For those of you who don't have it on your flist

[jlh]

news updated with an explanation about a half an hour ago. The weird karma of that must have woken me from a sound sleep. I made a comment on about page 9.

This is the third enormous PR debacle I've seen since the SA purchase (the others being Nipplegate and the initial sponsored communities announcement) and the surprise of the LJ/SA team when news spreads like wildfire across a website that is built to facilitate social interaction continues to amaze me. aside from whatever they think they're doing and whatever deniability they think they have, if LJ/SA even HAS a consumer relations team they should be (a) brought into the loop much much sooner on all major decisions by the Abuse team, not to alter them but to be aware of them and prepared for the fallout; (b) given sole ability to speak to the press and to the rest of us (the Abuse team should NOT have to do this); (c) fired, if any of this was already policy but they just sucked at it.

Never mind that the explanation of "interests" continues the slippery language of "friends" that gets LJ into so much trouble. Can I not be interested in something I don't like? Can one only be interested in "fighting" whatever this thing is? Because that language is more than a little ominous, and really should be spelled out more clearly in the TOS.

Most of you who have heard me expound on advertising and the media industry (my former career) and the reasons they do what they do know that I don't have a huge problem with companies following economic imperatives. But I do have a problem with lack of professionalism in a company that is entirely too large to not do better.

ETA: In looking at the edits to the news post, I am now under the strong impression that they do not have a corporate communications officer of any kind. At their level of corporate development, I find that to be ridiculously unprofessional. When you are still investigating a matter, you say one of two things to the press: "We have no comment at this time" or "As we are still investigating the matter, we have no comment at this time." And you make sure that everyone else in your company refuses to take calls from the press. Jeez, I'm not even in PR and even I know that.