Mutually Inclusive PR

Writing for Radio: Keep it Simple and Clear

Writing for broadcast requires remarkable discipline. No matter how many fancy words you know, you need to boil the sentences and phrases down to simple concepts, communicated simply.

But simplicity isn't good enough. You also have to be clear.

A news item on the radio today was about a adult video store robbery, in which the thieves "took a small amount of money, some videos, magazines and two wallets."

The newsreader ended with this sentence:

"They ran away, but police said they were not able to find them."

Top points for simplicity, but there's no clarity in the language.  Were the police looking for the thieves, or the porn magazines? Were the thieves looking for something?

I know how hard it can be to avoid ambiguities, so I'm not calling anyone out on this. It just struck me as a good example of simple language that tells the story, but leaves unanswered questions.

In this case, listeners are able to connect the dots and infer that the thieves ran away, the police were looking for the thieves, and the police were unable to find the thieves.

But in a story that quotes a public figure commenting on sexual abuse or fraud, it's important to be very clear who "they" is in your reporting. The last thing you want is for inexact wording to leave listeners wondering whether the mayor is guilty of a crime, when the mayor was describing his or her anti-crime stance,

Online Writers Get Instant Feedback in Hits

Cautious, controlled writing is valued by risk-averse large corporations.

But since beginning to write online, Jane Genova has learned to leave some of her reserve in the Recycle Bin.

The writing style that gets her the most hits when writing about a high-profile trial is "a combo platter of Sherlock Holmes attention to detail, ability to discern what may be going on beneath the manifest content (e.g. agendas, strategies, tactics), and presenting one's interpretation of that in a highly opinionated manner in real time."

Says Genova:

"The new sin (is) not being wrong, it's not entering the arena with a strong point of view.  That's the price of entry.  Once inside you better have the mental and verbal agility to slug it out with equally agile and verbal opponents.  Yeah, opining is a real dog fight.

"What has built readership has been flinging myself into this chaos called  the RI lead paint trial and using all my animal instincts especially hyper alertness and quick response to help readers make sense of it.  The more the tone mirrored the jerky pace of the old perils-of-pauline flicks, the more readers enjoyed it and the more obsessed I became with the whole enchilada.  The old term for this sort of preoccupation, on both sides, was passion.  The more apt one is, yes, obsession.  I'm proud to say that the lion's share of readers of this blog are obsessed."

She says it's only a matter of time before corporations learn the same lesson: their corporate jargon will get them little attention, while their more adventurous writing efforts will draw visitors and readers.

Tag: jargon style blogs corporate

Northern Voice Blogging Conference Highlights

Michael Tippett: Digg.com is an example of how the audience is influencing the news - readers vote on which stories should have most prominence. Their traffic is now bigger than NBC or CNN.

Nancy White:  The online world calls for new competencies. We operate in an electronic world, where our body language and our ability to sense body language don't help us. We need new skills of communication, facilitation, learning, tolerance for ambiguity. We need to be self aware before we can be effective telling stories and understanding others.

Robert Ouimet: The popularization of portable transistor radios was a transformative moment. In a similar way, blogging and MP3 players are changing the way content is consumed. The media relies on an audience. Media fragmentation scares the crap out of media companies. CBC Radio 3 is a response to these trends. It's a web site where people can send in their music. It's posted to the Net, was until recently the most popular podcast in Canada, and is broadcast on Sirius satellite radio.

David Sifry: The extremely popular bloggers have become more like mainstream media. For example, Instapundit and Boing Boing can’t handle comments. There’s about 115,000 people who are in the magic middle - 30 to 1,000 people link to them.  These are people who are influential or authoritative in areas that you might consider more niche.  These poeple become local authorities as opposed to the big broadcast voice. The amount of traffic these poeple see is manageable enough that they can continue to have real conversations.

Robert Scoble:  Google Juice doesn't care about "interesting". It cares about links.

Mark Schneider: Journalism's reputation is battered by credibility problems and complaints of bias. Best practices of mainstream journalism: Have an open mind; Try to avoid errors and mistakes; Corroborate with other sources; Maintain personal integrity; Rigorously chase the story.   

Tags: northernvoice media blogs northernvoice2006

Spin Detector Measures Political Deception

Queen's University tried out a deception detector, and applied it to speeches by three Canadian political leaders.

The results? Paul Martin uses the most indirect language, Stephen Harper the least indirect, and Jack Layton is slightly more indirect than Harper.

Using the Pennebaker model for detecting deception in text, the computer science students scanned the speeches for the following traits:

The Pennebaker model predicts that deceptive text will be marked by:

• A decreased frequency of first-person pronouns, perhaps because of a speaker's attempts to distance himself or herself from what's being said;
• A decreased frequency of exception words, such as `however' and `unless', perhaps to keep the story simple;
• An increased frequency of negative emotion words, perhaps because of some instinctive distaste about deceiving; and
• An increased frequency of action words, perhaps to keep the story going so that inconsistencies might not be noticed.

I don't know if I buy the model's premise, but at least somebody's paying attention to speechwriting these days.

Intrigued, I tried running a recent blog posting through the Language Inquiry and Word Count tool from the University of Texas at Austin's James Pennebaker, for analyzing character traits of an author.

If I understand the tool correctly, my writing is more direct, less emotional and more optimistic than average. I also use a lot of articles and big words, which leaves me open to accusations of being a detached, concrete thinker. (I also ran this posting through the tool, and it seems to think a brainy robot wrote it.)

Thanks to Jakob Webster for the link.

There's Something Bloggin' in the State of Denmark

I don't know what Allan Jenkins has been ingesting lately, but I want some.

The often urbane, usually thoughtful, generally erudite and sometimes downright rude author of Desirable Roasted Coffee has been on a blogging tear lately, and it's been fun to go along for the ride.

If you're in the communications business and you don't read Allan's blog, you'll survive. It's not as for-the-record as Shel Holtz's blog or as single-mindedly about PR as Jim Horton's. But you may miss out on some interesting perspectives on American politics, the world of business, European life, and whatever else is going through the mind of the American in Denmark.

Allan just writes about the things that fascinate him, the things that amuse him and the things that piss him off. And to judge from his recent output, he's been fascinated, amused and pissed off a lot lately.

Weblogs move up and down on my must-read list, but I always include Allan in my daily  browse. Mostly because his Desirable Roasted Coffee was the first blog I ever knowingly visited.  I hadn't seen him in a while, and didn't have his e-mail address handy, so I did the Google thing, and voila.  That one visit drew me into the world of blogs and blogging. His confident, unvarnished writing keeps me coming back.

My recent favourites from his coffee bar:

Bacon's Information and Cluelessness (the series of four entries)
Will You Read your Newspaper - or Communication World - in Three Years?
They Stop the Trains for Daylight Saving Time?
Is this Corporate Cluelessness Week? Ask Amy Gahran and Tosh Bilowski
Steve Crescenzo Takes Aim at Desirable Roasted Coffee ...

(This post was composed using Flock, thanks to a suggestion by Neville Hobson)

I Never Thought of it As Turd Polishing

Best quote of the week.  Tech journalist Chris Edwards on the difference between jargon and weasel words:

"There is a difference between jargon, the dialects that make technology just that little bit more distant, and euphemism, the attempts to polish a turd into something shinier and more attractive."

Edwards then parses a flabby news release by SoftBrands, showing how the use of language acts against clarity.

Vancouver Poetry Series Showed it Could Be Done

As an English major in college and university, I chased after B.C.'s literati, looking for wisdom about the world, the art of writing, and how to be cool.

Now online literary journal Jacket Magazine has uncovered an interview I did with poet/novelist/personality George Bowering in 1979, for The Ubyssey newspaper and the Vancouver Poetry Center Newsletter (promoting a series of poetry readings by some of the big names of the North American poetry scene). Jacket is a remarkable online publication edited by John Tranter, well worth visiting.

Bowering was a delightful author to interview, with his gravelly voice, well-timed wink and deadpan sense of humour. A prolific poet, he had recently published Burning Water, a novel about Captain George Vancouver's voyage of discovery up the west coast of North America. In it, he captured the misguided certainty of the European mindset, and the bizarre, disorienting situation the sailors found themselves in, jockeying with the Spanish for territory in the new world.

In the lead-up to the Vancouver Poetry Centre events organized by UBC literature professor Warren Tallman and a legion of volunteers, I interviewed Bowering, Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt, and independent thinker and writer Brian Fawcett (see a weblog Fawcett contributes to).

The reading themselves were eclectic and extremely well attended. The buzz of having some big-league American poets rubbing literary elbows with some of the best in Canada was pretty amazing. This was long before the Vancouver International Writers Festival.  For one short season, Vancouver literary events were in the same league as the Harbourfront International Readings in Toronto.

I think my favourite reader was Lawrence Ferlenghetti, who had no trouble holding the audience's attention in the cavernous main room at the Vancouver Italian Centre.  One of six-or-so readings put on that year was also the first time I heard a poet perform alongside a saxophone player, as Victor Coleman did.

I don't think Warren Tallman had the inclination or the energy to make the Vancouver Poetry Centre readings happen again. But by bringing some of the stars of the genre to a large audience in Vancouver, he proved the audience was there.

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Update:  Hmmm.  After reading and rereading my interview, I realize what a literary ideologue I was.  Where are the anecdotes and trenchant observations of the quirks of my interview subject?  I see the poetry zealot worming away at the edge of poetics and polemic, but I don't see any humour. 

For an idea of the kind of journalistic chops I needed to develop before I could be a good observer of the literary scene, take a look at the Allen Twigg interview of Warren Tallman around the time I met him. It perfectly captures the loopy, absent-minded professor that Tallman came off as, yet still captures his place in the literary world.

The Limitations of Editing by Committee

The obvious quality control problem of maintaining a community-edited site like Wikipedia is getting some attention.  Andrew Orlowski claims the well-respected online encyclopedia is hopelessly in need of rethinking and reworking. And Jim Horton laments the inevitability of uneven quality within a structure that refuses to establish hierarchical editors.

I've certainly seen some definitions that were flawed, but I still find Wikipedia easy to use and easy to link to.

And I'm not the only one. Steve Rubel notes (thanks to John Pederson for the link) that Wikipedia is kicking the New York Times' ass in online traffic.

It may not be perfect, but it's good enough for a lot of people.

Fewer Dogs Wagging Tails Makes Easier Reading

Dave Taylor argues in The Intuitive Life Business Blog that writers should be able to impose their formating preferences on the publications they write for. Hah! I wish him well on his campaign.

After the editors get finished forwarding his impassioned pleas to their friends and co-workers, with caustic comments attached, they'll go for drinks with each other and shudder at the prospect of each story in a magazine having its own unique visual style.

Taylor is completely right that some things in this world are designed by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Magazines and newspapers, on the other hand, tend to be designed by professional designers, to improve the reading experience for us, the readers.

When Taylor recently submitted an article to a magazine, he was appalled to find that his text formating was being removed by their composition system.

What Taylor sees as the tail wagging the dog (he's the writer, so he's the dog), is actually a case of the dog (the editors are in charge of the content of the publication) wagging the tail (the writer, who is commissioned to write something that will be edited and formatted to fit the writing style and visual guidelines for the publication).

Dave wants a particular word to be bolded?  Fine, as long as it's on his blog, where he's the dog. If publications altered their style guidelines for each different writer, guess what? They wouldn't have a consistent style, and readers would hate it.

If readers are used to a newspaper or web site bolding company names, what are they going to think when Dave decides to bold a quote form a source. Is the quote a company name, the reader is wondering. Variations from the publication's style create confusion, which may make the writer feel good, but it doesn't encourage the reader to renew their subscription.

Taylor's right, the dog should wag the tail. He just needs to realize that when his writing appears in a publication that has a style its readers are used to, he's the tail, not the dog.

Another Author Getting Screwed Financially

I have always assumed that internationally renowned artists, actors, writers and songwriters are financially well off.  Lately, I've been seeing more and more examples of creators being frozen out of the fruits of their labour, usually by corrupt or inept business managers.

Publishing executive Connor Cochrane has taken on the cause of Peter S. Beagle, whose literary output has been small but extremely influential. In addition to publishing Beagle's books, Cochrane has launched a campaign to put pressure on companies that have benefited from Beagle's creative talents to do the right thing and compensate him appropriately.

Beagle wrote fantasy novels The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place, which were seminal books in the 1960s. His most famous work, The Last Unicorn was made into a movie with his screenplay, released in 1982 and featuring Japanese animation and voices by Jeff Bridges, Alan Arkin and Mia Farrow, among others.

In the case of Beagle's script for the original Ralph Bakshi animated feature of Lord of the Rings, Cochrane seems to be hoping to guilt producer Saul Zaentz into coughing up some cash in addition to the $5,000 "consulting fee" Beagle was given for the screenplay.

The case for getting some compensation for The Last Unicorn looks a lot better. Cochrane claims Granada Media owes Beagle "hundreds of thousands of dollars" for the half-million sales of DVDs and videos of the movie.

Beagle faces a lot of expenses related to his hundred-year-old mother's care, reports Cochrane.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the link.