Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Communications

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.

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.

Is the Lack of Local News Polarizing America?

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When we moved to St. Louis in 1979, the city had two daily newspapers – the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. The Post-Dispatch leaned left editorially, and the Globe-Democrat leaned right. Both papers did a good job of local news coverage; generally, opinion and editorializing were confined to the editorial and op-ed pages, or an opinion columnist featured on the first or second page. Another source of local news were the weekly suburban newspapers, like the West County Journal and South County Journal. Along with local TV news, St. Louis was well-served with local news coverage. 

Fast forward 40 years. The Globe-Democrat disappeared for good in 1987. The Post-Dispatch acquired the Suburban Journals, and they, too, disappeared. TV news usually covers what it’s always covered – shootings, car wrecks, and other highly visual news stories. The Pulitzer family sold the Post-Dispatch to Lee Enterprises. 

The Post-Dispatch still sat atop the news in St. Louis, but it was a much-diminished position. From about 2005 onward, the news editorial staff (and presumably other staffs on the paper) shrank. The newspaper closed its Washington bureau. While the number of pages dropped, what was left was increasingly filled with wire service copy. Today, a reader typically finds more stories about national news, provided by Associated Press and the Washington Post. Local music reviews are still written by local reporters, but many movie and book reviews come from syndicated sources. 

St. Louis is not atypical. For most other metropolitan areas, one newspaper has survived. In some places, like New Orleans, the daily paper is not printed every day but is available online. 

Three communications academics have been studying what’s been happening. Joshua Darr is at LSU, Matthew Hitt is at Colorado State University, and Johanna Dunaway is at Texas A&M. The three have been studying the state of journalism for some time. One day, Darr discovered a reference to some of their work. The editor of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, had made a rather startling announcement. The editor has seen the work the three academics were doing, and she was intrigued enough to try an experiment. For the month of July in 2019, the Sun would publish nothing about national news on its editorial and op-ed pages. No op-ed columns, no editorials, no editorial cartoons, and no letters to the editor would be printed if they concerned national news. Instead, the focus would be local news.

The three academics swung into action; this was an unexpected opportunity to test their theories in a real-world situation. They set up a study, with another regional newspaper serving as the comparison. 

The Sun focused its opinion pages on local issues. And what happened? Readers engaged with local issues. People started listening to each other. People respectfully disagreed and debated with each other.

And what was happening in July of 2019 on the national scene? Robert Mueller testified to Congress about his report on the Russian collusion investigation. Democratic primary debates were held near the beginning and end of the month. President Trump was holding rallies. But the opinion pages of the sun focused on local news. One indication of what happened: references to Trump went from about one third of all editorials, letters, and columns to zero. 

You can read a short summary of the study’s findings at Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. The study itself, Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, is available at Amazon. 

What The Desert Sun showed, lending evidence to the theories of the three academics, was that focusing on local news reduced political polarization. Now consider all those news deserts – places with no news media or newspapers (which are growing in number) and those, like St. Louis, where national news dominates the opinion pages. A focus on national news may be great for the bottom lines of The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal, but it’s impoverishing local communities and adding to political polarization. 

I thought about what the Post-Dispatch’s editorial and op-ed pages, and various opinion columns in other parts of the newspaper, would look like if they focused on local news. No more snarky editorial cartoons about Republicans, Trump, and conservatives in general. No more Leonard Pitts and Eugene Robinson wringing their hands over anything remotely conservative and championing anything the Democrats might do, no matter how ridiculous or damaging. No more Dana Milbank, the columnist who coordinated his 2016 articles with the Clinton Campaign and got caught doing it. No Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, with his screeching hysteria about Republicans, Trump, and evangelicals who won’t listen to him. No more local editorial writer Kevin McDermott aiming for the National Snark Writing Award. 

Instead, we might see people writing about how to grow St. Louis. We might participate in discussions and debates about crime, our dysfunctional county government, redistricting of wards in the City of St. Louis, and how some schools managed to function during the COVID-19 pandemic when so many closed. We could take a hard look at how public education is organized and funded. We might find out why so many communities (like my own) allowed street maintenance to fall way down the priority list.

In other words, we might learn about and participate in the things that really matter in our day-to-day lives. 

In this series:

A Conversation About Journalism.

The Rise of News Deserts.

Top photograph by Waldemar Brandt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Conversation about Journalism

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Paul CŽezanne (French, 1839 – 1906 ), The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’ƒEveŽnement”, 1866, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

We have to start talking about journalism in the United States, and specifically the decline of journalism. Newspapers, television programs, and online news sites have been talking for years about how to fix the problems of circulation, readership, viewership, and competition from social media platforms, but I don’t think they’re going deep enough.

I’ve been working on a new fiction manuscript for some months now. The story is rooted in a community and the people who live there. An event happens that attracts the news media, both local and national. While the event and the role of the media are only a small part of the story, I’ve spent time researching news media, news, and how (and often why) certain event are covered.

This wasn’t a big stretch; my B.A. degree is in journalism, and I worked with journalists for most of my professional career in corporate communications. For three decades after I graduated from college, journalism remained recognizable. In 2003-2004, I was the director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools, amid a highly controversial reorganization. I dealt with journalists daily. I was interviewed daily, and usually by multiple reporters. (My first interview occurred 15 minutes into my first day on the job, when a TV reporter wanted a statement on a teacher sickout. I hadn’t even filled out my HR paperwork when I was standing before a camera.) 

As crazy and hectic as it was, this was journalism, and particularly local journalism, that I knew and understood. The reporters were covering news that people in the community cared about. They may have liked it or hated it, but there was no question it was important to them. 

In 2004, I returned to corporate communications, responsible for a very specific slice of company issues. I was still dealing with journalism that I knew. My colleagues responsible for more general media issues, however, were dealing with a journalism that seemed almost alien. The reporters were less reporter and more activist. They asked questions like reporters, but their stories often reflected nothing of what the discussion had been about. Staff meetings often became brainstorm sessions on how to deal with this. 

The issue lasted for years. Ultimately, only one thing was going to work: calling out the reporter for a bad or misleading story – and publishing the reprimand on the company web site or blog. It’s difficult to imagine the internal opposition to this – embarrassing a reporter was something you simply did not do. It was resisted for years, but nothing else worked. What finally broke the opposition was a story that postured as news but was so obviously propaganda that even a publication widely read by journalists called the reporters out. The company published the reprimand on its blog site. The awful reporting subsided for a long time after that.

What was new in reporting back then seems to be standard operating procedure today. Newspapers like to think the internet has eaten their lunch. And it has – particularly in classified and other kinds of advertising. But reporting barely disguised as activist opinion has had its effect as well – I know a lot of people who stopped subscribing to the local newspaper because the bias was blatant. 

And there’s no question that the newspaper has a bias, but what’s interesting is that the bias occurs mostly in national news stories, obtained by the paper’s subscription to wire services like the Associated Press and syndicates like Washington Post. Local coverage has severely diminished over the years, but the paper generally does a credible job with local news. (That is, unless local news becomes national news, then it reports like everyone else.)

Where I live is increasingly unusual in that my suburb of St. Louis shares a weekly community newspaper with a few other adjacent communities. It covers what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch cannot – local council and school board meetings, local development proposals, sales and property tax issues, and other issues that affect and often deeply concern people in the community. It has a lively letters-to-the-editor page that usually has only letters about local issues, events, and concerns. What the newspaper does, sometimes well and sometimes imperfectly, is facilitate democracy and self-government. 

People are looking closely at the connection between newspapers, and the decline of newspapers, and the increasing inability of the United States to govern itself, except by crisis. Next week, I’ll have a post about a newspaper that tried some rather innovative – it dropped all references to national news and issues from its opinion pages. 

Photograph of The New York Times by Wan Chen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“An Effort to Understand” by David Murray

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It may be the most idealistic definition of communication I’ve ever seen: “With sincere intent and real imagination,” writes David Murray, “all human beings can understand one another.” 

Murray is the editor of Vital Speeches of the Day. He’s the force behind the Professional Speechwriters Association. He leads the Executive Communications Council. He blogs, usually daily, at Writing Boots. He’s spent more than three decades in the communications business; I first met him when he was editor of Speechwriter’s Newsletter, back in the dark ages before social media, web sites, smart phonies, Amazon, and Google. 

He’s also politically blue. But he’s an unusual blue, one who believes that the politically red might actually be worth talking with. And thus his new book, An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half. It’s an optimistic book, reflecting the optimism and general good humor of its author. It’s a book about communications, comprised of short chapters ranging across the breadth of contemporary life – family, work, politics, change, culture, language, environment, leadership, friendship, and more. 

What links all of these things is the idea of communication. Life works because communication works. When communication doesn’t work, things unravel. Marriages fail. Friends stop speaking to each other. People suspect each of other of the most nefarious motives, simply because of what candidate they might for. Or, as Murray might say, communications fails when we stop acting like adults. 

It’s not about civility, he says; civility is not communication. Preaching to the choir and remaining safely inside our political bubbles isn’t communication, either. It’s not screaming names and labels at people to force people to back down and admit we’re right and they’re wrong. 

David Murray

Instead, communication is about understanding. We can have profound and fundamental disagreements about any subject or issue; the United States was founded in the context of profound and fundamental disagreements about government, people, and political philosophy, disagreements which still shape the nation today. But if we’re to hold this American experiment together, we have to make a sincere, sustained, and good-faith effort to understand each other. 

No one said it’s easy, least of all Murray. Coming from the moderately conservative (red) side of the political spectrum, I took him at his word, and I read his book to understand. I knew his politics; I knew we disagreed on a number of very basic things. But I also knew he would have something worthwhile to say, and something I could learn, because Murray is first a communicator. He’s not a political partisan seeking to convert me or any other reader to his way of political thinking. He’s a communicator seeking to understand others and himself, only asking for a similar understanding in return.

The 60 short essays of An Effort to Understand will make you laugh. They will make you think. Most importantly, they will make you look beyond the red and blue labels we use to objectify and categorize people. They will help you understand.

This may be the best book on communication I’ve ever read.