Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Radio ads used to be live, personal and spoken by an individual.
TV ads used to feature actual people, demonstrating something, usually live.
Phone calls involved a live speaker, talking, with permission, to another person.
Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults.
Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs.
Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.

One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from "you" to "me" to "us" to "the corporation" ...

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.

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Media Mob (and pretty much everyone else) reports that The New York Sun will shut down at the end of the month unless it's able to scare up some new funding.

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Sarah Weinman offers up Part II of her explanation of publishing house imprints on Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.  This time she looks at the Simon & Schuster imprints including Little Simon, Atria, Pocket, Scribner, Simon Spotlight, Touchstone and Washington Square Press.

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At Vanity Fair, Anne Fulenwider is handing over Hot Type duties to associate editor Jon Kelly and his assistant Kate Ahlborn.  (I don't post personal email addresses or phone numbers here; if you need Jon or Kate's information, you know how to find it yourself.)

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Today's Shelf Awareness reports on a new Publishers Marketplace initiative, a bookstore database called Bookstore Maps.  According to Shelf Awareness, "The database is combined with Google Map, creating what Publishers Marketplace founder Michael Cader called 'a visual database of stores' ... Among other things, the data could be used by publishers to map out store tours or look at previous tour or book sales information on national, regional and local bases."  You can check it out for yourself here.  Sounds interesting.  I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about it.

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Wondering what the difference is between traditional media, new media and social media?  Christopher S. Penn breaks it down on Awaken Your Superhero.

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Marketing guru Seth Godin has some interesting thoughts about launch PR.