Doesn't Meet Expectations

The recent episode where the minutes were leaked from the recent meeting of the BPA (bisphenol-A) Joint Trade Association, attended by Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Crown, North American Metal Packaging Alliance, Inc., Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), American Chemistry Council, Del Monte has some moments of humor. I can't say I'm surprised that BPA users turned to an ad campaign over constructive engagement with stakeholders or the shocking alternative of committing to looking for a lower-toxicity or non-toxic alternative for lining canned foods and packaging beverages.

The ham-handedness of the strategizing is surprising though. After reading Trust Us, We’re Experts, I had expected these guys to be a little smoother about their framing: suggesting in so many words that they use fear tactics such as telling consumers they will no longer have access to affordable baby food without BPA; finding "pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA" as their 'holy grail' spokesperson, because they don’t feel they can find a scientific spokesman; directing messages at historically exploited populations including "Hispanic and African Americans and the poor"; and, befriending people that are able to manipulate the legislative process.

My kids are grown, so it’s been awhile since I’ve bought baby food, but isn’t it also packaged in glass jars? Also, a “pregnant young mother” isn’t a spokesman for the safety of BPA. Some nice-looking heading-towards-middle-age mom with an honors student in high school, who could say “look, my kid and I ate food from epoxy resin-lined cans and drunk out of polycarbonate bottles, and my kid is smart and I don’t have breast cancer.” Maybe they couldn’t afford a good communications consultant. There are references to passing the hat to raise the $500K needed for the ad campaign.

It's interesting that you don't see them reaching out to the big plastics manufacturers. The plastics manufacturers might have a parallel effort, or the food container market isn't a big loss to them. It would be interesting to know which, because that might help proponents of a BPA ban in food containers practice a divide and conquer strategy. A total ban on BPA use might not be necessary to have some effective exposure reduction - just phasing out uses such as food containers and dental appliances. I wonder if anyone has done that homework yet (the EU's risk assessment may be a good starting place). Though ACC was in the room, one reason the petrochemical and plastics manufacturers weren’t represented more might be that BPA in food containers isn’t a big portion of their market share.

Another thing that makes the food industry folks appear out of touch is that they don't seem to get social marketing techniques, which might be a good thing because that will slow down their messaging. There’s already a “ban BPA” Facebook page. The activist messaging isn’t that slick yet either, if the clutching-at-their-pearls I’m-shocked-that-industry-is-trying-to-manipulate-us e-mail I got from the Environmental Working Group is any indication (no, I’m not going to bother writing a letter to Coca-Cola telling them to ban BPA; I’m going to continue to not buy their really bad for my health product in un-ecologically sound packaging, which seems to me a better approach to persuade them to change their ways). Hasn’t the activist community thought about accusing these industries of being anti-capitalists, and conspiring to sabotage businesses who are responding to market forces and producing BPA-free products?

Journalism is Dead, Long Live Journalism (Part I)

Ever since I read Breaking the News by James Fallows, I’ve had carried around this sense of unease about how media and professional journalists were executing their roles in a democratic society. In particular, whenever I encountered a newspaper or magazine story about my own little niche, toxic chemicals and the adverse effects associated with them, I often came away feeling dissatisfied that the writer didn’t get it quite right. Still, where would blogging be without newspapers?

We may find out soon, because the number of failing newspapers is piling up. Clay Shirky has written an essay about how the internet is shredding newspaper business models. According to Dr. Shirky, it wasn’t that newspapers didn’t see the internet coming. It’s just that all of the plans and ideas for business models at a time when technology supported freely passing around content, had unraveled, until the unthinkable scenario – newspapers becoming obsolete – started becoming more real. We’re observing a revolution, in which the old rules (“we can still make people pay for our content”) no longer apply.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Essentially, the problem being solved by a publishing industry, making information available to the public, has gone away presumably with the onset of the internet. It might not be so easy, though. Newspapers benefit society as a whole (even if “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” isn’t much of a business model), and it’s difficult to say what’s going to replace them. Two key points are: 1) we should be experimenting with lots of forms of newsgathering, and 2) journalism has always been subsidized, by advertisers, by someone rich with an axe to grind (think Randolph Hearst or Richard Mellon Scaipe), or these days, by ordinary people donating our time. As Dr. Shirky notes, there are models that seem to be working, such as Consumer Reports and NPR, ProPublica and WikiLeaks; I’d add SourceWatch to that list too. There are going to be gaps, such as who’s going to go investigative reporting, something that has to be someone’s day job backed by an organization with some clout so that reporters get their phone calls returned. In the end, what we need is journalism, not newspapers. I wouldn’t call myself a journalist, but in some ways I have to wonder if what I’m doing as a blogger represents a piece of the future for environmental journalism.