I Tweet, Therefore, I Am

The social media website Twitter is like being at a cocktail party where you don’t actually know anyone, but you’ve heard of them. You stand against the wall with your drink, or you walk slowly around and listen to fragments of their conversations. You’re always coming in at the middle of a story, and you can’t stay for the end because they may look at you rudely for eavesdropping, so you keep moving. Very few people speak directly to you, but when one does, you feel very happy, as if you connected, even for a moment.

Some of the people at this party do know each other, and their conversations are lively and fun. You enjoy just listening in.

And in the end, you feel like you had a good time. You were with people who ordinarily wouldn’t include you in their reindeer games. You heard interesting things. You picked up some tips about how to live a fabulous life, how to be more like them, what you have to do to have a career like they do. Maybe next time you’re at the party, more people will speak directly to you. It's like being with the King of Comedy without having to physically kidnap him.

After awhile, as you spend more time at this party where people drop in and out, you begin to notice there are people hovering near you. They think you are interesting, but they don’t know you to speak directly to you, so they’re just hanging out nearby, listening to you talk to yourself, listening to you pretend you are the center of attention and everyone is hanging on your words. You are flattered.

It’s not that peculiar a social networking model. It’s the traditional after work mixer, only ported to a virtual world and the mixer goes on night and day. The ways to get popular in the Twitterworld are the same ones as in the real world. You can be funny. Someone who is fast and culturally current with the quips gets followed by many. You can be the wagon train leader, out in front of the Internet exploration, sending back appropriate links to interesting pages and articles.

You can be a news service, either an actual news service like a blogging TV reporter or CNN, or a limited area reporter (which is probably the future of journalism). I follow people who write about the weather, several who tweet about what’s happening in their neighborhoods (crimes, accidents, fires, traffic jams, lost pets), and others who seem to be home unemployed all day breaking the news of what’s on TV.

Then there’s the people I call the cool crowd, the same group you yearned to be part of in high school. They all know each other, so you follow everyone in the crowd and you know what they’re up to, where they’re going for dinner, what’s the latest popular bar, who’s doing what this weekend.

Then there’s the salesmen and scam artists, trying to figure out how to play the room to their advantage. There’s a Twitter philosophy that says you should follow everyone who follows you, but this clutters your feed with their sales pitches. I see no point in following people I don’t know from other towns either. Where they’re going to dinner in Palm Beach or Irvine doesn’t add anything to my daily experience like a rave about a local restaurant could.

Yes, there’s fake celebrities on Twitter, but there’s also several genuine ones – actors, comedians, musicians, tech columnists – who have eliminated the Catholic Church model of communication. You don’t have to go through a priest to communicate with God. These celebrities have eliminated the entertainment reporter and the magazine editors who filter their stories back to the fans. They talk directly to their fans, but in a nice, safe way, which preserves their privacy and guarantees they’re never misquoted or misrepresented by someone with an agenda.

Newspapers should be afraid, be very afraid. I would hazard a guess many bloggers are frustrated reporters who couldn’t get hired by the almighty paper or had other careers to pursue but still wanted to write. Even if no one is reading them, they are self-fulfilling their desire to communicate. Several have amassed faithful readerships any newspaper columnist would envy. Twitter flings open the communications portal even more – to those who don’t even have the verbal wherewithal to blog, who haven’t got the skill and talent to put together an informative, tight, well-thought out 1,000-word Style Back Page. They don’t have much to say, but they have this to say, and dammit, they’re going to say it, and what do you know, a couple of hundred or more people will read it.

It’s the Mini-Me Newspaper, all about just me and what I think is interesting. Subscribers come onboard, whether you’re a celebrity, the life-of-the-party, the wagon train leader, the scummy salesman, the lonely girl, the frustrated reporter…doesn’t matter. You are the center of your universe and a galaxy of Tweeters will revolve around you in an exchange of news, ideas, jokes, secrets, sighs and lies. It’s your party within a party in an ever-expanding chain of parties where the conversation never stops except for the occasional sighting of a whale being carried by birds through an azure sky.

T-D Only Cares about Old People

The Times--Dispatch only cares about old people, or so it seems since they've scheduled their coffee meeting with the general public for 9 a.m. on a Monday morning at McLean's on Leadbetter Road, a breakfast place out in the suburbs. Who can go to these things except retired people? And that's already the paper's core audience, so this must be a retention meeting rather than one seeking new readers or departed readers. Well, I can tell you what the people who have nothing else to do on Monday morning are going to tell you about the paper:
Bigger font. 

Don't worry about the lack of tech and tech business coverage because we can barely operate push button phones, much less use a computer. We don't care about the future. We aren't going to live there. That paper delivery guy is throwing my paper into the bushes. What are you going to do about that? What happened to all those columnists we used to read? What happened to them? Stop moving the bridge column, and I don't understand these new fangled comics. What happened to Gasoline Alley and Henry? I liked Henry. Little bald white boy. Didn't say nothing. 

 Bigger font. 

Especially in the obituaries. I like obituaries. I read them first, and if I don't see my name, I have a second cup of coffee. Ha, ha. Today in History, that ought to be on the front page. I remember some of that stuff.  And the horoscope. Well, you know I know they're probably just made-up, but I like to call my friend Eleanor -- she's in assisted living at Westbrook -- and read hers to her. Sort of gives her something to look forward to every day, knowing how the day might turn out. Can the paper be delivered earlier? Because we're up at 4. We like to get to the Waffle House before the crowd, and bring our own paper. We've got things to do after that. I've got to be at the grocery store as soon as the doors open, because if you're just a few minutes late, all the marked down meat and bread is gone already. Some people must get to the parking lot at 3 a.m. and just sit there, waiting. 

More people are reading the paper online? You mean on line at the grocery store? Well, sometimes I do look at the People or Us Weekly. Or Woman's Day. Now there's a good magazine. Recipes. I don't know why they have to talk about sex, though. Everything is sex. Getting your man to do stuff. I'd be happy to get him to take out the trash. If you want to see the Enquirer and those trashy papers, you have to go to the Food Lion. Clerks at the K-Mart, they don't care about helping you. Have you see the size of their fingernails? Painted all kind of colors. Some of them have jewels on them. I don't know what the world is coming to.
Bigger font.

What's the Point, Stylebook?

One casualty of the death of newspapers is the death of the AP Stylebook. I suspect most bloggers and young newsies don’t even know what it is. They learned to write by text message and have a whole different style.

So it’s ironic that by the time I finally acquired a basic grasp of the Stylebook, which had been a thorn in my side trying to break into journalism, it doesn’t matter anymore.

VCU didn’t teach the Stylebook. My professors were mostly moonlighting newspaper reporters and they didn’t want to work too hard for their side money, so I came out of school knowing how to imitate newspaper writing only because I read newspapers, and that’s about all. The Times-Dispatch and News Leader took glee in making me take Stylebook tests and I didn’t score that well and didn’t get hired, but it was just a screening tactic. When they had someone they wanted to hire, like the offspring of an existing editor or someone at random who would increase the number of minorities in the newsroom, the Stylebook test didn’t matter.

I wrote book reviews for years for the News Leader’s late Ann Lloyd Merriman and noticed what she edited. Then I did another stint writing essays for Style’s Rozanne Epps and paid attention to her changes. This was my actual college education.

It was hard to get into the good habits of the Stylebook (you learn best by repetition) until I started grinding out routine news copy regularly, and this finally happened when I became an editor/reporter at the Mechanicsville newspaper. I wrote with my Stylebook open on my lap. It made my managing editors happy, but in the long run, did it matter? Not a bit.

My next boss was a press secretary with a master’s degree in journalism, or so said his office wall, and he didn’t seem to know anything about the AP Stylebook. He routinely changed my carefully Stylebooked writing into his own anti-Stylebook and when I pointed it out, “That’s not AP Stylebook,” he’d just smile. He was making twice the salary of those beady little reporters at the T-D, so what did he care? He could hang up on them all day long and twice on Sunday.

Rolling Stone has its own set of rules, which makes it difficult for me to read their articles without mental red lights when my eyes brush across something that strikes me as wrong, and just now, while reading Time, “17%” jumped out at me, which should be a Stylebook “17 percent.” So who still cares about the AP Stylebook? Maybe the AP.

I still try to write Stylebook style, just to show my whole life of struggle with it wasn’t a waste, but what does it matter? I get submissions from people all the time for the publications and newsletters I work on, and nobody is writing Stylebook-style. And don’t get me started on two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence (it's been one space since the birth of computers!!!). Why are so many people still writing typewriter-style?

Advertising vs. News Smackdown

The biggest commotion at the AMA Richmond panel discussion today was when Jason Roop, editor of Style, asked Scott Christino, retail and national manager of the Times-Dispatch, about where Brick drew the line between subjectivity and ads disguised as news. The audience, previously subdued, went into a low, humming buzz, whispering “What’s Brick?” We’ll get to that later.

The panel was Christino, (T-D Guy); Aaron Kremer, youthful owner of richmondbizsense.com (Web Guy); Don Richards, vp and gm of Channel 12 (TV Guy); Roop (Style Guy); and Bob Willoughby, general manager of Cox Radio (Radio Guy).

Round 1. Style Guy is thrilled to be in publishing and journalism right now. Good journalism is, like the Colbert Report, truthiness combined with fun. TV Guy yada yada. Web Guy says richmondbizsense has 3,000 daily readers. Radio Guy is all about making marketing work. T-D Guy, who wears a pencil behind his ear the whole time, reminds everyone the T-D is also three websites that offer “electronic solutions.” Advertising is like diet and exercise. Done regularly, your business will have a long and healthy life.

Round 2. Radio Guy says consumers are time-starved and radio is the only portable electronic media. (Huh? Everyone at Panera is carrying laptops and iPhones, not radios.) It has low production costs, offers websites, and client endorsements. (I assume he means all the announcers telling you how much they love their mattresses, or poor Glenn Beck shilling investing in gold. Even the mighty Limbaugh does endorsement ads.) Radio can become part of your story! Even stations with low ratings have loyal, responsive listeners. Style Guy (reading my mind) pipes in with the iPhone KO. Twitter, Facebook…all portable electronic media. Score 1, Style Guy.

TV Guy says they’re always fighting the impression that TV advertising is expensive, when they’re actually “pretty flexible.” (i.e, we’ll take what you got now). “We were wireless before wireless was cool.” Even with all the media available, TV still reaches 80 percent of homes weekly, same as always.

Web Guy says he has a niche audience, and his niche is “salivating” over his website. He gets the who’s who in Richmond business. Plus, he has low overhead. No legacy expenses or pensions. Since they only do web ads, they are the master of web ad technology.

Round 3. T-D Guy says the Richmond Chic column in the Sunday Flair section is barely disguised advertising that produces big sales after an item appears in the column. Radio Guy fesses up that the air talent have deals to promote products. (No kidding?!) They all agree it’s important to keep the news clean of advertising to maintain reader trust. Style Guy crows they have more readers than ever between the paper and online and Style strives for news purity, even though it is sad when adside co-workers lose commissions because of it. So sad. TV Guy assures us that the viewers know it when they see ad placement where it shouldn’t be.

Did we all know it when 30 Rock made the goodness of McDonald’s McFlurries a critical plot point?

Radio Guy backtracked that “people are really not coming to us for news.” T-D Guy moved forward that news is never impacted by advertising. “There’s a wall, but there’s a door on that wall…” conceding that without advertising, nobody gets paid. Style Guy steps in for the take-down. “Brick?” (Which is not above letting restaurant owners write their own reviews at times.)

The AMA audience has never heard of Brick. There is a what-is-this-thing-called-Brick buzz. Is there a magazine that will give them all the editorial support they crave and they didn’t know about it? Where is this Brick? The cornered T-D Guy flounders and turns to his reinforcements, for lo and behold, T-D Director of Product Innovation and Strategic Marketing Frazier Millner is in the audience. She is always in the audience when anyone from the T-D appears anywhere, and they always default to her. She pops up like a jack-in-the-box. “Non-core product,” she declares. (I’m going to use that excuse whenever I do anything unethical from now on. Non-core product!!) I couldn’t hear what else she said because my table was still aroused and rumbling about what-is-this-Brick? Brick should have been at the door, passing out cards. A fortune in advertising and product and story tie-ins was there for the taking!

Score 2 for Style.

Round 4. Audience member wants to know where marketeers can park their good news. Style Guy has two products, Giving and Belle, the latter soon to be a monthly, as avenues for success stories. T-D Guy says there’s not so much good news, except for the Public Squares they host. “I never saw an organization so open and engaged with the community,” he gushes.

Style Guy comes back with Style is a free publication so they know their readership wants it if they pick it up. Advertise with them and you’re “fishing in a well-stocked lake.” TV Guy says TV ads deliver with emotion. The average household has as many TVs as it has people. Everyone is watching what they want. Is TV also a well-stocked lake?

Young Web Guy said he thought his readers were going to be young, you know, with-it Web 2.0 types, but instead they’re older business people. Surprise! We oldies gotz mad web skillz! Web is the only media outlet actually growing. Radio Guy says 93 percent of everybody listens to the radio every week, and 70-something percent listen every day. (I miss the exact figure because a cell phone went off, which meant time-out for a round of cell phone jokes.) Radio advertising can be more creative. (It’s all happening in your mind!)

Cranky audience member says the mainstream media is relying too much on blogs and RSS feeds from dubious web sources for their online content and it’s confusing his clients because the blogosphere is not known for its truthiness. Style Guy says we’re not doing that. We all look at T-D Guy. (Hey, inrich.com, we're talking about you). TV Guy changes the subject. They get swamped with press releases which are useless to them. PR people need to develop a relationship with the assignment editor. Find out what they need. Give them only what they need. Not what you want. (This is the second time I've heard this. Nobody wants press releases.)

Round 5. What does the future hold? Style Guy can’t imagine newspapers will ever be completely dead. Good journalists will always be needed. TV Guy reminds us that 30 percent of people online are watching television at the same time. Web Guy channels Bette Davis. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. People will go to “where [the news] is well-written, well reported and they can trust it.”

Most of them agree that local content is the savior, and putting that local content behind a paid wall will save them. Like a peep show. Put in a quarter and turn the crank. See the local lady take off her clothes. Whoops. Show over. If you want to see more, pay another quarter. Radio Guy says local news is “more impactful to local communities.” I love being impacted. The conclusion: the media outlet that gets that and invests in the community will survive.

I would score this meeting Style: Win. TV: Place. Web: Show.

Lunch with T-D Guy

I went to the PRSA luncheon today to hear T-D Executive Editor Glenn Procter, who is not a quotable guy. There wasn't a "money quote" (words worth capturing for a story) until the very end when he answered a question about whether the citizenry was taking over journalism since they are everywhere with their blogs and camera phones. "For big news events, I want trained reporters on scene. Good content still sells. Watchdog journalism still sells."

Only the blogs are often better watchdogs. He did concede that a large part of the news website of the future was going to be contributed citizen journalism. (Don't have to pay them salaries or health benefits either.)

I wanted to ask what happened to the seasoned and senior reporters who all left in a mass exodus, but never quite got my hand up since I was not in the mood to pick a fight. 

Then he kind of answered my question anyway. He said reporters go out the door now with a "tool kit," a video camera, still camera, pad and pen, and an audio recorder, so they are prepared to report a story for multi-media. That's probably why the old-timers bailed. That's too much stuff to deal with. I know when I go out on a story, I can't really do justice to taking photos and taking notes at the same time. I end up doing a half-assed job when I have to multi-task with equipment. Imagine if I also had to do video and audio.

Other tidbits:

He wears ear rings.

Seventy percent of Richmond area businesses do not advertise in the paper.

"We're a media company. We're not the newspaper anymore."

Buying up all the suburban weeklies was to "get as much of the population into one of our products."

The priorities "going forward" (I hate that phrase) are 1) breaking news, 2) state government, 3) municipal governments, 4) health, 5) environmental issues, 6) education. Maybe not in that order since he came back a minute later and said state politics was No. 1.

(In retrospective, and I add this now in 2012 after Procter left, the priorities should have been 1) municipal government, 2) state government, 3) health, 4) technology. You can't do breaking news when you publish once a day the morning after the news happened.)

The most hated things about the T-D: the website and the half pages.

Since this was an audience of all public relations specialists, naturally they asked what is the best way to get their news into the paper, and Procter pretty much said no one at the paper looked at our press releases or emails. "Face to face is the way to play. Come and talk to us." He repeated it later on, too.

Now, this makes no sense because why do you need to come begging in person to have your press releases considered for story material unless....unless...

You make the appointment with the appropriate editor for the face-to-face, and when you get there, you find an ad salesman and a newspaper marketing person at the table, ready to pitch web and print ads...giving the illusion that if you buy in, your press releases will be read and considered. (Like, you don't have to buy magazines to be entered into the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, but people still think it gives them an edge.)

When I was an editor, I didn't want to meet everyone sending in press releases. Who has time? I just looked at them and asked myself, is this a calendar item? Is this a feature story? Do my readers want to know about this? Where in the paper do I put this? Or does it go in the wastebasket? I could call them if I needed more info. I didn't need them to come for lunch.

The Richmond Voice (update 2022, long gone newspaper) is a case in point. I send them a press release about a community meeting, something my job is doing that is going to impact the community in their pocket books, something they need to know in case they want to protest or ask questions. The Voice calls me within minutes and asks if I want to buy an ad for the announcement.

No, I say, it's a public meeting. Just run it in your community calendar.

No, you need to buy an ad, they say again.

This is news. This is the sort of thing you're supposed to write about as news. (And I say that sincerely as a fellow journalist, not as a PR hack. We're not selling anything!)

No, you need to buy an ad. She even puts me on hold to talk to the editor, and still comes back and says I need to buy an ad.

So I don't send The Voice things anymore because after going through this twice, I get the message. You're not a newspaper anymore. You're a shopper. I got the same creepy vibe when Proctor told the room full of PR people they needed to come in and sit down at the table with his editors.

Which begs the question, how much can you trust the newspaper if story selection and placement might be influenced by face-to-faces?

Death of Newspapers - Colonial Edition

The first newspaper in the Colonies was Publick Occurrences, printing in Boston in 1690. Early American newspapers were inevitably weeklies because it took 16 hours to set in type four pages. The first “death of newspapers” in America was 1765 as a result of the Stamp Act, which levied a tax on every printed page. The second death of newspapers was the Sedition Act of 1798, a low point of the John Adams presidency, making it a federal crime to defame his administration. (whoa!) Thomas Jefferson once proposed newspapers should have four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies. (Wouldn't it be great if someone did a paper like that now?) Objectivity in journalism is a creature of the 19th century. Prior to that (and apparently now) the whole point was to espouse a point of view.

Thanks again to The New Yorker for source material.

Mystery of the Missing Portrait

In 1969, a VCU freshman named Janet Johnson, who lived on the 8th floor of Johnson Hall, painted this picture, which amazed us all because she wasn't even an art major, so we took a picture of it.

She dropped out mid-semester because she never went to class. She got her days and nights mixed up and was up all night and slept all day. I think she was originally from Northern Virginia. She was very tall and liked to wear short, fluffy wigs. She also liked to party at Andy's, which was on Grace Street near the Mister Swiss, a few doors down from Lum's.

A few years later, someone told me they saw this painting for sale at Arts in the Park. That was almost 40 years ago. I wonder what happened to it.