Economist Article: Linguists online (Language Programs, Books & Tapes) Language Learning Forum

Economist Article: Linguists online
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Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes

Andrew C
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Message 1 of 5

08 January 2013 at 12:27am | IP Logged

A quite dreadful article in this week's Economist: here

I suppose their excuse could be it was written in a rush after the holidays.
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emk
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Message 2 of 5

08 January 2013 at 1:10am | IP Logged

Ah, now that's a classic PR hit. If you want to know how this works, check out the following essay on how PR firms work.

Quote:

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them…

The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves…

Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. [5] When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.

Not surprising, considering The Men's Wearhouse was at that moment running ads saying "The Suit is Back." Talk about a successful press hit-- a wire service article whose first sentence is your own ad copy.

I'm guessing this was probably a PR hit by Rosetta Stone, or one of the other usual suspects. But since The Economist wouldn't want to do anything quite so tacky, somebody Googled up some press releases from the competition and made a phone call or two.
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Chung
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Message 3 of 5

08 January 2013 at 1:58am | IP Logged

I genuinely don't see the difference between working in/for PR (and often marketing) and creating propaganda in some despot's "department of information/the interior" or similar. I felt as if my IQ dropped by 50 points reading that ad for RS (Article? What article?). This kind of thing just reinforces my disgust of marketing/PR/spin.

What I find interesting is that none of the comments (so far) question or point out the obvious slant toward Rosetta Stone.

On another note I had to laugh when I saw Enrique's long comment plugging Esperanto since he's done similarly on this forum (e.g. here, here, and here)
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DaraghM
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Message 4 of 5

08 January 2013 at 9:48am | IP Logged

The article also uses some classic persuasion techniques by saying their online tutoring service mightn't be economically viable, and could be stopped. This creates a feeling of scarcity, value for money and urgency.

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Quinn
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Message 5 of 5

09 January 2013 at 6:55pm | IP Logged

Chung wrote:

I genuinely don't see the difference between working in/for PR (and often marketing) and creating propaganda in some despot's "department of information/the interior" or similar.

Interestingly, the "father of public relations", Edward Bernays, admitted as much:

"When I came back to the United States [from the war], I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans ... using it. So what I did was to try to find some other words, so we found the words Counsel on Public Relations".

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations#Early_History

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