Altered States: Values we can't live by?

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in an office tower in Arlington, VA. The conference room where we were all watching the horror unfold in New York City overlooked the Pentagon. When the plane hit there, we panicked and rushed down 30 flights of stairs into an underground parking garage and from there into the biggest traffic jam I've ever seen. To this day, when I see a plane flying low or making that slow, wide turn, a chill runs up my spine and my hands start to sweat.

So I can completely understand the reaction of New York and New Jersey residents to the Air Force One photo op Monday. It was costly, senseless, insensitive and just downright stupid.

But that aside, the part that really confuses me is the flip-flop attitude toward altering reality that is evident both in the press and the public.

A week ago, the mainstream media reported on the shirtless photo of President Obama planned for the May cover of Washingtonian Magazine. Bad enough that the leader of the free world's pecs and six-pack abs would be cover fodder, but many outlets covered the fact that the original photo - taken last year in Hawaii - was actually altered by the magazine, apparently both for ashethetics and design considerations.

The Associated Press wrote: "That didn't hold water, hot or cold, with some commentators and academics, who felt the magazine should have adhered to a central tenet of photojournalism: You don't alter photos: period."

Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post and host of CNN's Reliable Sources, said:
"Journalistic organizations shouldn't doctor photos of the president of the United States."

CNN and Fox anchors decried the Photoshopping of the president as well. And I agree with them all. Photographs purporting to be news are snapshots in time and they should show the world as it is - not as we would like it to be. Alterations of photos - changing the color of the president's swim trunks, for example, turn the photo into a "photoillustration" and should be disclosed by the publication (digital or print).

Now, on the heels of this outcry over changing black trunks to red and possibly adding a bit of a health glow, now comes the NYC flyover and it's mantra: 'Hasn't anyone ever heard of freaking Photoshop."

Analysts on CNN's 8 p.m. airing of The Campbell Brown Shown on Monday said the military should have saved the money and angst by just Photoshopping the picture. Pete Dominick on XM Radio's Stand Up program reiterated this same statement several times on Tuesday's 4 p.m. show. And CBS anchor Katie Couric in her notebook wrote: "As for Lady Liberty, she's wondering if anyone at the Pentagon has heard of a little program called Photoshop."

The New York Daily News - a newspaper that established its reputation with news photography - is actually having a Photoshop contest and asking readers to send in photos with Air Force One in improbably places.

I can appreciate what we used to call in the newsroom "the hoot value" of the Daily News's contest, but not the message it delivers.

We are truly a nation of expediency and, it seems, our values are easily dispatched with or modified to suit particular circumstances. It makes my mind reel to think how quickly the media would react to news that the administration had photoshopped a photo of Air Force One flying magestically over New York.

What other altered realities might we accept: Instead of a smiling handshake between Chavez and Obama, suppose we photoshop in a different pix of the prez with a more stern and disapproving look? How about an upright Obama facing the Saudi Arabian king eye to eye rather than the he's-not-really-bowing bow that caused such an uproar?

Is that really different? No, it's not. A photograph is a moment in time captured forever. We rely on its accuracy for our historical perspective. They document our times, our attitudes, our struggles and our victories. If we cannot rely on what we see with our own eyes as being factual, then we are truly lost.

Certainly photos are altered all the times in publications and on the internet. In this case, they are either clearly altered - such as the muscle bound Ronald Reagan that once graced the cover of Washingtonian magazine - or identified as a photoillustration.

We seem to be growing into a nation of situational standards. We thump our chests about our values but we are quick to put them away when they are inconvenient.

The flyover was a mistake, period. The White House office that approved it - at a cost of $382K - made a major miscalculation. The NYC mayor's office, which was notified four days in advance, was careless in not realizing the impact this would have.

But the answer that our media commentators and experts put forward should not be to alter the reality to the give the government what it wants. The answer should be that the government should not have done it. Period. We cannot open the door - however small the crack - to permitting the government to lie to us whether in a photo or a statment or an action. There is no situation where we should ever consider that acceptable. Period.

How will we find the news nuggets?

Newspapers don't have a lot of advantages against the new media. They used to have portability ("When you can take a computer into the bathroom with you, then newspapers should worry," a newspaper designer remarked decades ago.). But with iPhones, Blackberrys, Mobile Web and Kindles, it seems newspapers have lost the portability battle.

But there's still the issue of nuggets. How many times do you find yourself just flipping through the paper and coming across a story that you would never have thought of reading. But the photos grab you or you stop to read the graphic and before you know it, you're smack in the middle of a good story. That's the beauty of the newspaper with its emphasis on photography and graphics, packaging and design.

It's ironic that the multimedia digital words dilutes the impact of images, graphics and design and puts the emphasis firmly on the words first. In a way, that takes us back to the days when newspaper design was 9 columns of dense type - every headline the same size, every story given the same weight. Now with RSS feeds and Twitter and Facebook links, it is the words and not the music that attract us into a story.

But the joy of the "unexpected nugget" - what a former editor of mine used to call the "Hey, Martha" story, may be being lost. Yes, once you are into a story, you may find a plethora of multimedia - video, photos, audio files, interactive maps and graphics. But you have to get into the story first.

This puts a new burden on journalists who will have to learn how to write headlines that stand alone and leads that actually tell the story - rather than the real people anecdotes that have come to define most current journalism. Scrolling through a list of headlines - all the same font and weight - is not the same as leafing through the pages of a newspaper. Rarely do you find the unique tidbit in the RSS feed - probably because your attention span fails after the first four or five screens scroll by.

In the Internet world, you can find anything you're looking for, but you have to know you're looking for it. This I fear can add another nail in the coffin of human inquisitiveness, quest for knowledge and understanding and learning for the sake of education yourself not with a specific monetary goal in mind.

Those things may be qualities from the past anyway, but it is a sad commentary on our society and our future that our individual vision is narrowing to a laser point - focused fully on our goals and area of interest, not wavering enough to see the nuggets all around us. The demise of a printed paper will likely only further this dissolution.

Does this mean we'll be less educated or less knowledgeable despite having the sum total of centuries of information, art, literature and history just a few keystrokes away? I guess that depends on your definition of an education person. As a professor once told me: "Education is knowing what you don't know."

Truth or consequences

Newspaper executives are in San Diego this week tilting at windmills, howling at the moon, thumping their chests and gathering around the fire in a man-circle getting in touch with their inner innovator.

Unfortunately, this is all too little, too late, and too much.

Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy Newspapers, says "Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies - fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print." This is hardly news. Newspaper companies have been diddling around the digital media for decades without truly getting serious about a conversion to the "hybrid media company" Pruitt envisions. And they are still diddling around. They're still thinking and planning, wishing and hoping. That won't get you into our hearts. Certainly, they've done very little in a whole lot of time.

The World Wide Web entered our peripheral vision in 1991 when the first commercially available ISPs started up and early adapters began to see what could be possible. But not newspapers. Today newspaper executives are talking about the internet as "new" media and the digital transition as if it just snuck up on us along with the virulent recession and combined to engineer newspapers' destruction.

Covering the NAA conference for The Huffington Post, media observer Jeff Jarvis opines bluntly that the newspapers "blew it." Boy, nothing is more true. But the bigger question is why did it happen and how can companies avoid it in the future.

When I worked in the corporate headquarters for a Fortune 500 newspaper company, my boss asked all his managers to offer opinions on why we were not a "gold medal company." What characteristics, he wondered, prevented us from being great. My answer: Because we don't want to be great. We want to make money. Being great means taking some chances. Great companies step off the ledge and if they fail, they consider it a step toward an eventual success.

This is not the way of the mainstream media company. Their way - the McClatchy's, the Gannetts, - is to wait until all the issues have been resolved, the bugs have been worked out, and then jump in potentially improving on the prototypical models with a new product. This may have worked in the past - almost certainly did. But in the forward driven world of new media technologies and digital integrations this approach was a catastrophic failure.

Newspapers have always been willing to be silver medalists - so long as they got paid well for it - only in this competition, the came in dead last.

Now, having lost the race, newspaper executives are left whining about internet aggregators linking to their sites without paying for the privilege. Even now, as tens of thousands of press operators, designers, graphic artists, support staff, reporters, copy editors and photographers are spending their days waiting in the unemployment line, newspapers are still not acting. They are still talking about what we need to do, rather than doing it.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt today warned that newspapers risked alienating their readers by mixing it up with aggregators who conservatively bring about 50% of the hits into the newspaper web site. It is typical behavior, however, for newspapers to make decisions based on what editors and executives think people want without actually finding out for sure and then finding someone else to blame when it doesn't work

In fact, many newspaper decisions regarding the digital space have been driven by executives who neither use nor understand the technology. In large newspaper companies, executives often are given programs to roll out at their locations but they are ineffective at promoting them to either advertisers or readers because they are behind on the technology that drives them. And the problem drifts top down. For example: Up until 5 years ago, Gannett executives were forbidden to buy Blackberries without permission from the head of the newspaper division.

The time-honored way for newspapers to pretend they were getting input from "real people" on decisions and products is to have a focus group. These groups are usually small -- 10-20 people. Papers that do this right may have several focus groups so that they bring in over a few weeks more than 100 people. But most papers have one. A set of controlled questions is asked. Sometimes readers are left alone with the paper or a prototype to peruse the product while they are observed for their reactions.

But frequently after all the information gathering is done, the information would come up for discussion at the local, regional or enterprise level. And this is where newspaper executives showed their true colors. What normally ensued is a couple of hours of discussion about how the reader just didn't understand what we were trying to do, or didn't realize that we already had that feature (a sign that they couldn't find it or didn't like it), or why what the reader wanted was unrealistic or undesirable. In the end, the paper would go off and do whatever they wanted to in the first place, having managed to negate the opinions of their focus group.

In 1997, Gannett launched a program called News 2000. At it's core was the premise that newspapers should write for their readers. Wow. Eleven years later, we are still battling the same issue - a core selfishness and self-aggrandizing that will not permit the possibility that the best and brightest minds in the industry have been wrong all these years. That a group of 20 year olds who run Facebook could have twice as many "clients" as the newspaper industry - at least using Gary Pruitt's stat that 100 million adults read a printed newspaper every day. Although figures from the Pew Institute put newspaper readership at 33% daily and assuming children under 15 aren't snapping up the paper, that's roughly 85 million.

Meanwhile, Twitter is approaching 2 million users and LinkedIn, which is a very targeted business community, has 35 million.

The lesson is one of ego, fear and greed. Gold medal companies look the future in the eye. They take some chances, the make mistakes, they accept some losses as the cost of doing business. They find out what their customers want even if they have absolutely no idea why anyone would want that.

Look around, guys. You did blow it. And you can't fix it by trying to play catch up. You must leap ahead and find what's next and make it yours. And while you're trying to figure that out, better play nice with your new friends Google, Facebook, Digg, Slashdot and whatever else just launched in the time it's taken me to write this. If they pick up their balls and gloves and go home, newspapers are going to be left standing in an empty field with no one to kick dirt at.

Coming this weekend: What would the newspaper look like if you could build it yourself? Would love to hear your suggestions on this.

Is bad social networking better than none at all?

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the ?

A friend forwarded a blog post today that outlined the 10 reasons companies should not join Twitter (My favorite: If you have to wait for your legal department to vet your 140-character Tweet). The author makes great points - with humor. But it begs the question for me whether it is better to network badly than not to network at all? I think the question is yes, it's better to be out there.

Newspapers are going the way of the woolly mammoth for many reasons, but two of the big ones are that they a) waited too long to realize and capitalize on the power of the internet and b) now view social networking as something that goes on external to them - they host the party but don't actually attend.

In part, newspapers are hampered by their history. A bedrock principle has always been you don't mess with people's newspapers. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Any changes to columns or designs were - and still are - subject to vetting and testing procedures that would do the FDA proud. The process can take months - or longer for a major redesign - meaning reacting quickly to changing needs is all but impossible.

In 1999, the American Journalism Review wrote of the digital media revolution:

If newspaper executives haven't fully grasped the extent of changes in communication or the opportunity the Web represents, then the story of online newspapering is as much about culture as business. Executives often seem handicapped by an almost mythic fear that their Old Media franchises will be devoured by their dot-com offspring. They forget how much more pleasant it is to be eaten by your own child than by someone else's. Web-centric companies (or Net-native, as they are also called) are at home in the language of interactivity that Web-enabled companies are still stumbling to learn; many have corporate metabolisms that enable them to move more quickly and imaginatively than Old Media organizations.

In 2006, the same publication didn't find things much different:

Stephen Gray, managing director of Newspaper Next, says the newspaper industry is exhibiting classic signs of an industry shaken by seismic changes, often competition from new technologies. "The newspaper industry, like others that have experienced this problem, needs to learn some quite counterintuitive ways of responding," he says. "One of the things we need to be clear about in our project is the focus of Newspaper Next is how to create innovation outside of our core product. We have as an industry really little record of innovation."

Not for nothing, but that was a full 7 years after newspapers decided they needed to change the identification of their product from the platform it was delivered on to the information at its core.

The newspaper culture does not allow for trying something out and changing it or discarding it completely if it doesn't work out. But the digital information environments - from the web to the tweet - demand change and - more importantly - constant vigilance to identify changing needs quickly.

The digital consumer is an infant - we want what we want right now and if we don't get it, we're going to pee on that nice hand-made linen over there. This is in contrast to the newspaper reader who may have felt vaguely disappointed in the paper so he wrote a letter to the editor and then read the paper faithfully every day to see if his suggestions had been implemented yet.

Fortunately for the digital consumer (and unfortunately for newspapers) there are a lot of places to go out there that are going to pick you up and coddle you, catering to your immediate wants and needs. This isn't to say they're going to be the BEST mom, but they're going to be the most responsive.

In this regard, the blogger mentioned earlier is right. You cannot take a week to vet a message. But rather than use that as an reason NOT to be on Twitter, it's time to change the dynamic in the industry itself.

Newspaper tweets are (for the most part) like reading an index of the paper. The photo at right is the Twitter page of one of the nation's largest metro dailies. And this is not unusual. You find the exact same bland recitation of what we're writing about on the Twitter pages of most newspapers - large and small. Why is it that there's no real interactivity? Why is it we're not engaging our readers? Why aren't we asking our readers to be our eyes and ears out there?

The answer is pretty simple: because automated systems can't do that - at least not yet. It's easy to push headlines out the door to any different number of publishing platforms. But it is much harder to monitor web sites, blogs, Twitter and whatever is next to see what people are talking about, to gather information from a variety of sources, to decide what kinds of questions you want to stir the pot with. That takes thought; that takes effort.

In the constant rush to save money, newspapers are succeeding in accomplishing what no other competitor could actually have done. They are making themselves irrelevant. The industry waited too long to react to the changes in the mediascape. Some, like Gannett, waited far too long because the payback was not readily apparent. Now that the boat has all but sailed, the industry is trying desperately to catch up by giving lip service to user interaction, crowd sourcing and citizen journalism.

• Pumping out a tweet digest of headlines is not engaging.
• Creating blogs for moms, pets, artists, entertainment and then largely abandoning them to fend for themselves rather than mining them for the contacts, story ideas and news tips they would certainly produce is not interacting.
• Establishing a presence on YouTube and Facebook but not taking the time to update is not compelling. (A newspaper Facebook page I looked at today said in its status that it was "considering its endorsements in this election season.")
  
• Having a website that parrots the newspaper with little increased depth or interactivity to drive readership between the two is not working.

Unfortunately, there are more that look like this than are really using a world of new digital tools to build readers involvement with their products (note to newspapers: this is not the same thing as inviting readers to send in photos of their children and putting those on a community page!).

So to those who fail all 10 of the measures to determine if you should be a twit, it's time (maybe past time) to use your failure instead of hiding behind it.

• Listen to your readers. See what they are tweeting about. You might get some story ideas.
• Check out some of your local Facebook pages - what stories are they talking about, what issues are tripping their triggers. There's a real good bet that the sewer easement isn't among them.
• Generate buzz for your ideas and sources for stories by throwing them out on as many social media sites as you can. Why keep calling the same old contacts when there is an entire world of new voices just a few clicks away.
• Pay attention to what you get back. No one likes to be asked to contribute if those contributions are never used. Find ways to use the info you get back - chances are if you actually read it, you would want to anyway.
• Start updating your digital persona. Its embarassing for a newspaper site to have a six month old status on FB. Would there be any reason at all for your potential readers to go back there? Would you?
  

Newspapers: start wrapping your head around the fact that this is your new home. You haven't completely moved in yet, but if you want to land comfortably you'd better get busy getting to know your neighbors and making new friends.

And don't worry if each message, each tweet, each blog post isn't perfect the first time out. They won't be set in stone, but that's OK because 10 seconds from now no one will remember.

1... 2... 3... 4...

SSS - pass the word!

The most elemental reason for any communication whether it's a Tweet, a status update, a blog post, or a letter to mom, is to share information that you (at least) think is important.

But in the new world of social media it is hard to keep up with the language changes. English is tough enough as it is. What with there and their, its and it's. But a new language has emerged and it is making mastery of these new methods more challenging than I thought.

I spent days trying to find out what FRP meant.

Don't know, do you. Turns out, it doesn't mean anything unless you are following CNN's Rick Sanchez. In his posts, it means From Rick's Producer - meaning that Rick himself did not actually tap it out on his Blackberry.

The other day, I kept seeing RT. Having learned from my struggle with FRP, I just tweeted a friend and asked. Now I know that RT means Re Tweet for when you are passing on a tweet of general interest.

My question is who devises these acronyms and how does the general twitter-verse find out what they mean? Or are there a bunch of people either pretending they know what's going on?

So I'm going to try and start my own acronym to see what it takes for something completely meaningless to spread into general usage. Look for those tweets with SSS in them. What does it mean? Who knows. Maybe "simply stupid stuff" or "superfluous silly shit" or perhaps "somewhere someone cares about this stuff" (except I think that would be SSCS, but whose being picky.) After all, it's not like there's a style book for tweets.

So everytime you post something supercilious and silly or just downright stupid, tag it with SSS and I'm guessing that pretty soon it will have a life of its own.

SSS, for now... go figure.

Why wrong words matter too

It's the bane of athletes and actors that regular people look up to them. They become heroic and we want to emulate their behavior and "Be Like Mike!". That's one thing if your hero is Michael Jordan. It's another if you look up to Placico Burress.

The same principle holds true for the public journalism figures we see or read each day. George Bush unfortunately dropped the bar on communication low enough to be a tough limbo move. Entire books exist of "Bushisms" so the president's misuse of the language can be neither gone nor forgotten.

But there are new examples each day from people who ought to know better. Periodically, we'll call those out here because when people who make their living from communicating can't use the language correctly, it sends a bad message to a new generation of communicators coming up that precision in language really doesn't matter. After all, people will figure out what you meant and isn't that the most important thing?

All of us, anyone who has ever been misunderstood or had their words twisted to mean something unintended knows that the right words matter.

Today's example of the wrong words come from CNN's Roland Martin during his 8 p.m. broadcast on Friday night. The story: The tragic mass murder of 14 immigrants in a Binghampton, NY, civic center. Dozens of people huddled in the basement and hid in closets and storage rooms while the gunman upstairs killed their colleagues, friends and relatives in a classroom. Martin said (apparently reading their minds) that as they waited out the massacre "they wondered if they would make it out dead or alive."

Amidst the horror of the story, this throw away comment stood out look a sore thumb. First, I hope I'm not alone in wishing that journalists would stop trying to guess what is going on in their subjects' heads. Second, I doubt that any of the 26 immigrants crouched together listening to screams and gun fire, would consider that they "made it out" if "out" was feet first.

Words do matter - even off the cuff ones.

NPs KO'd by tweets and teens: Who will write the obit?

I began following a Twitterer called "The Media Is Dying" today. One after one, a litany of failure scrolled across the screen.

Weeklies closing, dailies announcing layoffs, artists, cartoonists, reporters and even online journalists succumbing to the creeping crud that appears to be killing newspapers. With new sites cropping up each day to catalog the end of an industry, it's almost like sitting in a hospital room and watching someone die. It's heart-breaking, but you are helpless to change anything and helpless to look away. Will newspapers be heartened by the sadness so many feel watching their decline?

I doubt it. But here's another question. Who will write the obit for the industry?

Will it be Facebook: What's on my mind? I was so sad to see that newspapers died yesterday. So I took the quiz - which newspaper are you. I'm the New York Post (Straightforward and in-your-face! which one are u?).

Will it be Twitter: @replies Wht happend? None of the RSS fds on TW r working!

Will it be CNN: We have reports today that the newspaper industry has died. But, we caution, that those are unconfirmed reports. So we go to over to Don. Don, what do you know. Don: Well, not much yet. We are out here on the street and it appears that all the news boxes here in Atlanta are empty. We're also getting a lot of tweets on this. So as soon as we are done letting our listeners report the news for us, we'll get back to you.

However it is reported, it will be short and sweet and spread like jelly on tainted peanut butter. There certainly is no shortage of media pundits out there already circling -- groups, blogs and web sites dedicated to save newspapers, to catalog their demise, to predict their next incarnation. One thing that is certain, you may not have a physical newspaper to hold in your hands all that much longer. But you sure as hell will need their editors.

Web programmers are already scrambling to find ways to make the internet more like a newspaper. Consider Kosmix (Your guide to the web). This integration web site pulls together information based on meta tags (keywords). Of course, it's a computer doing it, which is why a search for the admittedly very broad topic of "newspapers" brought up a odd mix of items.

• A Wikipedia entry (A newspaper is a written publication containing news, information and advertising, usually printed on low-cost paper called newsprint. General-interest newspapers often feature articles on political events, crime, business, art/entertainment, society and sports. Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing columns which express the personal opinions of writers. Supplementary sections may contain advertising, comics, coupons, and other printed media. Newspapers are most often published on a daily or weekly basis, and they usually focus on one particular geographic area where most of their readers live. )
• An E-bay auction ($13.99 for an election day newspaper -- seems too cheap. I'd hold it for another 4 years!).
• And my favorite -- two You Tube videos. One on how to make bead jewelry out of newspapers and the other on using newspapers to start seedlings. And you thought there was no future!
  

For Twitterers, there's www.tweetdeck.com, which endeavors to pull together the diverse tweets the average twitter client receives and display them in a way to give them some cohesiveness. The company describes it:

In recent months there has been an explosion in social media with hundreds of services offering an abundance of information to the masses. TweetDeck is a realtime application that allows users to monitor that information in a single concise view. TweetDeck currently integrates services from Twitter, Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwits and now Facebook.

New integrators pop up nearly daily -- Twitter applications on Facebook, ways to pull FB into Twitter, applications to get all social media and blogs on your iphone, -- and now more applications to seek out news and information throughout the web, pull it together and try to give you a picture of what's going on in areas you are interested in.

Hmmmm, sounds a lot like .. I know, a newspaper! Certainly, the ink and paper may go away - and along with it the gray smudges on white sofas and tan-colored outfits. The day may not be too far off when I won't have to run out in the rain to drag the soggy bag of decaying newsprint into the house and spread it out on the kitchen counter to dry.

But what we won't lose, what we can't lose is the product that journalists produce -- the information filtered through the expertise, the background, the credibility and vetted by an editor over the age of 12 who knows how to use their and there correctly. We will still need and value that product.

Yes, Twitter, Facebook, My Space, Kosmix, and Tweet Deck; You Tube and Flickr will all have a place in our new world of communication. I want to know what my friends are doing. I want to know what TV Hunk they most resemble. I want to see photos of their kids and share photos of my dogs. And I want to know what they think about what's going on in the world. But I don't expect them to report the news. We'll still need journalists for that - whatever the venue.

So, what about that obit? Maybe it's not an obit after all. Maybe it's a feature story:

News moves to web; computer industry sales to seniors soars!

The pen is scarier than the sword

No matter how strong, how skilled, how successful, even the toughest manager or executive often crumbles at the idea of having to WRITE something.

Typically people over complicate the writing task and they allow fear to build until they are paralyzed into inaction. But the first year journalism student knows the trick to taking the panic out of writing.

Break your information down and make sure you can answer these questions

• Who is affected?
• How will they be affected?
• What is the issue?
• Where will this take place?
• When is it going to happen?
• Why is this happening?

With those essential elements in place, you know you'll have the bases covered.

The next step is to decide how to organize the information. The most important piece will be your first paragraph (known in the media as “the lede”). This is where you need to tell your reader the most important piece of information — why do i care about this.

If you can’t explain why I should care, then you either can’t make your case or you don’t have enough information. Either way, you are not going to be able to capture your readers’ attention long enough to convince him. So STOP and go back to the 5 Ws.

The most important thing that i think most business writers forget is their audience. Often, people write for themselves with the assumption that if they are interested, others will be too.

Definitely, not so. You need to know the audience. If you are an IT manager writing a proposal that is going to be read by financial executives, you need to tailor your writing specifically to what they are going to be interested in.

And I can pretty much guarantee you, your interests are far different.

More on that next time.

It's called communication for a reason

As a young journalist, I once watched in stunned silence as a more experienced reporter lambasted an intern who didn’t know who Neil Sheehan (the New York Times reporter who published The Pentagon Papers) was. The intern was demoralized as the reporter left him with his head down on the desk - still not knowing how Neil Sheehan was.

Since that day, I’ve repeated this mantra - “The only stupid questions are the ones you don’t ask” - a thousand times. sometimes you have to show a little less bravado in order to get the story.

Too often, however, that bravado gets in the way and prevents us from asking the right questions, from getting to the core of the truth, from attaining understanding. Far too often, it seems, journalists, bloggers, commentators are more interested in impressing the audience with their flair for language and their overall intelligence than communicating information.

It bears repeating that the purpose of all written and verbal communication is actually to communicate. If your audience can’t understand how you communicate - either because it is over their head or, in many cases, in a completely different language all together - then the goal can never be reached.

A common example is in technical documentation or training. As the vice president of IT for a metropolitan newspaper, we were constantly installing new systems or software that required some kind of documentation. Early on you find out that you cannot use typical IT terminology with most users. In training classes, the concept of locating the “icon in the system tray”, locating a .pdf file, or using tools in the title bar elicit blank looks. Quickly you learn that you can’t assume people will understand the language your are speaking, no matter how basic you think you are being.

When technical people write for business people it’s almost like watching people talk to their dogs (you talk and the dog listens intently and then tilts his head and scrunches up his eyes… then wanders off to sleep on your best heirloom blanket!). IT people are just not wired to think in terms of business metrics and, to some large measure, don’t think they should have to. Everyone should understand that bigger is better, faster is more productive and new technology is better than old. Unfortunately, that’s not good enough now — in IT or in other areas.

Notably, business and economics. No longer can we afford to keep to ourselves when commentators and other expert analysts on TV or in newspapers prattle on in terms we don’t understand. Elevated linguistics, complex business terminology and jargon are just methods of making the average person believe that they are just not smart enough to think on the same level and, therefore, should leave all the thinking to the experts. Wrong. If there’s one thing we cannot afford to do now - either as an individual or as a country - is to go along for the ride. And the state of the economy right now should show us that maybe a few more basic questions should be being asked.

Key #1 of good communication is to know your audience. If you are an doctor writing for a medical journal, you can expect a level of subject matter expertise and a common understanding of the mystical language of MDs. But if you’re a doctor writing an article for a general readership publication, your audience is far different and you need to write differently to communicate with them.

It is impossible for you to be a good barometer of the readability of your own work. You know what you are trying to say and, even if details or explanations are missing, you will fill in the gaps mentally. Here’s a pretty good test: find someone in your target audience and ask them for a test read. If you’re writing a business proposal, seek out someone in the finance field. If you’re writing for a general audience, seek out what newspaper’s would call “a regular person” and ask them to look it over for you. Make sure you are clear with your tester that you WANT honest assessment and be welcoming. Generally, we don’t like to look “dumb” so we may pretend to understand things we really don’t.

Key #2 is to use words economically. Use the fewest words to make your point, not the most. And always use the smallest most direct word rather than the $60,000-word. If you want to impress your audience with your linguistic skills and make them feel stupid at the same time, go for words that send people looking for a dictionary. But if you want to communicate with them, treat them with respect and use language most people can understand to make your point.

At the end of the day, communication is about sharing information to help people understand an issue, make a decision, or do a job better. Language is a means to that end, not the end itself.