' meals—cut ties with the company as well. So, how's Chick-Fil-A fighting back?

The Daily Show's co-creator, Lizz Winstead, Tweeted out this photograph today:

It appears to be from the Willow Grove Mall in lovely Willow Grove, PA. Blogger Joe My God found that they're not the only one taking this message tactic:

Chick-fil-A is initiating a voluntary withdrawal for our Jim Henson Creature Shop Puppet Kid's Meal Premiums due to a product issue (even though all puppets passed safety testing requirements). In lieu of the kid's meal premium we will offer a Kid's Icedream. We plan to have replacement kid's meal premiums within 2 weeks. Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Now, technically, they're not The Muppets, which Disney now owns, but Jim Henson creatures are all kind of informally common-noun "muppets," no?  Either way, Chick-Fil-A is saying that the "voluntary recall" happened before The Jim Henson Company made their announcement: Essentially, that they recalled the product voluntarily, and The Jim Henson Company exploited the moment to take a stand.

Which seems unlikely, given both the "voluntary" nature of the product recall, as well as the varying messages each Chick-Fil-A franchise seems to be putting out.

When contacted for quote by the Huffington Post, The Jim Henson Company referred a reporter to their previous statement and basically told them to check in with Chick-Fil-A, but as The Consumerist pointed out, the recall is in fact "voluntary," which refutes what the sign at the heart of this reads: That it's a recall. Furthermore, they contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which issues recalls like the one that'd be required for the toys in question; they had no issues with the toys listed for recall action.

But essentially, what you have here is an anti-gay fast-food chain and The Jim Henson Workshop engaged in a P.R. war, with a confused media caught in the middle, attempting to interpret subtleties in messaging that have more or less been distributed through social media. It is mostly weird, and relatively funny.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Well now, Shell's getting it, too.

An "Arctic Ready" site of "Shell" is currently making the rounds on the Internet. It looks like it's by Shell, it's written in corporate rhetoric, and it has all of the features of a corporate attempt at social media (like a 'make your own postcard' section, and a game for kids).

Except, a closer look reveals something else: In the "game" for kids, you defend an oil rig from icebergs. On a page where "Shell" touts an arctic drilling platform, they explain:

On the slight chance that something does go wrong, Shell's spill cleanup plan is second to none. No one has yet fully determined how to clean up an oil spill in pack ice or broken ice—but that too is exactly the sort of challenge we love.

But best of all are the social media "postcards" that they created and that people are spreading around the web.

For example:

Or:

Or:

On a first look, they appear like something Shell put out, but an actual read would make you question if a company like Shell would have the gall to actually put out something like that.

Which gets you clicking. And so goes a canny awareness campaign like this. If successful activism takes more than just a message, now, these activists appear to most certainly have whatever that "extra something" is (which in this case, looks like astute and brilliant impersonation skills).

Check out what Shell's actual homepage looks like:

And the Arctic Ready homepage:

The real Shell site "help" page:

And the Arctic Ready "Shell" help page:

The entire thing is immaculately executed, and fairly hilarious, too. It's clearly some environmental group doing this, though the web registry only points to a privacy-proxy for a domain:

c/o ARCTICREADY.COM
P.O. Box 821650
Vancouver, WA 98682
US

Whoever it is, they're already fooling more than a few people, and are bound to upset the corporate PR brass at Shell. Something like this is bound to spread quickly, and fuel a little (misinformed) populist outrage along the way. So far, Shell's only issued this terse statement, hidden on their Alaska page:

Last week groups that oppose Shell’s plans in offshore Alaska posted a video that purports to show Shell employees at an event at the Seattle Space Needle. Shell did not host, nor participate in an event at the Space Needle and the video does not involve Shell or any of its employees. A fake press release claiming that Shell is considering legal action following the launch of the video was also distributed to the media. Most recently the group sponsored a contest on a website asking people to create fake advertisements which appear to be from Shell. The ads, and a contest to create more of the ads, are not associated with Shell. We continue to focus on a safe exploration season in 2012.

New York City has entire armies of so-called social media are marketing consultancies that likely can't yield results like this after years of trying everything in their playbooks. Maybe they could take a page from these guys', whoever they are.

UPDATE: It looks like it's the work of Greenpeace, in conjunction with activist group The Yes Men.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The internal memo announcing the hires was written by the Times' Deputy Editor of Interactive News, Sasha Koren:

We’re thrilled to announce two additions to the social media and community team: Michael Roston and Daniel Victor.

Michael Roston, who has deftly operated the home page on the overnight shift for the last year and a half, will join us as a social media producer. Michael came to our attention last year with his smart, clever Twitter feed, then impressed us with his in-depth knowledge of Reddit, which he generously shared, encouraging us to do more to speak to that platform’s quirky user base.

Of his time on news presentation, Patrick Laforge notes: "Not many people could walk into the overnight home page job with as little time in the producer's chair as Michael did. He became an obsessive student of the stylebook and headline writing, and a pioneer in using his down time from the job to embed himself in rewrite, copy editing, social media and other opportunities. He was always a cheerful presence on the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, greeting his Twitter followers in the wee hours with witty remarks from the 'Tower of News.' If you're not following him, you should be."

From his work keeping @nytimes relevant with breaking news during the wee hours, we suspected he had an appetite for making more use of social media tools and thinking in the service of Times journalism. He’ll bring that appetite and a knowledge of homepage operations to the job, along with a deep experience in online news from previous positions at True/Slant, the New York Sun and the Huffington Post. He’ll move to daytime hours on June 11.

A brief interlude: Somehow, Roston's witty Twitter acumen and familiarity with Reddit came before the fact that the guy was pretty much the last person out the door at both the New York Sun and True/Slant, the pay-writers-what-they-earn project that he basically helped give unlikely life to—and preserve said unlikely life—before it was gobbled up by Forbes (in one of the more depressing content model about-face moves in recent media history).

Onward:

Also joining our team as a social media producer will be Daniel Victor, who comes to us from ProPublica, where he has been the social media editor. There and in earlier positions at Philly.com and TBD.com, he has conceived of and run successful and innovative projects making use of social media and other tools to thoughtfully engage readers. He was a reporter at the Patriot News of Harrisburg, Pa., and holds a B.A. in journalism from Penn State. He’ll join us at the end of June.

Please join me in congratulating Michael and welcoming Daniel.

— Sasha Koren

ProPublica's social media presence is one of the few from media properties that actually deserves distinguishment beyond being mere promotional tools: Take, for example, their Officials Say The Darndest Things blog hosted on Tumblr, or the way they started a Patent Harm Facebook Group off of their stories about the health care industry, or the way they're crowd-sourcing research on campaign finance. Also not a bad guy to bring on board, especially if the Times wants to do more with their social media than, say, the NYT Fridge.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Posted to Twitter by Dana Stevens--@thehighsign

It's the kind of mistake that's irresistible to social media wits: an iPhone app for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign misspells the word America. The app lets users take photos and it currently superimposes the legend "A Better Amercia (sic)" over them. While the Romney campaign is seeking to have the app corrected and replaced in the iTunes store as soon as possible, jokes about the screw-up spread like wildfire across Twitter Tuesday night. It is tempting to run down a catalogue of wisecracks but one tweet represents the general tone pretty well:

Won't you join @andybowers' lead and have your dog share @MittRomney's wish for "A Better Amercia"? Here's mine:twitpic.com/9qte94

— Dana Stevens (@thehighsign) May 30, 2012

No one comes away completely clean, though--the Washington Post's blog entry regarding the screw up was titled "Romney app misspells 'Amercia,'"--unintentionally (we guess?) implying Mr. Romney's app had misspelled the misspelling. Or something.

Embarrassing as the foul-up may be for the otherwise tightly organized Romney campaign, at least it's unlikely anyone will lose a foot over it.

Sarah Phillips (Courtesy Deadspin)

The self-obsessed world of online journalism came close to a singularity moment early this month, when an up-and-coming young sports columnist was exposed as a garden-variety con artist. Over at the Gawker sports site Deadspin, John Koblin reconstructed the luridly fascinating saga of ESPN.com writer Sarah Phillips, who had landed a plum perch in the enormous, vastly profitable industry of sports journalism without benefit of a single in-person job interview. Ms. Phillips’ career path was largely a con job—she had previously set up shop as a sports-betting columnist at the betting site Covers.com, with no discernible background in either sports fandom or wagering—so perhaps it felt natural for her to set about gulling impressionable sports-minded writers and web proprietors out of piles of money on the promise that, together, they would all come into tidy fortunes by cracking wise about the sports world on the Internet. “I’m a writer for ESPN.com. And I have a plan to take over the world,” is how Ms. Phillips succinctly put things to one of her marks on Gchat.

The plan, such as it was, involved reviving a version of ESPN’s lapsed Page 2 franchise, and bulking it up into a network of sports-comedy blogs. “By my ESPN.com senior director estimates,” she explained in her world-conquering Gchat pitch, “each of the five of us [contributing content to the network] will be making over $100K. My ultimate goal, being that I work for ESPN, is to sell the site to ESPN and become a blog on ESPN.com.” But inevitably, there would be some strategic hitch along the way—photo rights to purchase, seed money to collect, advertising to pay for—and once Ms. Phillips had that stake in hand, she’d typically vanish.

The deal on offer probably sounded vaguely plausible in Ms. Phillips’ own head—the key to carrying off an effective scam, after all, is for scammers to project confidence in their own ornate fantasies; that confidence is what they are selling to their clientele. And since the managers at ESPN had already hired Ms. Phillips without even a minimal semblance of due diligence—so certain is the mass appeal of a comely young woman writer in the online sportswriting world—well, who’s to say what’s possible? (Mr. Koblin reports, by the way, that Phillips was not merely an online con artist, but also something of a sock puppet: She had a history of channeling sports forecasts and betting odds by a longtime male confrere named Nilesh Prasad; the two had attended high school together in Oregon, and worked at the same T-mobile store until they’d both been fired for allegedly perpetrating another online scam there, involving the resale of company phones on Ebay.)

But like all cons, the Sarah Phillips episode is more interesting for what it reveals about the marks than about the perpetrator, whose motivations almost always turn out to be sad, venal, and banal. But since this con was aimed squarely at the great enabling myths of the rapidly monetizing world of social media, it speaks volumes about the ultimate end-uses we envision behind the frantic connectivity of our online lives.

Just consider the inner workings of the Phillips pitch. There was the testimony of the geektrepreneur who had swiftly monetized her own online brand—her identity, that is—and who was now extending the same bounty to a corps of web-savvy self-starters, just like her. There was the credibility of major online brands dangled before the marks as a classic inducement-cum-distraction.

And there was, most of all, the the illicit allure of a hot-seeming twenty-something woman reaching out to shut-in geeks with the promise of easy money explicitly rewarding them for their pet obsessions—in other words, the very fantasy of transcendent personal specialness and irresistibly attractive genius that keeps most young men transfixed before the Internet for hours on end in the first place.

From the demand side of the equation, the Phillips scam also had to seem invitingly credible in a broader sense, as well. After all, the standard come-on of Web business prophets is that the self-generated marketing of your personality online is the hidden secret of online prosperity. “The new American Dream is to go viral,” burbles the cyber-visionary hack Jeff Jarvis. The interactivity of the Web has enhanced all manner of enterprise, announces the NYU digital cheerleader Clay Shirky, precisely “because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing (and music and film and so on).” Lay these entirely representative specimens of pat and content-free managementspeak side-by-side, and you have the high-theory version of Sarah Phillips’ business plan.

The ever-elusive quest for the optimally self-marketing kind of personality was also why my former corporate superiors at Yahoo News would obsess over the intangible magic of the online “voice” in the site’s coverage of the news cycle—even though the occasional appearance of a strong voice in a Yahoo-branded platform was also guaranteed to send them into operatic bouts of managerial fretting. One of the more curious sidelights of the Phillips affair, indeed, was a scam whereby the young hustler would purchase individual Twitter accounts outright to boost her own social media profile. This may be the saddest footnote to the Phillips saga: Madly seeking to monetize a Web-branded personality, the con artist is reduced to subcontracting the illusion of an appealing online persona.

It used to be an elementary job requirement for charming hucksters that they at least be colorful—but in today’s social-media-verse, all that evidently matters is that you seem popular. And that you don’t get caught.

]]>  

Sarah Phillips (Courtesy Deadspin)

The self-obsessed world of online journalism came close to a singularity moment early this month, when an up-and-coming young sports columnist was exposed as a garden-variety con artist. Over at the Gawker sports site Deadspin, John Koblin reconstructed the luridly fascinating saga of ESPN.com writer Sarah Phillips, who had landed a plum perch in the enormous, vastly profitable industry of sports journalism without benefit of a single in-person job interview. Ms. Phillips’ career path was largely a con job—she had previously set up shop as a sports-betting columnist at the betting site Covers.com, with no discernible background in either sports fandom or wagering—so perhaps it felt natural for her to set about gulling impressionable sports-minded writers and web proprietors out of piles of money on the promise that, together, they would all come into tidy fortunes by cracking wise about the sports world on the Internet. “I’m a writer for ESPN.com. And I have a plan to take over the world,” is how Ms. Phillips succinctly put things to one of her marks on Gchat.

The plan, such as it was, involved reviving a version of ESPN’s lapsed Page 2 franchise, and bulking it up into a network of sports-comedy blogs. “By my ESPN.com senior director estimates,” she explained in her world-conquering Gchat pitch, “each of the five of us [contributing content to the network] will be making over $100K. My ultimate goal, being that I work for ESPN, is to sell the site to ESPN and become a blog on ESPN.com.” But inevitably, there would be some strategic hitch along the way—photo rights to purchase, seed money to collect, advertising to pay for—and once Ms. Phillips had that stake in hand, she’d typically vanish.

The deal on offer probably sounded vaguely plausible in Ms. Phillips’ own head—the key to carrying off an effective scam, after all, is for scammers to project confidence in their own ornate fantasies; that confidence is what they are selling to their clientele. And since the managers at ESPN had already hired Ms. Phillips without even a minimal semblance of due diligence—so certain is the mass appeal of a comely young woman writer in the online sportswriting world—well, who’s to say what’s possible? (Mr. Koblin reports, by the way, that Phillips was not merely an online con artist, but also something of a sock puppet: She had a history of channeling sports forecasts and betting odds by a longtime male confrere named Nilesh Prasad; the two had attended high school together in Oregon, and worked at the same T-mobile store until they’d both been fired for allegedly perpetrating another online scam there, involving the resale of company phones on Ebay.)

But like all cons, the Sarah Phillips episode is more interesting for what it reveals about the marks than about the perpetrator, whose motivations almost always turn out to be sad, venal, and banal. But since this con was aimed squarely at the great enabling myths of the rapidly monetizing world of social media, it speaks volumes about the ultimate end-uses we envision behind the frantic connectivity of our online lives.

Just consider the inner workings of the Phillips pitch. There was the testimony of the geektrepreneur who had swiftly monetized her own online brand—her identity, that is—and who was now extending the same bounty to a corps of web-savvy self-starters, just like her. There was the credibility of major online brands dangled before the marks as a classic inducement-cum-distraction.

And there was, most of all, the the illicit allure of a hot-seeming twenty-something woman reaching out to shut-in geeks with the promise of easy money explicitly rewarding them for their pet obsessions—in other words, the very fantasy of transcendent personal specialness and irresistibly attractive genius that keeps most young men transfixed before the Internet for hours on end in the first place.

From the demand side of the equation, the Phillips scam also had to seem invitingly credible in a broader sense, as well. After all, the standard come-on of Web business prophets is that the self-generated marketing of your personality online is the hidden secret of online prosperity. “The new American Dream is to go viral,” burbles the cyber-visionary hack Jeff Jarvis. The interactivity of the Web has enhanced all manner of enterprise, announces the NYU digital cheerleader Clay Shirky, precisely “because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing (and music and film and so on).” Lay these entirely representative specimens of pat and content-free managementspeak side-by-side, and you have the high-theory version of Sarah Phillips’ business plan.

The ever-elusive quest for the optimally self-marketing kind of personality was also why my former corporate superiors at Yahoo News would obsess over the intangible magic of the online “voice” in the site’s coverage of the news cycle—even though the occasional appearance of a strong voice in a Yahoo-branded platform was also guaranteed to send them into operatic bouts of managerial fretting. One of the more curious sidelights of the Phillips affair, indeed, was a scam whereby the young hustler would purchase individual Twitter accounts outright to boost her own social media profile. This may be the saddest footnote to the Phillips saga: Madly seeking to monetize a Web-branded personality, the con artist is reduced to subcontracting the illusion of an appealing online persona.

It used to be an elementary job requirement for charming hucksters that they at least be colorful—but in today’s social-media-verse, all that evidently matters is that you seem popular. And that you don’t get caught.

]]> http://observer.com/2012/05/05082012-social-media-espn-scammer-sarah-phillip/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver sarah-phill http://observer.com/2012/01/the-best-tweets-from-mcdonald-stories-hashtag-disaster/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:00:54 -0400 http://observer.com/2012/01/the-best-tweets-from-mcdonald-stories-hashtag-disaster/ Drew Grant http://www.observer.com/?p=213124
You'd have thought that Taco Bell's tweet on Martin Luther King Day-- "Have you ever dreamed about eating @TacoBell and then woke up and made that dream come true?" --would have been bad enough to scare off any other fast food chains from making another social media blunder this week. But like a line of delicious, deep-fried dominoes, McDonald's has now toppled in the face of the almighty force that is thousands of bored, scabby teens.

When they paid to promote the hashtag "McDStories," those poor executives who graduated summa cum Mclaude from Hamburger University didn't stop to think that maybe some people's stories were better left untold. It began trending earlier this afternoon, and before long the hashtag had been taken over by hoards of horror stories. Click through...if you have the stomach for it.

Robert Wright: Non-Tweeter (via Bloggingheads.tv)

New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer prize nominee Robert Wright is The Atlantic's latest digital hire. No, not The Atlantic Wire, just TheAtlantic.com. Mr. Wright has been penning for The Atlantic for 20 years, but has limited his editorial duties to The New Republic, The Sciences, and Wilson Quarterly.

According to the press release sent today, Mr. Wright's new position at The Atlantic "will cover issues related to politics, foreign policy, science, religion, and philosophy, among other subjects. He will also supplement his writing with video conversations, a format he popularized on Bloggingheads.tv."

So why doesn't anyone want to be his Twitter buddy?

Despite having one of the most prolific voices in technology and social media, and being what Atlantic editor Bob Cohn refers to in the press release as "a digital pioneer," Robert Wright's Twitter account hasn't been updated since March. (This was the Twitter handle that was referred to in the announcement as belonging to Mr. Wright and seems to be legit.)

Mr. Wright might not be much of a tweeter (he's too busy penning for every publication in existence), but a little bit of social media goes along way these days. Let's all friend Mr. Wright, and maybe we can start getting his genius in 140-characters instead of having to read entire articles in The Atlantic.

Just before dawn on Oct. 14, Salon reporter Justin Elliott was on Twitter and in Zuccotti Park, awaiting the outcome of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to clear out the Occupy Wall Street protestors for cleaning.

“On scene at Zuccotti, infusion of new protesters just arrived with signs "NYPD protects and serves the rich" | big cheers #ows,” Mr. Elliott tweeted.

A few days later, Nocturnalist columnist and New York Times staff reporter Sarah Maslin Nir kept followers up to date on the latest from her Zuccotti sleepover.

“Getting cold and tired, but every serious protestor has a tarp to block the wind. And I refuse to huddle for warmth #gonnadie,” Ms. Maslin Nir tweeted just before 1 a.m. on Oct. 17.

With freezing rain forecast for Saturday, staying warm is a major concern for Occupy Wall Street protesters and reporters alike. For many journalists, the movement is noteworthy for regularly drawing them out of the newsroom for long periods of time, demanding an on-the-fly mélange of traditional and social media reporting. 

Unlike, say, a political campaign—which can be adequately covered over the phone from the cozy dryness of the office—the demonstrations require hands-on reporting, Mr. Elliott explained.

“Because it’s so de-centralized, I think there’s a real advantage to being on the marches and in the park as much as possible,” he said.

For the same reason, OWS reporters keep one eye on Twitter, one of the main organization tools of the protest, at all times.

“You can’t be omnipresent,” said ANIMAL New York editor Bucky Turco. “So If I’m at Zuccotti and there’s something going on elsewhere in the city, it will usually end up on Twitter first and I can adjust.”

In New York, protesters and demonstrators typically coordinate with police before marches and acts of civil disobedience, explained Mr. Turco. (He had the procedure explained to him by Detective Rick Lee, the so-called “hipster cop.”)

“That’s what kind of makes it intriguing for the media, is that you don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Mr. Turco said. “It's organic and it’s not staged.”

With the help of a MiFi, Mr. Turco and other reporters blog, write and file copy directly from the scene or a hospitable fast food restaurant nearby.

“Sometimes I just do my normal routine from Zuccotti,” Mr. Turco said.

As populist uprisings in Iran and Egypt demonstrated, Twitter is more than a reporting tool. Professional reporters, like citizen journalists, treat it as a publishing platform for a complementary narrative, more personal than a newspaper story and delivered in real time.

“A lot of the stuff that’s being put out on social networks is kind of a blow by blow, giving a glimpse into the mechanics of things like the General Assembly,” said Anthony De Rosa, Reuters social media editor.

New York Daily News social media Anjali Mullany said she is increasingly spending more time organizing the paper's live reporting, as well as other forms of non-traditional coverage of Occupy Wall Street.

"Social media is also a great mechanism for reporting details and anecdotes that may not fit or work in a traditional article. So is live coverage and live blogging," Ms. Mullany said in an email to the Observer.

A live tweet can illustrate the excitement and urgency that hooks a reader.

“Tweeting scratches that itch for the reader,” Ms. Maslin Nir said. “Especially when police are about to close in and you’re getting these tweets like, ‘We’re being shoved down 42nd Street, the barricade is crushing us.’ You know, that’s really something that Twitter can do.”

But for others, covering OWS exemplifies one of the major tensions between new and old media. Swept up in the shallow stream of Twitter, do reporters miss the big picture?

“There’s a lot of people tweeting about Occupy Wall Street, but there’s actually very few people, if you start looking around, just on the scene, doing descriptive reportorial stuff,” Mr. Elliott said. He tends to live tweet when he’s on scene, and Salon posts both traditionally reported stories and live tweet feeds for readers.

Although Twitter tells reporters where to be and when, it’s little help once the tape recorder comes out.

"Because there are no leaders in the group, it's difficult to get a really representative statement on what's going on," said a reporter of a widely circulated New York newspaper who was gathering information at an OWS gathering on Oct. 26 in Union Square.

"It ends up being a lot of talking, to a lot of different people, and then, somehow, trying to find the truth between everything that you're told," added the reporter, who asked to remain anonymous for job security purposes.

The reporter's struggles raise an interesting question: Is the plurality of Twitter a more accurate representation of the movement itself than the forced, newspaper-friendly narrative?

Most news outlets are hedging their bet, combining new and old, in hopes of creating the most complete portrait of the movement possible, at the risk of their reporter's social lives.

“You have to devote a lot of time to it,” Mr. Turco said. “I haven’t seen my family and friends as much.”