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Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“Bad News” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

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Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and co-hosts Newsweek’s podcast “The Debate.” Before joining Newsweek, she was the opinion editor of Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in the United States. She’s written for The New York Times and Washington Post. She’s appeared on MSNBC, NPR, and NBC. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is not the person you would expect to have written a book like Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. But she did.

Bad News is not a book written from a conservative, right-wing, or alt-right perspective. It’s not a hastily compiled mishmash of everything that’s wrong with the news media. Instead, Ungar-Sargon has published a carefully researched, well-documented, and well-written story of where American news media has gone seriously wrong and how that is harming the United States.

If the problem could be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: the business model of the news media has shifted from reporting the news to giving its demographic the perspective that it wants. Some call this reporting the narrative instead of the news. Whatever it’s called, it’s making a significant contribution, perhaps the most significant, to destroying trust it itself, in American Institutions, and what Americans have believed about their country. And that has implications far beyond the 50 states

This is what Ungar-Sargon documents in Bad News:

The people who are the reporters and editors have not been working-class for two generations. The economic and social status of reporters changed fundamentally, and the author points to the Watergate scandal as one of the starting points.

The major news media have abandoned the working class, not unlike the Democratic Party did beginning with the Clinton Administration. The working class is still large group of people, and Fox News isn’t so much the conservative media outlier as it is the channel that covers what the working class cares about.

Social media and the internet, far from “democratizing” society, have been the mechanisms by which the major news media centered their efforts on narrative instead of news – and turned the narrative into a business model.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

The media’s coverage of racial issues fits its audience’s understanding about race and itself, but it is completely out of kilter with what most Americans believe or experience. One example: 81 percent of Black Americans do not want the police defunded. Ungar-Sargon argues that the media is besotted with race because a discussion of class, which she sees is the real issue, would undermine the media’s own position.

The media’s cartoonish coverage of Jews, crime, and Trump voters exemplify what is happening. She doesn’t say it exactly this way, but Donald Trump is like the drug to the news media’s addiction. It needs Trump, and not only to prop up its ratings and subscriptions but also to be the ever-present Bogeyman out to destroy America as the media understands it.

She doesn’t present a laundry list of how to fix the problem; the solution will take generations. But she does suggest things that Americans can do to stop the media from exercising the negative influence it has. And it’s not things like cancel your newspaper subscription.

Bad News is an important book, one likely to be ignored by the news media. But the rest of need to read it and understand it. It’s that important.

Related:

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

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A work colleague in a Latin American country sent an email, asking for help. A manufacturing plant had been proposed, and while most people wanted it, a small number of radical environmentalists did not. There had been protests, road blockades, and rallies. And then, when it appeared that both the company and the authorities were going ahead, the ante was raised.

Using anonymous Twitter accounts, the protestors targeted the company’s spokesman. Scores of people were tweeting. A bounty was placed on the spokesman head — $5000 US was being offered for the spokesman dead or alive. And the tweets included his home address. Stripes were published in the local media.

I was asked to contact Twitter, which I did immediately. Then, as now, Twitter and the other social media giants were difficult to reach. They were, and are, all about communication, except when you needed to communicate with them. The company spokesman and his family went into hiding. Twitter responded two days after being contacted. The tweets, Twitter said, did not violate their community standards and would remain. 

Think about that for a moment. A US-based company was allowing its platform to be used to threaten and possibly accomplish violence against an individual.

I should mention this happened in 2014. This continued to be Twitter’s policy until about a year later, when its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, received a death threat. On Twitter. Overnight, death threats were deemed violations of community standards. It’s amazing how that works.

In a very short period of time, roughly five or six years, social media had gone from the “great democratic experiment to give power to everyone” to something darker, more threatening, and more dangerous. The first few years had been something almost euphoric; very few people today would say anything about social media is euphoric. We’ve seen its ugly side, and we’ve seen it over and over again. Today it’s called cancel culture. 

But it’s more insidious that people ganging up on someone online. What is worrisome is that it’s becoming embedded as policy with the social media giants. The concern, usually expressed by conservatives, is that a progressive / leftist mentality guides the social media platforms when they determine what’s true, what’s false, what is “missing context,” and what’s “fake news.” The Wall Street Journal took a look and determined that left-wing factcheckers were controlling the discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic. A lawsuit by conservative journalist against Facebook brought forth a really curious statement in Facebook’s court filings – that its factchecking was nothing more than opinion. I wouldn’t call that the best defense. 

In general, Big Media is comfortable with the factchecking done by the social media platforms. That’s no surprise if Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others are aligned with your own narrative and view of the world. 

Consider what happened with the Covington Kids in January 2019. The power of big media and social media converged to destroy a bunch of teenaged boys whom they believed epitomized the prevailing media narrative. As The Atlantic pointed out, the media botched the story, and the damage to their credibility has been lasting. Not to mention costly. On that Friday and Saturday, I sat horrified while I watched online friends on Facebook and Twitter hysterically embrace the role of lynch mob.

Social media are powerful and influential. According to Pew Research, more than half of the people on Twitter get their news from that platform. For Facebook, the number has been declining to slightly less than a third. My own experience has been to stop considering Twitter as a source for hard or political news and discount most of what I see labeled as news on Facebook. I follow virtually no news accounts on Instagram or MeWe. 

We have to learn how to assert, or reassert, some control over what is called news.

Related:

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

When Journalism Began to Change

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When I read Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger, I was struck with how much his experience at the newspaper tracked with my own experience in corporate communications. The worldwide web and what followed was upending his world at the newspaper at the same time it had begun to change mine – and for the same reasons. We began to deal with it earlier, while The Guardian and other newspapers were affected more quickly, but we were grappling with many of the same issues and at roughly the same time (1995-2015).

I left corporate communications for a time – almost four years. I felt worked to death, spun off, and finally laid off, and I was done. I set up my own consulting firm, and I was focused on two areas of communications – writing speeches and community relations. In late 2003, a friend dared me to apply for the top communications job at St. Louis Public Schools, which I did, thinking I’d never hear anything. I was wrong. They called, I interviewed along with nine others (we were all told to report at the same time and sat in the same room until we were interviewed). I got the job and started work the next morning.

The school district was in crisis. A reform board had been elected, an outside management firm was hired, the district was found to be bankrupt, and underway were layoffs, school closings, and staff restructurings. The old communications department had been 13 people. The new one was me and one-half of another person, and we shared a secretary with another group. 

I’ve never had a job like that one. On my first day of work, I was filling out papers in HR when I was told the news media were waiting for a statement. The teachers were having a sick-out to protest changes in sick-leave policy. I did five media interviews that day, three of them on camera. One of the reporters laughed when she saw me. “We heard they’d hired you. Welcome to St. Louis Public Schools.”

For the next eight months, there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t give a media interview. I was followed home at night by reporters. I was tracked down at a car dealership on a Saturday when I was having my car serviced. Sometimes it was national media calling and doing interviews by phone. I lived, breathed, and dreamed journalists and journalism. And sometimes the news happened right next to me, like when a school board member drenched my boss with a pitcher of water or people in the aisle next to where I was sitting were arrested at a school board meeting. A good meeting, my boss told me, was one where fewer than three people were arrested.

It was a crazy and rough-and-tumble experience, but I was dealing with journalism as I’d always known it, as I was trained in it, and as I had experienced it in corporate communications. A bit more intense, to be sure, but I recognized people who saw their jobs as getting the news and telling the story. 

By the time I returned to corporate communications in 2004, something had fundamentally changed, and especially with national media. I was working in a narrowly defined area, communications for so-called “legacy” assets. A spinoff from seven years before had declared bankruptcy, and the company had regained responsibility for all of the issues that had been spun off with the bankrupt company. I was hired because I had the background for it.

Generally, the reporters I dealt with specialized in business or environmental issues, or they were local media in various locations. I was in familiar territory, and the journalists were familiar. But with the company’s main line of business, the journalists were anything but familiar, and the people involved in media relations were going crazy.

Simply put, reporters were casting news stories in a broader context of opinion. It wasn’t all thinly disguised editorials masquerading as news stories, but it was close. And it wasn’t all reporters, but it was a few key ones. I’d sit in staff meetings, listening to the problems. And it wasn’t simply a case of “PR people always dislike reporters and vice versa” kind of problems. I read the stories, and I could easily see that the problem was serious. The media relations people had tried everything – from uninviting the reporters to events to traveling to meet with the reporters’ bosses. Nothing had worked. 

At one staff meeting, after yet another example of what should have been a balanced story had been turned into a disaster, I offered a suggestion. “We have a web site. You’re going to have to critique the story and publish the critique on the web site, showing exactly what’s happening.”

By the looks I received, they must have thought I’d landed from Mars. You didn’t do that with reporters. It would make it worse. They would hate you and get even. That was not a solution, and no one had ever done that before. “You don’t get into a spitting war with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

“Embarrassment at doing a shoddy job is the only thing I know you can do that might work,” I said. “Seriously, what’s the downside?”

My advice was not accepted. The problems continued. For years. Until the day a worse-than-usual outrageous story was published, inventing “news” out of whole cloth. It was all bogus. It was so bad that a major journalism school called out two reporters for what they had done. But only people following journalism had seen it.

By that time, one of my responsibilities included the company’s blog. We often published links to stories about the company. Without asking permission, I published the link to the journalism school’s statement, without comment, and lots of people saw it, including people inside the company. The offending reporters were pulled by their editors from covering the company for six months. 

Today, we have a phrase for the problem, and it is a serious problem. Many people will tell you that our national media no longer report the news, but instead maintain, promote, and defend the narrative (a post-modern concept if there ever was one), whatever the narrative happens to be. And it’s exacerbated by social media. 

How all of this might have started is unknown. A lot of things fused together – post-modernism, fundamental changes in university academics, the growing political divide in the United States, and more. The narrative is not an active conspiracy of publishers, editors, and reporters colluding to report the news in a certain way. It would likely be easier to deal with if it was a conspiracy. Instead, it’s group think, group think shared by many of the nation’s elites, and it’s killing journalism. And the rest of us

Related:

How Email Started a Revolution

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Lower photograph by Absolut Vision via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

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If you can think back to a time before Amazon, before Google, before Facebook and Twitter and even before My Space, you might remember how the worldwide web was first breaking into the public collective consciousness. In Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridgerdescribes how his newspaper encountered the early web and tried to understand what it meant – and how to make it work. 

This new thing had arrived on the communications landscape, and no one understood if it even mattered, or what you might do with it. At the exact same time Rusbridger was grappling with the question at The Guardian, we were grappling with it out our company. His efforts had one major advantage over ours – a small “skunk works” of IT people at the newspaper were working on the technical idea of the web for the newspaper. At our company, the IT organization had looked at the web idea and concluded that it was a passing fad, that the business’s future was more in the province of software programs like Lotus Notes. 

It sounds almost incredulous today, but there was logic to that decision. If the business was largely focused on customers and markets, then electronic programs to share information within those markets and with and between those customers made sense. We in communications understood that, but also understood that there was a large regulatory and public component to the business, and Lotus Notes would not work in that environment. 

Fresh from the experience with email communications to employees, we were spending time looking at emerging electronic technologies for communications. We quickly discovered that what research existed on the subject was largely academic, and mostly within the confines of Departments of English and Literature. We waded our way through a considerable number of books, research papers, and published studies in journals. The writing was a challenge – almost as if academics wrote on the subject to avoid understanding. We gradually sorted through it, and we began to learn the jargon, like hypertext and hypertext markup language (html). 

What helped crystallize our thinking turned out to be the annual conference communications and public affairs people in the company worldwide. I was given the duty of organizing it for this year. With a small team, we made the theme electronic communications. While the subject was relatively narrow, the speakers came from a broad array of backgrounds – the recently named online editor for Newsweek, a professor of rhetoric and public policy who talked about the similarities between oral and electronic communication, people who talked about the “emerging web,” and several others. We also used an outside firm that specialized in what was called “emerging IT technologies,” and they facilitated the involvement of every attendee in creating a CD of the conference. 

Nothing like this had been attempted before, and it was wildly successful. As a senior communications leader said later, “We were dragged kicking and screaming into the electronic era.”

The conference set the stage for the next communications leap – how to get the company on the web. We asked IT for help and were turned down; they couldn’t afford the time or what they thought the investment might be. So, we turned again to the tech firm that had helped us with the conference. They were local, and they happened to be the only firm with experience in creating a web site, for a small company that used the site internally and with a few customers. Only one other company had a web site in St. Louis at the time – Anheuser-Busch.

It was one of the most intense professional experiences I’ve ever had. For six months, we worked on creating a company web site. Everyone thought we were nuts and throwing good money away. The team consisted of me, my admin, and the outside consultants. To describe the companies and its operations, we used materials already approved for public consumption. But make all news releases available? Post news about the company? Link to external articles on the company? Create a weekly cartoon feature about the company? A feedback loop? All of that, and vastly more, had to be worked through a company famous for its extensive legal, technical, scientific, and public policy approval channels. 

Three weeks before we launched the site, the company hired a new IT vice president. He came from outside, and one of his first questions to the department leaders on his staff was, “Who’s in charge of the worldwide web?” The answer he finally got was, “Well, there is this guy in PR.” We found ourselves descended upon. With the launch so close, we convinced IT to hold off until after the launch, and then we could form a team to evaluate and look at how to go forward.

The launch was a stunning success. The critical factor was the knowledge and expertise of the outside firm; what they knew would not be duplicated inside the company for years. The fact that this firm had helped with the communications conference also gave them instant credibility with the company’s communications people. The web site attracted the attention of companies from all over the world; our contractor, in fact, was contacted directly by Microsoft, who’d seen our site and wanted to make the company a preferred supplier. 

What we understood was that a web site was largely a one-way communication vehicle; even with a feedback loop or contact email address, it capitalized upon the advantages of the web but didn’t really create two-way communications. That would come years later, and when it came, it would be a revolution.

Related:

How Email Started a Revolution

Top photograph by Umberto via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Middle photograph by Marcus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Lower photograph by Ian Schneider via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Leprechaun for Christmas (a short story)

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It was the worst Christmas ever.

Eight-year-old Chris Hunter was facing the first Christmas without the person he loved most in the world, his Grandpa Malcolm O’Brien. His grandfather had died two months before from a heart attack. 

His grandparents lived in a large, two-story stucco home on East Ardennes Avenue, one of the oldest streets in Stonegate, a close-in suburb of St. Louis. Built in the 1910s, the house had tall ceilings and Frank Lloyd Wright-type mantles, lighting, and overall design. It was utterly unlike the large, contemporary ranch home his own family occupied in Woodfield, a far western St. Louis suburb some 20 miles from Stonegate and 35 miles from downtown St. Louis.

Chris loved exploring his grandparents’ house. From the attic to the basement, the home was filled with boxes, trunks, and old wardrobes full of magic. At least, that’s what his grandfather always told him. Magic was everywhere. And he’d let Chris loose to search, and sometimes join him, for the leprechaun’s pot of gold. 

Since the time when Chris was old enough to listen, his grandfather had told him stories about the leprechauns, the small little people who loved to commit mischief and kept a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Together, Chris and Malcolm would search the lawn for shamrocks and especially the four-leaved clovers. His grandfather would read stories about leprechauns. 

Of the three Hunter children – Ross Jr., Emma, and Chris, the youngest – it was only Chris who would listen avidly. The two older Hunter children would roll their eyes and slip away, looking for something else to do. Chris alone would stay, grinning and laughing at the Irish accent his grandfather affected when reading the stories 

“This is our secret, Chris,” his grandfather would whisper. “You and I are the only leprechauns left in St. Louis, and we have to find our pot of gold that someone’s hidden from us.” 

In looking for the gold, they’d find old clothes, books, toys, and photographs from decades earlier. Each new find prompted new stories from Grandpa Malcolm. And Chris was captivated.

Ross Jr. was older by six years, and Emma by four. Ross Jr. was tall and blond, like their father. Emma and Chris looked more like their mother’s side of the family. His father often called Chris “Little Malcolm,” which Chris wouldn’t understand until years later. The youngest Hunter strongly resembled his grandfather, with black hair and brown eyes so dark and deep they looked almost black. He didn’t know why, but Chris knew that his father and his grandfather did not get along. The boy wasn’t quite sure what to make of his father’s regular references to “Little Malcolm,” but knew his father didn’t mean it in a nice way.

The annual Christmas feast was always held at the O’Brien’s house. Chris’s mother was an only child, so the celebration would usually be his grandparents and his family. The Hunters would arrive by noon, everyone would open presents, and then they’d eat at 2 p.m. sharp. Chris’s mother and Emma would help in the kitchen, Ross Sr. and Ross Jr. would head outside to throw a football or play basketball at the hoop Grandpa Malcolm had had installed for Ross Jr. in front of the garage. Chris had once asked to play with them, but his father said that he was too little, and he could watch them.

When his father had told Chris he could watch but not play, Grandpa Malcolm had frowned.  He took Chris by the hand and led him back inside the house. “I have a story to read to you,” he’d told the boy. And that started the leprechaun stories.

Grandpa O’Brien would read from the big book of Irish folklore he kept on the shelf in his study. Except at Christmas, when he would read an original leprechaun story he’d written himself, with the main characters being Chris the Leprechaun and his sidekick Old Malcolm. And every story was about Old Malcolm always getting them into trouble, and how Chris the Leprechaun would rescue them from a fate worse than death.

Whenever Chris was at their home in Stonegate, he and his grandfather managed to find the time to explore for that mythical pot of gold, which Grandpa O’Brien insisted was hidden somewhere in the house. They never found the gold, but they would often find peppermints, candy bars, and packs of gum. Once, on Chris’s seventh birthday, they found two silver dollar coins, which Grandpa O’Brien said meant they must be getting close to the gold. “And that’s one each for Chris the Leprechaun and Old Malcolm,” he’d said.

His parents thought his grandmother, still grieving her loss, might skip the Christmas feast this year. After the funeral, she spent several days with the Hunters at their home, usually with Chris by her side. He had her smiling and even laughing when he read the Christmas stories to her, using an Irish accent like his grandfather, and told her the stories of their escapades searching for the pot of gold. 

But she insisted that the Christmas feast at her house in Stonegate would continue. The only change was that they ate at 1 p.m. and would open presents afterward. 

They arrived at 11. Ross Sr. and Ross Jr. went straight to the basketball hoop outside. Chris followed and watched them for a time, but then went inside. Emma was helping his mother and grandmother prepare the meal, so he went exploring on his own. But it wasn’t the same without his grandfather. No new leprechaun story. No searching high and low and finding something sweet to eat. No pulling of pranks on the rest of the family. The boy felt almost desolate.

They ate their dinner, with dessert being the favorite of Grandpa O’Brien and Chris – mincemeat pie with a big dollop of whipped cream on top. Then it was on to the Christmas tree and opening presents.

Even that wasn’t the same without Grandpa O’Brien. Chris liked his presents, mostly toys and books, including a set of Hardy Boys mysteries. But he could remember sitting next to his grandfather, listening to him utter a smart quip about each present. And smelling the ever-present Old Spice aftershave. 

“Well,” Grandma O’Brien said, “we’re done. Anyone for coffee or tea?”

“Wait,” said Ross Jr., sitting closest to the tree. “There’s one more.” He reached underneath and retrieved a smallish present, wrapped in a dull green paper and green ribbon. “It’s for Chris. And there’s a message. It says, ‘Look Hard.’” He handed it to his brother.

“What on earth,” Grandma O’Brien said to their mother. “I don’t remember you handing it to me when I put the presents under the tree.”

Chris’s mother shook her head. “We didn’t bring it. I’ve never seen it before.”

“It wasn’t there,” Emma said, somewhat red-faced. “I looked at all the presents before we ate. It wasn’t there.”

Ross Jr. handed the present to Chris. “Well, open it up and see what it is.”

Chris looked at the present in his hands. He handed it to his grandmother, pointing to the gift sticker. 

Grandma O’Brien gasped. “That’s Malcolm’s handwriting. I’d recognize it anywhere.” She handed the present back to Chris.

The boy carefully removed the ribbon and paper, and then he opened the plain cardboard box. 

Inside was a small metal kettle with a lid. Chris lifted it out of the box and removed the lid.

The kettle contained several chocolate coins wrapped in the gold tinfoil. Chris stared in wonder, and then grinned. “It’s the pot of gold, the one Grandpa and I were always looking for.”

He looked closely at the candy coins. He pulled out one, and then he saw something else glinting among the pieces of candy. He pulled it out and held it up between his thumb and index finger. 

“It’s a gold coin,” he said. “A real one.”

“What?” his mother said.

“Let me see it,” Ross Sr. said, and Chris handed it to him.

“It’s a $2.50 gold coin,” his father said, “with a Liberty head, dated 1842.”

“There’s another one,” Chris said, extracting a second coin. He emptied the kettle on the floor, but no other coins were mixed with the candy. 

Ross Jr. was looking at his mobile. “I googled it. People are selling them for anywhere from $2,000 to almost $100,000, depending upon the condition and where it was minted.”

“Did you say 1842, Ross?” Grandma O’Brien said.

He nodded.

“That was the year the O’Brien family came to America, fleeing the potato famine.”

The family stared at each other.

“And there are only two coins?” Ross Sr. said.

Chris examined the coins again and looked at his father. “Just two.” And then he smiled, remembering. “One for Chris the Leprechaun, and one for Old Malcolm. They always split whatever they find.”

The worst Christmas ever had become one of the best Christmases ever.

Top photograph of a leprechaun via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission. 

Photograph of shamrock by Amy Reed via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How Email Started a Revolution

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I’ve been reading Breaking the News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, the memoir published in 2018 by Alan Rusbridger. From 1995 to 2015, Rusbridger was editor of The Guardian, if not Britain’s largest newspaper, then perhaps its most influential. Part memoir, part newspaper history, the book is largely about how The Guardian recognized and then started coming to grips with the digital world.

Part of what fascinated me about the book is that it covers approximately my own experience with the digital world and how I helped (or tried to help) a corporation’s communications department come to grips with it. My journey started slightly earlier that Rusbridger’s – in 1993. But it ended the same year his did, in 2015, and for the same reason, retirement. What he was doing with The Guardian and digital communications is almost a mirror image of what we were doing in corporation communications. 

In1993, a colleague returned from a conference in Toronto and said she’d seen a presentation by AT&T on its email newsletter for employees. It sounds old hat and rather quaint today, but in 1993, not many people had email accounts. At our company, roughly 5,000 employees were on company email – out of a total of 30,000. We thought that 5,000 just might be enough to start our own email newsletter. We talked with AT&T and with a small insurance company in Canada, the only two companies which at the time had email newsletters for employees.

The technology was available and functioning. The will to use the technology for an employee newsletter was not. It was an uphill slog, often steeply uphill. The people managing the computer systems predicted doom, as if an all-text newsletter would permanently crash the servers, cause the collapse of the global financial system, and usher in a new Dark Age. The communications bosses were skeptical, saying no one would care about company news from across all divisions. We plodded on, stymied at every step, until the day of a Eureka moment: No one could prevent us from doing it, short of shutting the email system down. So, we did a test. We sent the first issue to all communications people in the company worldwide, about 90 in all. 

The test was (unintentionally) brilliant. It crossed numerous kinds of operating systems and computer hardware. It crossed widely disparate commercial and manufacturing operations. It also crossed cultures, native languages, and time zones. And it crossed another potential barrier. Since it was just a test, and only with communications people, we decided we didn’t need legal or Human Resources approval. The plan was to publish twice a week for two weeks, and then consider what, if anything, happened. And we wanted to get some sense of how people responded to and interacted with a digital newsletter. 

We told the 90 communications what we were doing, and then we immediately launched the first issue, in case someone objected and tried to stop it.

Initially, we had no response. Then a colleague is Europe asked if he might forward it to a few people in his region. We said yes.

By the end of the first week, we’d received more than a thousand requests for adding a name to the distribution list. By the end of the first month, virtually everyone on the email system had requested addition to the distribution. The newsletter contained very basic items: news from the company, news about the company, and letters from employees. Yes, they wrote letters. We received them from all over the world, and we soon found ourselves moderating debates. It was a curating function, but we used a light hand. 

Something about our email newsletter had connected with people around the world. One employee explained it this way: “It’s cool to see it by email, but it’s cooler because of its voice. It respects its readers. It sugarcoats nothing. It allows employees to have their say, and we’re educating each other. It lets employees see the company as the world sees it, and we can see where the world is right and where it’s wrong.” Surprisingly, by crossing divisional lines, it allowed people to see what was happening commercially in other areas and even created sales opportunities. But the biggest surprise was to learn that sales reps, researchers, and others were forwarding the newsletter to customers, academics, trade associations, and other outside parties. (We kept that news to ourselves, but we had to be mindful of how outside people would react.)

Our twice-a-week newsletter, written to be read in at most five minutes, had opened the door to the digital revolution at my company. 

Next: Understanding what was happening, and here comes the worldwide web.

Top photograph by Online Printers via Unsplash. Used with permission.