Making a Name Writing to Editors

Bobby Crawford, 38, has been delivering mail at the Hearst Corporation for 13 years, regaling everyone from interns to executives with tales of his skateboarding escapades. But what most of the writers, editors and arbiters to whom he delivers letters and packages do not realize is that he has been published in more magazines than many of them. For the past 15 years, Crawford has been firing off handwritten letters to magazines — skateboard publications like Thrasher and Slap, culture and arts magazines like Interview and BlackBook, music magazines like Magnet. More than 100 of his letters have been printed in their pages, reports Abigail Pesta, editor at large of Marie Claire, a Hearst Corporation magazine.

He recently sent off a missive to Thrasher, complaining in his slightly backward-slanting print that snowboarding was “just another rip-off from skating.” Mop-haired and boyish, he usually signs his letters “Shaggy,” though he uses his real name for more serious topics, like a 2006 letter to BlackBook about how the day John Lennon died is not a day to celebrate.

“All the morons that go to Strawberry Fields playing his music, smoking dope and drinking alcohol are making his true fans (like myself) look bad,” Mr. Crawford wrote. (BlackBook ran the note, but pointed out that the article he had been commenting on was about a celebration of Lennon’s birth, not his death.)

In a letter to Slap in December 2007, Shaggy let loose on youth: “Kids these days are turning into fat, lazy slobs. They don’t know how to express themselves. People need to get off their computers, out of their houses, and meet some people in the streets.”

One of his main complaints was that people rarely write letters on paper anymore. Slap itself no longer appears on paper, in fact, having gone Web-only in December 2008. But in its final few months of paper publication, Slap put out a full-page appreciation of Shaggy. Next to a photo of one of Crawford’s crumpled, hand-addressed envelopes, an editor noted, “Shaggy has indeed been mailing us letters for at least a decade now, and they are always funny, mean, disturbing and good.”

“Shaggy was relentless,” Slap’s editor in chief, Mark Whiteley, said in an interview. “He’d send letters every month. Sometimes they were terrible, sometimes they were pointless, sometimes they were just too harsh to print. But a lot of the time they were hilarious. They were also incredibly ‘my way or the highway,’ which made them entertaining.”

Asked what inspired him to become a cantankerous letter writer, Crawford said he simply wrote what he saw. “I don’t get fooled,” he said. His favorite letters? The ones that make people angry.

When not writing letters, Mr. Crawford can often be found on his skateboard at Union Square Park or around Astor Place, sometimes until the wee hours. A favorite activity: jumping over “passed-out drunk people” on his skateboard. To prove it, he produced a photo of himself soaring over a man sprawled on the ground at Union Square.

Snookering the Media is Easy According to The Yes Men

When Chevron rolled out its latest ad campaign last month it wanted to burnish the image of the spill-tarnished oil industry, according to blogger Brett Michael Dykes. The campaign, called "We Agree," highlights very broad negative impressions of the oil business, with the leaders of Chevron--the "we" referenced in the spots--chiming in to say that they understand and are taking positive measures to improve things, via initiatives such as clean-energy development.
But the company now is in anything but an agreeable mood over a hoax campaign that draws on far more specific, and damning, complaints over oil company practices. The meta-pushback campaign is the handiwork of a group called the Yes Men. Joining forces with the environmental groups Amazon Watch and the Rainforest Action Network, The Yes Men released a bogus press release and even put up a phony website for the hijacked version of the "We Agree" campaign.
As the New York Times' Stuart Elliott notes: "The main difference between the lampoon and the real one was that the fake release described the ads as addressing environmental issues in which Chevron is embroiled, including a dispute in Ecuador over oil pollution; the real ads do not directly address those matters." Some media outlets, including the digital-business publication Fast Company, were taken in by the prank.
So Chevron, which had been expecting to spend much of the time touting its civic-minded achievements, is now embroiled in a push-back campaign against its media-hacking tormentors. "We expected something like this would be done," Chevron spokesman Morgan Crinklaw told the Times, because "there are activist groups whose sole focus is attacking Chevron and not engaging in rational conversations on energy issues."
The perpetrators of the prank claim they are merely truth-squadding the sunny claims of the "We Agree" spots. "The oil giant has prioritized this high-priced glossy ad campaign that attempts to trick us into believing it is of the people, for the people," Maria Ramos of the Rainforest Action Network told Reuters.
This isn't the first time the Yes Men have targeted a major energy company. The group's past campaigns included pranks ridiculing Exxon Mobil and Halliburton, among other international corporations. In boasting about the success of the Chevron prank, the Yes Men also took a shot at the media. "If you really want to snooker the media, it's pretty hard for them to resist," Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men said in a Yes Men press release. "We cobbled together some fake releases with string and thumbtacks and chewing gum, and we fooled the most respectable outlets." Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum added: "Chevron is doing what we did, a million times over, with a ginormous budget -- and it never reveals its subterfuge. No wonder the media's full of lies."