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Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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When Journalism Began to Change

January 20, 2022 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

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.

Dancing King Stories: The King’s Communications Man

May 14, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Jay Lanham Dancing King

This is the first in a series of profiles of some of the main characters in the novel Dancing King. Every character has a story, one that is much larger and more detailed than what can be included in the narrative.

In Dancing King, Jay Lanham becomes the communications director for Michael Kent-Hughes and the monarchy. He is all of 29, but he already has considerable communications experience behind him. He was graduated from the University of Northumberland, receiving a communications degree (with honours). He had had internships with The Guardian and The Telegraph and was hired by The Daily Mail right after graduation (from an editorial perspective, The Guardian would be considered on the left side of the political spectrum, The Telegraph slightly more toward the center, and The Daily Mail on the right side of the spectrum).

He worked for The Daily Mail for three years, and he then joined the communications staff of Britrail. He quickly gained a reputation for crisis communications following two train accidents, but what put him on the map in the communications industry was his adroit handling of a threatened strike by rail workers. Lanham didn’t know it at the time, but he effectively countered the plans of the would-be strikers whose unions had hired Geoffrey Venneman of the FBL public affairs firm. Two years younger than Venneman, Lanham had successfully anticipated almost every move by the unions.

After three years with Britrail, he set up his own consultancy, Lanham & Associates, which, as Josh Gittings, Michael’s chief of staff wryly noted, was likely more Lanham than Associates. He shared an office with other creatives in a small Whitechapel office building, and while his firm wasn’t an overnight success, he was managing to grow his client base. Single, he lives in a small flat in the Southwark area of London, about three blocks from the Borough Market and London Bridge Station.

Dancing KingHe applied for the job of palace communications director almost as a lark. While Gittings had been soliciting resumes, he hadn’t talked to Lanham, so the application was what’s called “over the transom.” It arrives at a propitious moment; Michael has interviewed several candidates, including the faux candidate Geoffrey Venneman, and not found anyone to his liking.

With his application, Lanham proposes a communications plan for Michael, based on what’s read about the new king and after reviewing the text and video versions of Michael’s sermons when he served as a priest at St. Anselm’s Church in San Francisco. Michael responds enthusiastically; he asks his wife Sarah to read the application as well, and she responds just as enthusiastically.

During the actual job interview, which begins at breakfast with the family at the palace and continues as Michael brings their adopted sons Jason and Jim to school, Lanham essentially starts doing the job – a large number of reporters are waiting at the school to film scenes of the boys’ arrival and toss questions at the king. Lanham handles the media so well that Michael hires him on the spot.

During the next six months after his hiring, Lanham will discover what it means to be Michael’s communications man. The king will be undertaking a series of sermons in London churches, and Lanham will help plan those communications. At the same time, the king will find himself the target of Geoffrey Venneman, hired by the Archbishop of Canterbury to stop Michael’s plans for the reformation of the church.

While Dancing King is a work of fiction, Lanham’s hiring and his crises experiences during the first six months of Michael’s reign are taken from real life and my own experiences in both corporate and crisis communications.

How Lanham is hired is based on an experience I had some years ago, when I was considered for a speechwriting job with a very large defense contractor. The CEO wanted a 20-something, savvy about social media. The recruiter saw that a 50-something candidate knew more about social media than the two 20-somethings being considered. All three of us were given an assignment of writing an article about a speech by the CEO for an employee publication. The other two wrote articles. I wrote the article, and then embedded it in a mocked-up newsletter with other stories, using pictures and charts I found on the company’s web site. As it turned out, none of us got the job (it wasn’t filled), but I did visit corporate HQ as one of the two final candidates.

Lanham handles a series of crises, all orchestrated by Venneman. All of them (including a protest) are based on my own experiences in crises communications, including figuring out who some of the hidden players are. And one section of story, involving one of the most important speeches Michael will make, mirrors almost exactly an experience I had writing a speech for a corporate executive.

Top photograph: An idea of what Jay Lanham might look like. Photo by Ali Morshedlou via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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Meet the Man

An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.

 

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