Sponsors pull plug on Tech Central Station

Tue, 2006-11-21 14:01Kevin Grandia
Kevin Grandia's picture

Sponsors pull plug on Tech Central Station

Looks like former tobacco spin doctor Doug Goodyear's DCI Group is getting with the times and letting loose it's controversial TCSDaily project. As many know, the ExxonMobil sweetheart TCSDaily has been a bastion of the climate change denial movement for quite some time now. You also may remember that DCI Group was embroiled in a bit of controversy lately over a YouTube Al Gore spoof video they produced and posted under the guise of 29-year old amatuer filmmaker.

According to the Nov. 1, '06 edition of O'Dwyers Weekly PR insider newsletter (of which DeSmog is a big fan), the "DCI Group, a brass knuckled Republican PR firm in Washington, has sold its TCSDaily online journal to editor Nick Schulz. According to the TCS, "previous sponsorship agreements have expired" and that "updates about the transition in owenership will soon be available." TCS recieved corporate funding from ExxonMobil and General Motors in the past. It would be very interesting to know which TCS sponsors "expired" their funding.

Tags: 
doug goodyear
DCI group
TCS daily

Comments

Tue, 2006-11-21 17:17 — Anonymous

desmog

Wed, 2006-11-22 09:13 — Geoff
Speaking of videos, you folks may get a kick out of these spoof Chevy Tahoe ads... http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/tahoe.html Amazing what one can do with a bit of software these days. And how DO they get those gas guzzlers up there?

Wed, 2006-11-22 02:38 — Steve Bloom
Even though I have yet to receive my secret decoder ring for signing up as a DeSmog Detective, I decided to sniff around the TCSDaily site and see if there were any interesting tidbits to be found. First I noticed that editor Nick Schulz claims a hundred thousand daily readers while the contemporaneous DCI press release claims hundreds of thousands. OK, maybe that's a minor quibble, but it caused me to wonder about Nick's other claim of an average of six articles daily. Although there are no prior main pages to do an article count directly (maybe because it makes double-checking the numbers too easy?), it is possible to do it by counting back through the individual issue categories and adding up the results. Here's what I got: 78 articles for the last 30 days, 60 articles for the 30 days before that, and 116 articles for the 30 days before that, totaling 254 for the 90 day period. This is a daily average of less than half what Nick claimed, but most interestingly it appears to show a substantial drop as of the 9/19 change in ownership. So sad. Could this be a trend in Wingnut Factoid-land?

Wed, 2006-11-22 12:01 — Kevin Grandia
Thanks for the work Steve, while I don't have a ring, maybe just pop me a quick e-mai at kevin@desmogblog.com and I can send a DeSmog shirt. Keep up the great work!

Sun, 2007-04-22 09:40 — wum
No funding from the state department anymore?
[x]
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