Brin Blogs Heart Out, Lee Jumps Ship, CP+B Not Quite So 'PC'

- Google's Sergey Brin started a blog. In the first entry, he discloses his risk for Parkinson's disease. The New York Times probes why he'd do that.

- British actor Paul Kaye plays Seamus Murphy, the shady proprietor of an airport car park, for another one of those not-yet-viral "viral" campaigns. This is for Holiday Extras, a travel website.

- Esther Lee departs EuroRSCG.

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Lionsgate Copyright Nazis Foil Legit Promotional Effort

To promote W., Oliver Stone's artistic tribute to America's favorite President (insert eyeroll here), Lionsgate launched the W. Mashup Contest on YouTube.

Use the clips and audio/video composition tools to create your own trailer. Oliver Stone himself gets to decide which is best.

The problem is, YouTube immediately removes entries upon submission. One entrant says, "all that remains of your genius contest entry is the phrase 'This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Lionsgate'."

Here is the hole where an entry should be. (In the event that Lionsgate is smart enough to fix this, here's a screenshot.)

A complex promotion for a man who, at the very least, was a complex leader. Maybe they're only suppressing entries by users suspected of storing WMDs.

The Newspaper: Less a Medium than a Feeding Tube

Today I came across a banner ad run by the Newspaper Association of America, which seeks to reposition "the newspaper" -- a rolled-up, grayish mound of reading material that occasionally appears on the threshold of hotel room doors -- as "The Multi-Medium."

"Is newspaper old media or new media?" the ad asks, followed by an enigmatic, all-encompassing response: "Yes." Below the text is a woman whose newspaper appears to be feeding content to other media from a bunch of wires and cords. Cute.

Click-throughs guide the perplexed to Newspaper Media. With pretty imagery, plenty of data -- many of which are broken links -- and sentences that melodramatically start, "In a world where consumers are tuning out advertising...", the NAA hopes we'll start perceiving newspapers as less a stagnating medium than an abstract (but stable!) concept: "newspaper" isn't just where Gram finds the crossword; it is THE legit news source, offline and online (unless you're looking for data on why).

And the NAA can help you (yes, you!) advertise on both.

In defense of the NAA's position -- which could use some work, starting with those dead links -- print media isn't dying so very quickly. Newspaper readership grew 2.5 percent in the top 100 markets, according to a survey from earlier this year. And trusted newspaper brands increasingly dip into other so-called "new" media: mobile and internet, for a start. The New York Times even started embedding video.

See? Nobody's dying. Now go help Rupert Murdoch finance a new yacht.