The best guess is that Apple will unveil a tablet computer, perhaps like the image below. One thing is for sure – Apple has mastered the art of product debut and news media hype.

Amid all the speculation, Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag issued a call for readers to send in photos of the Apple tablet. Valleywag offered a cash prize of up to $100,000. A day later, in typical lawyer-fashion, an attorney representing Apple sent Valleywag a cease-and-desist letter. That act, together with the contents of the letter, may have tipped Apple’s hand and actually confirmed speculation. Here’s what the attorney, Michael C. Spillner, wrote, in part:

“I am writing on behalf of Apple regarding the notices on Gawker.com and Valleywag.com Web sites that Gawker Media will pay someone a financial reward for sending you photos, video, or a sample of an unannounced and highly confidential Apple product.”

Naturally, ValleyWag published Spillner’s letter online.

The smart, intelligent move would have been for Spillner not to write the letter and to keep quiet. He should have had a clue that such a saber-rattling tactic would only create more impetuous for someone to spill the beans about the new product in exchange for the $100k … that his letter would serve only to perpetuate speculation. But, most lawyers are not wired that way.

It’s a shame that communications skills, including how to deal with modern day dynamics of the news media, are not taught in law schools.

Another press release is the antithesis of what today’s beleaguered reporters want. They are under orders to find fresh stories or else … so why should they care about another press release that’s been sent to everyone? They don’t.

Today’s news media – whether mainstream or online – is struggling financially. They don’t want your self-aggrandizing press release or any other 1970s era press materials. Furthermore, they are building walls against the barrage of unsolicited PR stuff, using, for instance, special spam filters that screen and trash any document with the typical PR jargon, such as “For immediate release.” Why would a reporter – who is under pressure to find legitimate news – risk their job looking at something that’s been carpet bombed to every other reporter on the planet?

Brian Lamb, founder and chief executive officer of C-SPAN, shared this wisdom with me:

“Media relations today is about relationships. A reporter needs to know who you are. It’s as important as what you have to say. If you have a great announcement but have not established a contact or relationship in the media, no one will pay attention.”

Lamb’s powerful words get incisively to the core of effective strategic communications today. It’s all about establishing relationships with journalists.

Sure, I know … I know … when a press release is mass distributed, it will show up briefly on an automatic news aggregation site, from obscure pages of MSNBC to The Singapore Times. But, that’s not real media coverage and certainly does not equate to meaningful awareness-building. It’s at best a brief poof of smoke that disappears, and you’d be kidding yourself to think otherwise.

Real stories in the real media are the result of knowing the right person to contact at the right time. It’s called relationships, and it’s never been more important than now … in the digital era.

Newshour interviews tend to run longer to provide more depth and understanding for both sides of an issue or story, presenting either an opportunity or a challenge for the person being interviewed.

The good news is that as a newsmaker or someone providing expert perspective, you are given a fair amount of time to present your case provided you heed interview rule #1 – listen to the interviewer’s questions and answer those questions before bridging or transitioning into your own agenda.

The bad news is that if you are not prepared for the interview or obsessed with trying to remember rehearsed talking points or simply lack adequate knowledge of the subject, you may flounder live on national television.

The latest person to flounder on NewsHour was Rosetta Jones, VP for corporate relations at VISA.

NewsHour’s Ray Suarez was interviewing Jones and Kim Zetter of Wired.com about a case of record-setting cyber theft of credit card numbers. The Justice Department had indicted three men for stealing more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers by hacking into the computer systems of five major companies. Jones and Zetter were billed as “cyber-security experts.”

Zetter’s side of the interview was superb and informative. Zetter knew her stuff. But when it came time for Jones to take a question, she stumbled, did not answer the questions from Suarez and delivered rehearsed and unrelated talking points. She clearly was not prepared or over her head. Here’s an excerpt from NewsHour.org:

RAY SUAREZ: Rosetta Jones, the program, according to the government, that these fellows were using burrowed into the systems and then started exporting the data they were finding there to places outside the United States, to some places inside the United States, but also to Latvia, Russia, the Netherlands. Why?

ROSETTA JONES, Visa: Your question was why they were exporting data?

RAY SUAREZ: Well, why to those places? Is it harder to investigate, harder to prosecute once you ship the data off to somewhere else in the world?

ROSETTA JONES: We think there’s ample opportunity for the government to be involved to help international cooperation in catching the criminals. We think that is an important opportunity and a significant area where the government can be involved.

RAY SUAREZ: Have the two sides been learning from each other, the hackers and the institutions that are trying to fend off these attacks? Do they look for breaches and then exploit them and then your side tries to build new defenses?

ROSETTA JONES: Well, I think, as long as card data remains valuable, criminals are going to continue to seek that information. What we have to do as an industry is to work with financial institutions and with merchants to protect that card information. And we have to make sure that they’re adhering to strict industry data security standards.

I think as an industry we also have to explore new ways to make that card data not valuable to criminals. And we’re looking at things like the introduction of dynamic data into the transaction. We think that has a good opportunity to help prevent fraud.

And, so it went, painfully, as Suarez tried to extract specifics from Jones who apparently was not an expert but rather a corporate PR person who had memorized some general talking points. It did not reflect well on VISA, and the company should have better and more professional spokespersons.

You can read the interview here … or, better yet, watch it.

Incidentally, Jones was only the latest so-called expert to bomb on NewsHour. A fellow named Robert Faris was on the program in June to talk about Twitter even though he had little knowledge of Twitter and was not using the mini-blogging service.

The real issue, I believe, is that by having such non-experts on the program actually hurts the credibility and reputation of the NewsHour.

Imperial Sugar Company's online newsroom

With the newspaper business in America in shambles and much of the rest of mainstream media adrift somewhere between wild sensationalism and chaos, there are fewer and fewer places for a corporation, association or not-for-profit to get their stories shared and heard.

Sure, mainstream media may show up if some scandal or crisis is brewing. But they could care less about such things as best practices, new and more efficient approaches to doing business and worthwhile programs that help people.

The reality today is that it is a significant challenge for any company or organization to get meaningful attention on a consistent and credible basis.

Sending out press releases is the least effective method of getting the media’s attention in today’s world although news releases are still the staple of lazy PR people who lack actual working relationships with the media or knowledge of the online media environment.

In this digital era, a great online newsroom is needed together with a strategic plan for building an enhanced footprint of awareness. The problem is that most online newsrooms are either dusty, molding depositories for press releases that date back to when God invented dirt or merely advertising showplaces to boast over new products with complete disregard for legitimate “news” about the company.

Imperial Sugar Company, headquartered in Sugar Land, Texas, has boldly taken a better direction. The company has created an honest-to-goodness working newsroom, ISCNewsroom.com, and after just a few months online, site traffic and ranking reflect its popularity. Awareness about the company’s news has increased on all major search engines.

At a time when most online newsrooms are generally the least-visited section of a company’s Web site, the ISCNewsroom has quickly become the most popular online news source in the sugar industry, reaching out to investors, employees, communities, suppliers, the media and the industry, as a whole. It is rich with appealing photos.

ISCNewsroom.com was developed by The News Group Net - with offices in Washington, Austin and Dallas. It is a consultancy of veteran communications strategists and journalists really know legitimate news and how to strategically communicate and connect with audiences … and the results are in the impressive audience numbers that help to position Imperial Sugar as the #2 producer of high quality cane sugar products in the United States.

In his popular blog, WebInkNow.com, David writes:

I’m particularly excited about how ISC hired journalists to create their newsroom, something I’ve advocated for years. This is something I’ve called brand journalism and is an increasingly effective marketing tool. In fact, ISC has hired the skills of a print journalist, a television journalist, and a photojournalist.

When a company creates information in a newsroom like ISC and updates it frequently, the valuable content is indexed by the search engines, and will gravitate into the top positions.

Imperial Sugar’s new online newsroom was developed by The News Group Net, of which I am a partner.

Click here to read David’s full story.

For a business or organization, WordPress brings an online newsroom alive and interactive with many features. The newsroom is no longer a dusty and boring archive of news releases that go back years. Rather, it becomes an online showcase for an organization’s latest news, photos and video, and a place to listen, exchange, and share with key audiences.

You can see where I am going … in today’s Internet era, stop shouting. Reach out to the media, investors, stakeholders and others who follow your organization, and tell them that everything new will be online. Focus the media’s attention back to your site, to your organization. Give them a site they can subscribe to in order to instantly get all updates by email. Such an approach meets the legal requirements of full disclosure for publicly traded companies.

What gives each WordPress site its distinctive look and feel are called Themes, and there are many to choose from. Solostream.com and DIYThemes.com are just two examples. Incidentally, WordPress is free.

Here’s the good part – when you post news on a WordPress-powered online newsroom, it shows up on Google within minutes. In other words, it becomes search engine friendly.

If you want to learn more, send me an email.

The PR industry has become an email spammer to the news media by emailing thousands of press releases each day. Reporters, under pressure to find fresh and new stories for their editors (the opposite of press releases), have become overwhelmed with their inboxes being cluttered with releases sent to everyone and his uncle. Reporters don’t need that; they need something that feels more exclusive and imaginative in order to keep their jobs. They need stories!

News organizations, in response to complaints from their reporters over too darn many press releases, have installed special email spam filters to catch releases and dump them into email trash. A popular spam filter is SpamSieve. Works like a charm. Furthermore, reporters are under no mandate to read those releases in the trash.

So, when your organization spends hours of valuable time to craft a press release, and then, distributes it via email or some blast email service, that’s what happens to it – the trash basket. End of story.

All you need to do is ask a reporter – mainstream or online – what they need for a story, and they will tell you that they need a story idea … just a brief paragraph in an email that outlines a possible story, including contacts and links to other material. That’s what they want. That’s all they need.

Now, I expect that somebody’s going to write a comment to say that press releases serve other meaningful purposes other than attempting to generate media attention. I suppose my response might be … stop kidding yourself.

Speak with journalists, and they will say that the majority of online newsrooms are of little value to them. In most cases, online news information sections neither deliver timely news nor anything else of value to the media, like ready access to the right contacts. Rather, they are akin to dusty archives.

Why even bother, I ask? It is amazing to see the sections referred to by even some of the largest corporations and even PR agencies, which should know better, as “Pressrooms.” A pressroom is where the machinery is located at a newspaper to physically print a newspaper, certainly the antithesis of the image of today’s online media information site.

Here are some ideas—based on input from many journalists—for creating a contemporary and useful online news info capability:

• Use correct terminology. It is neither a “Pressroom” nor a “Newsroom.” Leave those terms to the media. It is “News Info” you are delivering about your organization.
• Use dynamic content management platforms and RSS feed technology to drive your online news information site, so that the media and others who follow your organization can track new developments online with instantaneous newsfeed syndication and social media services.
• Deliver timely and relevant material of meaningful use to the media about your organization, not ads or marketing pieces.
• Be accessible … if for no other purpose than it’s the job of a communicator. Provide contact details, including names, telephone numbers and emails. No forms. If you’re a communicator and don’t want your contact information listed for the media, consider changing careers.
• Update regularly. Dynamic RSS site technology allows quick updates for timely issues from any computer, and without encountering the bottleneck of going through a web team.

What kind of signal is your communications department sending online about your organization? Savvy, timely, accessible … or tired, boring and an approach that makes the media jump through hoops to get what they need? Unfortunately, the latter is more the case than the exception for most. Isn’t it time for a change?

Salmonella contamination of peanuts has been traced to a Peanut Corporation plant in Blakely, Georgia. The outbreak continues to spread, and has sicken at least 600 people, more than half of them children, and may have killed eight people.

With such overwhelming evidence against a major food company, why did Parnell choose to evoke the Fifth Amendment, and who advised him to do so? I do not have the answers, yet.

I can tell you that his actions today before Congress were not wise. What he said, in fact, was self-incriminating and downright foolish. He demonstrated no compassion, no sympathy for those who were sickened or may have died, and no concern.

Feds have his emails to employees, instructing them to ship contaminated peanuts. There are words for Parnell’s behavior … outrageous and arrogant.

We live in an era when leadership mandates more accountability, more openness and transparency, and more cooperation. Parnell’s behavior, on the other hand, likely will land him in court. What he said was irresponsible.

Reuters reports:

The president of the U.S. peanut company blamed for a salmonella outbreak refused to answer questions before Congress on Wednesday, while internal company messages showed him complaining about lost profits while the scare was investigated.

The contamination has forced one of the biggest food recalls in U.S. history, scared Americans away from one of their favorite foods and brought the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under intense scrutiny.

What Parnell did before Congress today will make this an even bigger story, and one that unquestionably will focus on his lack of action in favor of profits and greed.

I received a press release via email a few days ago from a well-meaning PR person.

Guess what? I can’t write about it because at the bottom of the release is this:

NOTICE: This electronic mail transmission contains confidential information intended only for the person(s) named. Any use, distribution, copying or disclosure by any other person is strictly prohibited. If you received this transmission in error, please notify the sender by reply e-mail and then destroy the message. Opinions, conclusions, and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of AGENCY X shall be understood to be neither given nor endorsed by AGENCY X. Before opening any attachments please check them for viruses and defects. When addressed to AGENCY X clients, any information contained in this e-mail is subject to the terms and conditions in the governing client contract.

Yikes! The notice at the bottom of the press release says I cannot distribute the press release. This is what happens when lawyers get in the way of PR.

Or consider this typical press release from Shell that I found on one of the press release wires. Now, I’m not picking on Shell here, I’m making a general point. I could have chosen any one of a thousand releases for this example.

New Shell $aver Card(SM) Available at Shell-Branded Stations Nationwide.

HOUSTON, Jan. 5 /PRNewswire/ — Shell Oil Products US launched the Shell Saver Card today, becoming the first gasoline retailer to make an electronic check payment method available to consumers nationally. This latest Shell payment option provides consumers with a convenient way to pay for purchases with a direct link to a checking account and savings on each gallon of fuel pumped at Shell stations.

The body of the press release has several other paragraphs and contains 361 words. It is a well-written new product release. But then the lawyers get involved and add a 519 word “Disclaimer statement” (sometimes called safe harbor). The legal crap is much more lengthy than the news and includes minute definitions of things that aren’t even in the release such as these two sentences:

Forward-looking statements include, among other things, statements concerning the potential exposure of Royal Dutch Shell to market risks and statements expressing management’s expectations, beliefs, estimates, forecasts, projections and assumptions. These forward-looking statements are identified by their use of terms and phrases such as “anticipate”, “believe”, “could”, “estimate”, “expect”, “intend”, “may”, “plan”, “objectives”, “outlook”, “probably”, “project”, “will”, “seek”, “target”, “risks”, “goals”, “should” and similar terms and phrases.

Yikes! By including these statements, the press release says don’t believe a word we’re saying. This is what happens when lawyers get in the way of PR.

Over the holiday break I read a great book by David Henderson called The Media Savvy Leader. David talks a lot about what he calls “bad habits” around these sorts of disclosures. David says that the legal people include this sort of language so the company can’t be accused of lying. That’s a terrible strategy if you want journalists to believe you! David suggests: “Always tell the truth and you won’t need to hide behind an attorney or safe harbor.”

Question to PR people: Have you ever had a lawyer ask you to review a contract in order to remove the jargon and legal gobbledygook? I never have. So why does it happen the other way?

I was fortunate when I was VP of corporate communications for several NASDAQ publicly traded companies (before I escaped the corporate world in 2002). I had an understanding with the lawyers and we only put the safe harbor in the quarterly financial releases, but not the others. I’d recommend that you come to an understanding with your legal department and do the same.

For more on this subject, check out David’s book The Media Savvy Leader. It is a terrific book because David has been a success both as a journalist and as a media-relations practitioner. He is an Emmy Award-winning former CBS network news correspondent so he knows what it is like to be a working journalist. And as a media-relations advisor and strategist, he has been responsible for such stunning successes as generating massive national media attention on little Branson, MO. And Henderson knows the online world. He writes a terrific blog and knows how online communications fits into the mix.