Shut Up, Millennials

Last night I attended a "One Party" after work event at the Urban Farmhouse. Urban Farmhouse in Scott's Addition seems to serve craft oatmeal and craft beer, an interesting menu. Oh you millennials, with your craft everything. True, it was mostly a happy hour, but they -- for some unknown reason -- had three people who were operating successful local businesses to each give a ten minute speech on how they got started and how they market.

The event was co-sponsored by the Richmond Ad Club, American Marketing Association Richmond, Legal Marketing Association, and the Richmond Chapter of PRSA.

Interesting, right? Especially for me since according to the published agenda, the speakers were supposed to go first at 5:30, followed by nearly two hours of networking (code for drinking and talking), ending at 8 p.m., instead of the other way around, which I hate because I just want the program, and maybe some free food.

Silly girl. When does anything ever start on time? The program started closer to 6:15 when the host introduced the first business partnership and was roundly ignored, as were the first business partnership, two young women who make a living renting out unique looking chairs and tables for weddings, parties, commercials, and movies. (How did they get started doing that? Where do they find the furniture?)

Okay, you amazing millennials, life must be grand for you. You all have these great marketing jobs, and you got them even though you have visible tattoos, Manic Panic (am I dating myself?) hair in shades of bright red, blue and purple, and you don't remotely wear "office appropriate attire." Here are the guys with the messenger bags; here are the women with the Lady Gaga shoes. Here are gluten-free choices on the buffet table for all of you. This event was certainly billed as a "party" in the title, and two hours and 15 minutes of "networking" time was programmed in so you could talk to each other. Your one job was to shut up for 30 minutes so three of your peers could each speak for 10 minutes about how they started their amazing businesses.

And yet, you could not do that.

You could not do that when the third speaker jumped up to the mic after the first speaker and called you all rude and reprimanded you for your bad manners and pleaded with you to hush up just long enough to show some respect to the people who had agreed to come there and share their stories, ever so briefly.

And you could not do that when the third speaker started her ten minutes by shouting into the mic, "Shut up, shut up, shut up." Standing in the back doesn't mean we all still can't hear the deadly continuous drone of your voices, you amazing millennials. Your lives are so fascinating, you cannot stop talking about yourselves for 30 minutes.

Instead of a Newspaper, I Get a Shopper

I had so much hope after the Henrico and Chesterfield TDs were announced. I thought we were going to get real weekly newspapers that would help me connect with my community and get involved in the political and social life of my county.

Instead, I get another lousy shopper, as if the richmond.com "newspaper," and the pathetic Sunday Direct were anything more than vehicles to deliver boatloads of shopping inserts and advertisements with the softest of soft news, like recipes or some light entertainment press release.

For mysterious reasons that probably have something to do with ad sizes, I get a narrow broadsheet Henrico TD dated Oct. 30 in the same bundle as a perfect square tabloid Henrico TD. Why two? The lead story in the broadsheet is the Harvest Festival at Meadow Farm and the Highland Games at RIR, told in photos. Inside, more Harvest Time photos, a crossword puzzle, a word search, and horoscopes. The ads are all house ads except for a furniture store and Kroger's, so I assume this paper was designed to deliver the same Kroger's full page ad that is in the daily.

Not to mention there are also ad inserts for Kroger's, Martin's and Food Lion. Does anyone really shop by weekly sales anymore?

Okay, maybe the news is in the tabloid. On the cover is the Pumpkin Rush, also part of the Harvest Festival.

There's an editorial promising future stories about "citizens and events...festivals and games...memorials and parades...volunteer organizations...agents of change...triumphs and movements of the schools...perspectives on trends and developments." What, no politics, no government, no economic development?

There's a story about a musical at the Cultural Arts Center, flu shots, Henrico Christmas mother, a concert at a church, a community calendar, a press release from Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, the valor awards,  a high school football game, and the journalism I hate most in the world -- the one question posed to a group of people, which is entirely their answers and headshots. In this issue, five children tell what they are going to dress up as for Halloween. Oh good gosh.

The same day I picked up this crap in a plastic bag on my lawn, I found the Oct. 13 Sunday Direct, getting soggy on another part of my lawn. The cover story is a black bean soup recipe and a woman celebrating her 100th birthday by hang gliding. No photo. Here's the weekly calendar of light entertainment events and then...what? WHAT? Five broadsheet pages of classified ads for cars!! Followed by two pages of miscellaneous ads. That's the Sunday Direct.

Finally, It Is Admitted

I periodically take "media relations" classes just to see what the reporters are saying their lives are like these days. I have been on both sides of the communications fence, pitching stories as a public relations practitioner and fending them off as an editor.

In last week's class, a television reporter actually said That Which Is Never Said. The general manager sends down "must cover" and "must cover favorably" edicts that usually are associated with an advertiser. It's "an ethical dilemma," he shrugged. This has been the standing procedure everywhere for decades, but no one ever, ever admits it. In this era of dying old-school media, I was startled that at last we had come to that level of desperation where the obvious cannot be denied anymore.

The following week we had a newspaper reporter who was so low energy, I was dying to ask him how in the world he had gotten his job. He had majored in something unrelated -- like psychology -- and then as is often the case, didn't know what to do with the major and needed a job. So he went to a small paper and was hired.

These stories amaze me. I made the apparently bad mistake of actually majoring in journalism, only to hear from the managing editor of the Richmond News Leader back in the 1970s that editors didn't like journalism majors. "They have preconceived ideas," or something like that. They preferred to hire any other major but journalism and then mold that person to their liking. At 22, I was still pretty moldable, but it didn't matter. I was tainted. At least it was better than what Alf Goodykoontz, now deceased in a car accident, told me the following year, that he wouldn't have a single mother in his newsroom because we were "emotionally unstable."

Emotions of Another Kind at the War Memorial

It was sobering to be in a room surrounded by photos of young men and women who were recently killed because they picked the military or CIA for their careers. The Social Media Club of Richmond VA (SMCRVA) held their August meeting on cyber bullying in one of the meeting rooms at the Virginia War Memorial on Belvidere. It's a great facility, but the holiness of the place is kind of inhibiting.

I have not been there since they built the addition and was blown away by the museum part (wow, those mannequins in the wars exhibit look like real men! It freaked me out) and the little outdoor amphitheater. This is a beautiful spot with a commanding view of the downtown skyline, two bridges, the river, and the Ethyl Corp building, often confused with the state capitol. (As for the catering, no. Also, $2 for a Coke? No.)

TMI facilitated the meeting with their nifty poll-taking clickers, which I had used at my workplace when TMI facilitated our employee restlessness. We learned the evening's attendees were mostly white women under 34 who lived in Richmond and liked Facebook and Twitter, and used Twitter at work. It was a relatively small group since the polling kept closing between 59-64 votes.

We heard touching and emotional stories about racial discrimination, homophobia, sexism toward female gamers, Kindness Girl urging less ass-holism and more kindness, and one guy confessing to pretending to be someone named Regina George on social media and getting his comeuppance after posting a party photo of a tasteless Sept. 11 party cake (toy planes crashing into cake towers). He swore to never be a cyber bully again, but I heard the next day from some people in my Twitter feed that they didn't go because of him and were not ready to forgive him because of things he had tweeted in his bad old days. He carefully went over all the steps necessary to be an online troll and why trolls troll, and maybe they need 12-step programs now, but whatever. (Also, I had to look up Regina George because I didn't get that at all, and learned it's because I have never seen "Mean Girls." I keep thinking I have, but what I saw was "Clueless." Not the same. Is "Heathers" the same?)

The groups that would have benefited the most from this really nice presentation were not there -- which is middle and high school students who live in the heart of inflicted cruelties and the people who post comments on the TV news' Facebook pages. I know Kindness Girl wants us to love everybody, but anyone who spends any time reading comments on the Internet must come away with the sure knowledge that most of us are astoundingly ignorant, biased, mean, sometimes viciously mean, sexist, cruel, and unable to spell worth a damn. And we all have computers and Internet access. I really have a hard time loving everybody.

When You Have to March, March

I was born too late for the romance of the old newsrooms...and also the wrong gender, probably...when characters were not only tolerated, they were celebrated. I have always loved to read those stories, so I was pleased when Roger Ebert moved on from memories of his childhood and got to the good stuff in his biography, his days as a reporter on the Chicago Sun-Times.

Here's his introduction to his editor, Bob Zonka.

"...Zonka taught me his newspaper code, which he liked to express as, 'When you have to march, march.' This included writing a story you lacked all enthusiasm for, meeting a deadline no matter what hours were necessary, getting an interview after you'd been decisively turned down, not falling in love with your deathless prose, remembering you were there to write a story and not have a good time. These were not rules he enforced. They were standards he exuded."

Life Itself by Roger Ebert, Grand Central Publishing, 2011

Down to Coupons

The last two times a marketing person called me about resubscribing to the Sunday Times-Dispatch, they pitched it the same way: Coupons. I am missing out on getting the coupons.

It is sad that the advantage of getting a newspaper isn’t getting the news anymore. But how can it be? The news is almost a day old. It used to be television news made it harder to compete, but the newspaper could always claim in-depth coverage. Now, with the Internet, it doesn’t even have that.

What it has is coupons and sales flyers on Sunday. Here’s the problem with the flyers. They create a need in us – okay, more my husband – for things we can’t afford and don’t really need. I would rather he not know too easily what is on sale at Best Buy. If I am actually looking for an item, I can look up the flyers online. Don't suggest items to me. Not in this economy.

And coupons – well, don’t tell me there’s $250 worth of coupons in the paper. That’s if I use every one of them. I don’t need every product every week. There’s lot of coupons for things I’ll never need, like dog food and baby items. The time I spent clipping and organizing them got annoying. And as expiration dates rolled around, I was throwing out three times as many as I was using.

And I really started getting annoyed with the newspaper itself. Didn’t need or want the sports section. Didn’t need or want the depressing classifieds with its lack of help wanted positions. Didn’t need or want real estate sections. Didn’t need or want the brides. That might work in a small town paper, but I don’t know any of these people anymore. Really don’t need or want the obituaries. This is just too sad. The bigger photos make it worse. What I needed was that $20 or $30 I was paying for 13 weeks of papers, so I am still canceled.

Newspapers need to stay small. Somehow there are too many employees involved with the business of newspapers, the advertising, the marketing, the bean counters. There’s too many vice presidents and not enough reporters. Newspapers always needed to stay small and focused. They never needed huge buildings, stockholders or board of directors.

Selling itself as a coupon distributor is not going to save the paper. While moving my niece out of the old Morton’s Tearoom building one Sunday, my assignment was to stay outside and keep an eye on the open truck. I also kept an eye on the newspaper boxes outside the YMCA.  A person paid for a paper, opened the box, and took all the papers. I assume it was for the coupons. I hope the paper doesn’t think this counts toward circulation.

Wanted: Business Model for a New Century

I was thinking about the “business model” of news and advertising on news vehicles the other day. It hasn’t changed in more than 50 years, except the television network evening broadcast went from 15 minutes to 30.

Otherwise, it still comes on around dinner time, wrongly assuming that we have gone straight home from work. It wrongly assumes we are all the man of the house who can sit down and pay attention to the broadcast, unwinding at the end of the day while the wife prepares dinner.

It still assumes we will give the numerous commercial breaks equal attention because to not see them would involve getting out of the chair and walking to the TV to change the channel.

It still assumes we pick the news channel based on the looks of the reader, and that this person reading the news to us is an actual, trustworthy journalist who knows what they are talking about because they covered the story, instead of a “spokesmodel” type who is just standing in the camera lights reading a script prepared by a behind-the-scenes segment producer. He or she is good at reading without looking like they are reading, but probably have very little understanding of what the story is about.

Many of these so-called reporters, especially on cable news shows, look like the type of young woman who in another time or place, would have been automobile showroom models, cocktail waitresses or stewardesses. How do they suddenly have the gravitas to deliver breaking news to me like Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow?

Local news is particularly maddening for the way it religiously gives equal time to sports and weather, whether or not there is any, and the way the anchors start each story by saying their co-anchor’s name and looking at them as if they are the only person they are telling the story to and the rest of us are just spying on this chat. Seriously, anchors, you never have to look or speak to the other anchor sitting with you. We know they’re there. Just read me the news. I’m over here. Look in the camera at me.

Television as a whole still assumes we do not own DVRs or remotes. They think we will not get up to change the channel, so they program based on strong lead-ins, one show leading into a better show, which is teased throughout the first show as something you won’t want to miss, so don’t touch that dial. But I am watching this a week later on my TiVo, and I only recorded the one show I wanted to watch, not all the ones following it. 

The print newspaper business model is: we are interested in the news even though it is yesterday’s news and we already heard it somewhere, and anything that happens after 11 p.m. or so, didn’t happen as far as you know as you read your morning paper. I assume you are reading it at work because who has time in the morning to read it at the house? You will want to read it on great big sheets of paper, the size of aprons, that you will have to fold and refold into a more manageable 8x10 size each time you turn the page.  Or you will have to clear off a big space on a table to spread it out, as if you are about to do a papier-mache project. Doesn’t this sound archaic?

The newspaper assumes you will look at the ads instead of skipping your eye over to headlines, looking for a story of interest. It assumes a third of your interest, no matter who you are, will be about sports. It assumes you do your grocery shopping on Thursdays, and gardening on weekends. It assumes you still cut out recipes and save them in little boxes.

Ten years ago I worked on a local paper that covered two zip codes. We had two high schools in those zip codes, so our single sportswriter only had to cover the games of two schools. A good portion of our readership identified with one or the other of those schools, so we had a 40/60 chance of a sports story being of interest (factoring out people with no kids or no connection at all to local schools). A daily paper covering a large metropolitan area might have 30 high schools, and the readership interest in any one football player from one of those schools can be what? And yet time and energy is still spent covering local sports.

News and journalism needs a new business model. I see the neighborhood blogs creating something promising, but the major media need to figure it out, too.