Verizon's Good Day

Jul 06 2001

Verizon must have done something really nice in a past life to justify the good press it's getting today. Look at this lede from TheStreet.com's Tish Williams: "Behold Verizon wireless' glory."

The handful of reporters who covered the story seemed breathless with excitement over the glimmer of good news. According to Reuters, after all, Verizon's success "showed the weak economy failed to dampen customer interest in wireless services, which could bode well for the rest of the sector."

Journos credited Verizon's good showing after what the Wall Street Journal called a "sluggish" first quarter to its new, in-store partnership with Radio Shack and a pre-paid service that, as Reuters oh-so-helpfully pointed out, "allows customers to pay for service in advance." The Journal's Andrea Petersen suggested, however, that prepaid customers aren't all they're cracked up to be, saying they "tend to have less loyalty to a service and rack up, on average, lower bills."

The company scored another public-relations coup with InternetNews' coverage of the deal Verizon Information Systems inked with AltaVista, in which the search engine will now use Verizon's SuperPages.com for its white and yellow pages. Woo-hoo.

Of course, no large corporation can go through a day with only positive press. For the balance in its daily coverage, Verizon can thank Washington Post reporter Mike Musgrove for noting Verizon's odd new policy for fighting spam. Starting Aug. 8, Verizon customers who use a different domain name won't be able to send messages from that address, forcing them to use what Musgrove called the "inelegant and clumsy" method of changing the "reply-to" header in their messages. As John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, told Musgrove, the tactic "would only prevent a very dumb spammer using very dumb tools." How's that for good news?

Verizon Wireless Adds 807,000 Subscribers
New York Times

Verizon Finds Lots of New Subscribers in RadioShack
TheStreet.com

Verizon Wireless Posts Strong Growth In New Cellular-Service Subscribers
The Wall Street Journal

AltaVista Signs With Verizon
InternetNews.com

Verizon Limits Users' E-Mail Addresses
Washington Post