Lies, Damn Lies, and Press Releases

Check out the title of this press release, published by Sandisk a few days ago. When I read it, I see the words 'SanDisk Works With Grass Valley To Develop World's First Broadcast Industry Camcorder To Use Flash Memory Cards'. Do you?

Ok, now that we've got that established, I think you'll agree with me that if Sandisk's claim is true, it's a pretty big deal, both for Sandisk and more generally for the flash memory market. It, among other things, validates a long-term tape-to-flash memory transition prediction I made last December. Unfortunately, while my prediction remains intact, the 'world's first' verbage in Sandisk's tag line is blatantly false. It conveniently ignores Panasonic's P2 cards; as the Semico Spin pointed out earlier today, "We must give credit to a real pioneer in this market. Panasonic has been shipping flash card based camcorders since the summer of 2003."

When I called out Sandisk's PR team on their error, they pointed to a clarifying statement buried within the body of the press release, "It is the first camcorder introduced in the broadcast industry that uses non-proprietary, removable, solid-state flash memory cards as recording and playback media." They also claimed that the unclear title was an unfortunate outcome of the need to edit press release titles down to short-as-possible lengths. I'm an editor, so I thought I'd take a crack at massaging their type.

'SanDisk Works With Grass Valley To Develop World's First Broadcast Industry Camcorder To Use Flash Memory Cards' is a 111-character statement, including spaces, according to Microsoft Word's statistics feature. My alternative, 'SanDisk and Grass Valley Develop World's First Broadcast Camcorder To Use Industry-Standard Flash Memory Cards' is one character shorter. And it's accurate. 'SanDisk and Grass Valley To Develop World's First Broadcast Camcorder To Use Industry-Standard Flash Memory Cards' is only two characters longer than Sandisk's original version. Also accurate. I developed both of these alternatives in a sum total of less than 30 seconds.

It's hard enough for me to wade through the technical details of a new product in order to assess its market viability. When I also need to fight through imprecise (I'm being nice here) or deceptive (if I wasn't being so nice) positioning, it leaves me very disappointed (I'm being nice again). Fortunately, I remembered Panasonic's P2 line when I saw Sandisk's release. Many journalists, unfortunately, won't, and are so swamped that they don't have time to dive into press release body text; instead they make snap coverage-or-not decisions based only on titles. Heck, some so-called 'journalists' are so clueless that they don't even realize that Grass Valley is a subsidiary of Thomson; they've surmised that Sandisk will be selling the cameras, and has named them for a small town in Northern California. And, unfortunately, I think Sandisk also knows this (I'm not being nice, again). Sigh.

Followup: To get a sense of just how far away we are from flash memory being a cost-effective long-duration storage device for video, specifically for high-quality, high-resolution video, check out Anthony Burokas's column in EventDV. Here's one telling 'teaser' quote: "If you are shooting 1080i on P2, Panasonic's own charts indicate you'll fill up an 8GB card in eight minutes."