Maybe I'm not getting this. You didn't release the podcast, yet they're miffed with consumerist?

okay, this guy is waaay too self righteous to be working for a sleazy op like walmart. and look at those compound sentences(!)- he doesn't fit in there at all.

was he wearing a blue vest for this meeting, or is that confidential and off the record?

"What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?"

I sincerely hope this was accompanied by a briefcase being slid across the table. You know, bursting with those packets of hundred dollar bills.

Answer: Tattletales and PR schmucks.
Question: What makes the sound of two fingers wagging?

imoutthere

Isn't Edelman Steve Rubel's company? Yikes. I would've expected a lot more.

I don't suppose they ever considered just doing the right thing as a way to not be written about? When exactly are companies going to figure out the best way to look good is not do anything to look bad?

"What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?"

Stop angering customers?

"What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?"

Get your employees off of state-sponsored medical aid and welfare?

@ GenX: No, he's miffed that I disclosed our conversation in the podcast interview.

@ Dave: If memory serves, he was wearing a grayish blazer with matching pants.

@ Gina: Yes.

Personally, I don't see their right to be mad... the podcast is geared at people who are already irretrievably pissed at WalMart. It's not like any PR is going to sway them the other way. It's not like you came on here and created keyword "walmart has doo doo in their souls"

Be careful. They will start up a cheaper consumer blog across town staffed by Pakistani and Filipino writers and run you guys out of business by publishing only happy news.

BRING IT POPPY!!!

What a PR boost this is for Consumerist. Even Walmart fears the site. Eventually they will be hiring zombies to comment on how great Walmart is.

Wait. I'm confused. (Mostly due to the fact that I can't get at the podcast right now, but some of it due to pharmacological intake in my college years.)

Ben, did you just mention the existence of the off the record conversation? Or did you go into details?

Oh gee, you are so mean to Walmart. You should so totally start being nice to them. Walmart is great, and so completely not evil. Really. I mean it.

(Okay, so where's my fifty bucks...)

In addition to the conversation's existence, I mentioned these details:

* Mike wanted it off the record
* Mike asked what they could do to get me to stop writing about their companies.

And that's about it.

That just boggles me. There's nothing inherently wrong with a PR company asking what can be done to stop writing about the companies as long as you have some criteria (1. stop being corporate assclowns, etc.) so, again, I wonder at why he took offense. Surely, advertising that Walmart is engaging its critics isn't bad by itself (the tactics would be the sticky point)

It's sort of ironic that Mike appears to be sitting at a poker table in the above picture -- I guess you called his bluff, huh?

.....It's so funny! Walmart could have SO turned that meeting to its advantage, by simply asking Ben for a list of grievances, smiling, and promising to look into it! Instead, they turn into a threatening/blackmailey, secretive sort of thing.

.....Just the appearance of goodwill is worth a ton in corporate relations! Imagine the corporate benefits if they subsequently produced a "locked-in baby" policy, and publically/generously solved a handful of consumer grievances... They seem willing to just piss it away. Arrogance does not sell, but they do have low prices, and that will sell every time. Damn it.

he simply looks like a douche.

I feel so used. :(

Ben, thanks for the post. But lets be clear on a couple points.

* I asked for, and you agreed to, a candid and private conversation about a number of different topics, one of which was Wal-Mart, another was Edelman. I didn't declare that it was off the record, I asked you. Quite the difference.

* Despite your characterization of the conversation, the main substance as reflected in my notes was my very direct offer to help your readers resolve consumer problems with any of my clients. Bloggers and blog readers ought to matter to companies, and too many businesses wait for their customers to come complaining instead of proactively trying to fix problems. At the time you expressed that you'd be interested in that. But you never took advantage of that opportunity.

* I made the trip to Brooklyn to meet you for a drink because, among other things, I'm a fan of the consumerist. It's a well-written and entertaining blog. But it appears I misunderstood your interest in actually helping your readers (and, frankly, helping the businesses they frequent to do a better job) but instead just drive up the sitemeter hits.

And as far as this post - well, I'll leave it to others to judge its veracity, considering you're entirely comfortable with having made a committment and then ignored it.

Again, cheers and good luck.

Who the heck let him in?

Can't we all just get along?
Hmmm, apparently not. WalMart always wants to play alone.

Anyone can post now, you don't need the commenter invite. I say let him in. As far as I'm concerned, if I know that he can read our grievances and is willing to actively talk to us about them, that's a hell of an opportunity. At least then, if nothing happens, we can go back to being our usual indignant selves.

GenXClub, that offer's still on the table to the best of my ability. But at the same time, I'll be a lot more wary of corresponding with the consumerist. I'd rather help solve problems than score points.

Mr. Krempasky is a right-wing hack, with connections to all sorts of right-wing attack campaigns. I guess when they're directed at him, he wimps out.

http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Mike_...

Perhaps Popken and Brownlee will want to do a weekly post on this. They're always in need of posts, if some sort of back and forth occurs in this space (being a somewhate neutral site), I could see it having a lot of credibility as far as public discourse. I've posted way too much on this one, I'll let John and Ben go from here.

Ben, I think that since you allowed Mike to think that the conversation would be kept in confidence, it's weird that you told people about it. You could've said, "No, I don't do anything off the record," or "I won't keep this conversation a secret, but I will credit you anonymously," which reporters sometimes do. So, you kind of got him talk under false pretenses. That his words were significant and revealing makes it a little harder to frown on what you did.

Then again, if Mike really knew how blogs work, he would have simply laughed at the idea that anything he said would be kept off the record.

A conversation is not off the record until *all parties* agree it is. One side's peremptory declaration that a conversation is off the record does not make it so. It has to be agreed-- up front, not retroactively, and there can be limits, including a list of topics that can be published and a time limit.

Exactly what did you "agree not to" publish?

My advice, such as it is, would be never *ever* to offer a PR agency off-the-record status. At all.

Everybody - Can we knock off all this stupid @Retard crap?

They do it over at Lifehacker too, and it's just so retarded looking. What purpose does the @ symbol serve that simply writing the person's name with a dash or colon after it doesn't? Best case scenario, there would be a quote button on every comment that would enter their name in the comment box, hyperlinked to the entry, but failing that, just leave out the damn @ symbol.

"Why yes! I do enjoy tilting at windmills, why do you ask?"

Why, exactly, is his political affiliation relevant here?

This asshole slimeball should be fired. Edelman is a fucking joke and all their butt-smelling around the rim of Web 2.0 that Rubel licks up is just an act, a slick attempt at "good PR" - ha! Telling a consumer advocate blogger that a comment like "What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?" is like asking for immunity from the D.A. and then dropping the bomb that you killed three cops. It doesn't play like that homey. He should be canned for his stupidity alone.

AND FUCK WAL-MART. Their exploitation practices are racist and a violation of basic human rights.

Honestly, - for a company that is as big as Wal-Mart is, I don't think having their problems swept under the rug by people that are high up enough to make things happen- that doesn't solve anything.

Mike - you can solve people's problems by proposing and pushing companies to change their actual output - not just policies - on the issues people have having.

Also: Off the Record gives a clear message: "I'm not transparent, I don't want to and/or can't be honest with you, so let's pretend you're not talking to me."

Essentially, this is where you would actually turn on the tape recorder - this is where the person is actually going to talk and answer questions honestly.

So while it may appear to have been a little rude, I think the outcome is the least of what could have happened. Were I you, I would try to smooth this over, and not make a big deal out of it. Try and put positive spin on what could have been a terrible breach in the facade you appear to have painted.

Re Mike Krempasky's three point post above:
I was somewhat sympathetic to his reply to your blog entry. His three points seemed to be pretty well made, until I got to the very end: "Again, cheers and good luck." Maybe its just me, but that sounds a lot like, "You're of no importantance compared to us, now f*** off."
I wonder if, "Cheers and good luck," is the standard response to customer issues at Walmart, too?

Mike seems to be under the false impression that by saying something is "off the record" actually means something. I was taught in journalism school that there is no such thing as "off the record".

He opened the meeting with, "This is all off the record." The next thing out of his mouth was, "What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?"

I think the more interesting question is, what was the next thing out of your mouth? If you said, "sure Mike, that's fine with me", then you're an unprofessional douche. Then again, you're a blog editor, not a newspaper reporter. It will probably take a few more years for PR people to completely graps the difference.

I wasn't there, obviously, but it does seem somewhat underhanded on Consumerist's part if the conversation did indeed take place as stated.

If the Consumerist had planned on publicizing what the other party requested would be off the record, there's an amount of responsibility that falls on their shoulders -- the responsibility to respond by saying something like "wait a sec," or "no, this is on the record."

Obviously the other party should have confirmed your cooperation before saying something like "What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies," but the point is that the Consumerist LET him continue under the impression that it was indeed off the record.

Even if we go with the Consumerist's version of the story instead of Mike's (which indicates he asked you rather than told), there's still a small amount of responsibility on Consumerist's part to respond to what he said.

Yeah, note that Consumerist is careful to say what "the next thing out of his mouth was," and not to say that he said it immediately after the "off the record" statement, or that nobody else said anything after the "off the record" remark -- like "O.K. It's off the record."

And does Consumerist deny that the conversation was off the record by agreement?

@Gina

Thanks for the best laugh of the day. It's Oz-like.

To make it easy if you're only following this post, here is our point by point response, also posted here:

* Nope, you didn't ask, you declared. We said, "Ok." Now we're saying, "not ok."

* Why should it be our responsibility to drop the complaints in your lap? They're right there on the blog. You already watch us with the Nielsen BuzzMetrics corporate grade blog-monitoring site. What prevented Edelman from stepping up on any number of the complaints we've posted about your clients, like Walmart and Starbucks? Where were you with the Boiled Walmart Baby? The withdrawn Starbucks coupon? The opportunity lost is yours, friend.

* You made a trip out to Brooklyn only after your employee, Chris Abraham, made a series of blunders in approaching us. We help out our readers by publishing their complaints and, when warranted, following up leads. Our duty is to the story, not to do your job for you.

* The morality of reneging on a committment to a PR flack... sounds like the basis for a good piece of sketch comedy.

All conversations with journalists are only off the record until they decide they can afford to burn you; doesn't everyone know this by now?

And disclosing that a source asked for a conversation to be off the record is not, itself, a violation of that confidence. Spilling the contents of the subsequent convo on a podcast is, though.

But burning Wal-Mart? Hell, I'd do it just for the recreational value.

I love this blog; it's funny, entertaining, and I generally find myself in moral agreement with its perspective. So the irony of the fact that this is the very first time I've felt the need to post is not lost on me. Here are my specific problems:
>
Nope, you didn't ask, you declared. We said, "Ok." Now we're saying, "not ok."

Hmmm. Whether he "asked" or "declared," you assented. Now you've decided "not ok." What changed? How would you respond to a company that treated you or your readers that way?

My next problem, and then I promise to go away:

> The morality of reneging on a committment to a PR flack... sounds like the basis for a good piece of sketch comedy.

Now you're really losing me. When you have to fall back on an ad hominem argument to make your point, it sounds defensive and self-serving. You had no problem having the drink with the "PR flack" or making an agreement (tacit or otherwise)to keep the conversation confidential. But now you're essentially saying, "Come on, you can't be serious; he's in PR."

I think you guys are great; that's why I'm writing. This conduct is unworthy of you.

.....I am not wealthy, and I do admit to buying groceries at Walmart. They just kill everyone else on price. It's crowded, sure. But in my opinion, it's a free enterprise thing. Propping up less profitable operations with government regulations is never good for anyone. Fact is, everywhere Walmart opens up, people line up for blocks to get hired. At least in Alabama, where I have experience.

.....I have to laugh at Mr. Krempasky's indignation. Surely you realize that there are no real confidential conversations with the media? And why would you bother? Personally, I think that there's nothing wrong with asking an outlet what it would take for them to lay off. What was revealed that was so evil?

.....I didn't observe any boiled babies at the Beal Ft. Walton last week, but I did suffer through a huge near-hour wait in the checkout line. Half the registers closed on a Saturday night? Help us, please! While buying my beach groceries, I missed nearly the entire Florida-Tennessee game. Not to mention the risk of possible ecoli in my spring mix developing while everything heated up in line...

.....I'd also mention, if Mr. Krempasky is still listening, that the the Walmart on Lakeshore Parkway in Birmingham is pretty well run. You've got a lot of great folks working there, and the management is superb. Give 'em some props!

LOVE how Republicans are indiscreet when meeting w/ reporters then blame reporters for THEIR not getting an iron-clad commitment.

Hey PR guy - either meet with the press and take your chances, or don't meet with them and get fired. "Background"? For consumer PR?! Are you high?

Oh, hey, Krempasky is associated w/ Joe Gannon? The male prostitute/White House flack? Ben, did he try flashing a bit of shapely thigh at you? Show off his ripped abs? Do TELL!! ;p

Don't write when you can speak, don't speak when you can nod, don't nod when you can wink.
Assume NOTHING is EVER off the record when talking to the press. Especially when you work for a company with a huge target on your back.

Ben did what he had to do. Krempasky should have been more careful about what he said.

Politics should have nothing to do with this discussion, right or left.

Why is anyone up in arms about this? Mike, you are a paid hack of the Wal-Mart Corporation, not Joe Schmo who might lose his job for talking to the media; your job IS talking to the media. Ben did what he felt was right, and on balance I agree. Given the choice of honoring an agreement with a PR Hack and not revealing the PR hack's somewhat sleazy sounding offer and revealing said conversation to show sleaziness of Wally world's PR team, I'd go with revealing to the world Wally's PR sleaze.
Don't forget a blogger isn't a regular journalist. He hasn't taken any ethical oaths and doesn't need your insider information for 'scoops' down the road.

Now, onto Wal-Mart itself:
Wal-Mart is not as terrible as everyone seems to think it is. It is also far more hideous than anyone could possibly imagine.
For the first part, Wal-Mart doesn't hire illegal immigrants, doesn't pay workers minimum wage, does provide health insurance, and does provide much needed jobs.
For the second part, Wal-Mart doesn't support the community in a real way, pay workers a substandard wage, and provides insurance that is sub par for the world's biggest retailer.
Wal-Mart is poorly run, poorly managed, and relies on predatory pricing to keep itself in business.