Finally, a profitable newspaper.

Unless you happen to live in Holmes, western Tuscarawas, southeast Wayne and northern Coshocton counties of Ohio or you’re an exceptionally well-read Amish person, odds are you’ve probably never heard of The Budget. Based in Sugarcreek, Ohio, it’s a paper that really gets its audience — big time.

The Budget isn’t fretting much over what to do about online content like other, bigger papers do. Why? Because they’ve simply decided to offer less.

Visit their website and you’ll see a pretty interesting collection of small-town local stories — how the Bulldogs nipped the Pirates on a go-ahead FG,  a local church ministry that crafts prayer shawls, progress on the new roadside signs welcoming folks to Sugarcreek.

What you won’t see is national news. Why? Well, it’s certainly not because they don’t offer it. It’s because … well, let me let them explain it. This is from their website:

“Out of respect for our 116-year relationship with our Amish and Mennonite writers, readers and friends, the National Edition remains available only in its printed format.”

You see, The Budget has a 116-year relationship with a core audience that shuns technology, and they intend to remain important and loyal to that core audience.

The result? You can only get the national edition through the mail, like 20,000 folks or so do. And because the paper comes to that audience in the way they want it, The Budget — despite its dated and costly production process — remains profitable. In fact, according to this Associated Press story, they may even be adding editorial staff

Clearly, the factors surrounding The Budget’s decision are unique to them. But I’m convinced that there’s something here that we should all be mindful of. Maybe — just maybe — if we know our audiences well enough and do all we can to meet their expectations, we’ll find the courage to move in the direction we need to, whether that seems like the “right’ way or not.

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My personafessional life.

Is it just me, or is anybody else feeling the boundaries of their personal and professional lives becoming more porous? My friends are my colleagues, my colleagues are my contacts, my contacts are my peers, my peers are my friends, and so on and so on. Smarter folks (like Julien Smith and Chris Brogan) call this the blending of social constructs, but no matter what you call it, I think it’s critical if you want to get anything out of social media.

Okay, scratch that — maybe not anything. After all, I suppose some folks find value in simply staying connected in these new ways. It’s kind of fun to know what my cousins in Atlanta are up to, and what my old high school friend did over the Fourth of July weekend. Either of those would certainly fall under the category of anything. But I like to get a bit more out of it, frankly.

Take Twitter, for example. I don’t follow a ton of people, but those I do follow are pretty interesting folks. All day long they are cluing me in to websites I should check out, pointing me to some new trend in my business or my profession in general, or guiding me to a pertinent news story. These folks aren’t selling anything. They are simply giving me a small 140 character window into what they are thinking at that moment, and since many of us are in similar businesses or professions, I often find these tiny windows surprisingly illuminating. Perhaps that’s because, like most folks, I tend to build my networks around similar interests, and so those networks are often rich with pertinent information.

True, my network sometimes tells me things that may not be so illuminating — at least not in a professional way (though I do reap great benefit from my friend Laura’s irrepressible optimism). Some of the folks I follow on Twitter, like comedian Tim Siedell, are simply good for a laugh at random moments throughout the day. And some of my Twitter feeds are straight up news. (For my money, there’s no better way to get on-the-spot news.)

But here’s what intrigues me — it all seems to add up somehow. This blended stream of incoming information seems to create something unlike anything else I’ve known. If it were all professional all the time, I’d process it with some corner of my brain that holds the “you-have-to-read-this-because-it’s-good-for-you” reflex. If it were all personal all the time, I’d process it with my “well-that’s-interesting-but-probably-not-particularly-useful” reflex. And in either case, I’d be missing out on something.

Also — lurkers, take note —  it’s worth pointing out that until you jump in, you quite likely won’t understand how this confluence works. That’s another matter I’ve been giving some thought to, and will be doing a presentation on at the fall College Communicators Association conference.

So thanks to all of you, my personafessional friends/colleagues/contacts/peers. Keep me posted.

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What do choosy mothers really choose?

Here’s a little story about a day my world shifted, and how it may be shifting again.

Years ago, I was a bit of a Deadhead. Okay, maybe more than a bit. I usually caught somewhere between six and ten shows a year. Maybe 50 to 60 shows when it was all said and done. I did it for the music — partly. To paraphrase Bill Graham, the Grateful Dead weren’t the best at what they did. They were the only ones who did what they did.

But I also did it for the crowd. Back then, it felt like belonging to a tribe. A tribe of misfits, maybe, but a tribe nonetheless, with its own code of conduct. Over time, as the tribe got larger (and the band became more popular) things started to change, and you could no longer count on the code holding up. The whole scene was more widely accepted, but its standards were not more widely shared. A lot of the newcomers had different ideas about what was okay and what was not.

And then one day, in a mall in middle America, I stumbled upon a Grateful Dead tee shirt in a tacky gift shop — you know, the kind that sell the ersatz lava lamps and blacklight posters. That’s when I knew it was over for me.

You see, part of the appeal of the whole experience was that I could feel securely outside the mainstream and still operate within the comfort of a set of shared values and assumptions. Now that the scene had so clearly become mainstream, it had taken on those mainstream values and I didn’t really want much to do with it. (In fact, it wasn’t long afterward that the scene pretty much collapsed of its own weight, but that’s a different story.)

For some reason, this is what I thought of when I read this Newsweek piece about some trends in the blogosphere.

Look, I’m as aware as the next person that an obscene number of people are blogging, so it’s not as though I imagine it as anything but mainstream these days. But still, one of the reasons I’m drawn to both reading them and writing one is that the medium manages to carry a sense of personal connection despite its broadcast delivery. This paradox — a personal touch in a broadcast medium — is, I think, at the heart of the success of all social media. Even if I’m one of a million followers of Pete Cashmore’s smart smart Twitter feed for Mashable, I still feel like he’s talking to me.

But when I’m confronted with evidence that forces me to acknowledge that what I’m reading is not so personal after all, I’m left feeling a little skittish. What if the review I’m reading isn’t a true review, but the work of a corporate shill? What if the advice I’m seeking to resolve a computer problem is simply an effort to guide me to a particular product? What if choosy blogging mothers don’t actually choose Jif, but are paid to say so in their endearing mommy blogs? Blech.

The web is democratized, and that’s a good thing. But democracies don’t guarantee fairness, only access. Those who know best how to game the system, win. (And if you don’t believe that, then explain our political system to me.) Maybe we — legitimate users — will find a way to preserve what’s good about the medium, or maybe we’ll simply move on to the next thing that satisfies our need for personal connection in an increasingly disconnected world.

Either way, I’ll be looking at certain Twitter feeds, blogs, and websites with an even more cynical set of eyes. And no one paid me to say that.

Promise.

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So much to say…

Okay, so I just realized it has been more than two weeks since I last posted here. That’s twenty days without a single thought passing through my head. Right? Well, not quite. In fact, I’ve had a whole bunch of thoughts going through my mind. Thoughts about work, about language, about parenting, about <gasp> politics. But none have made it here. Why?

That’s a little complicated to explain, but I think the answer says a bit about me, and a bit more about the medium.

About me — every day, just as I settle down to the keyboard to post something here, a pesky little editor lurks just over my shoulder, a mean spirited imp who has an opinion about everything from subject matter to semi-colons, from metaphors to metonymy. And he’s not the least bit shy about sharing his opinions, especially when he’s really got his game on. Lately, he’s been playing like an MVP. He doesn’t even wait for words to form before he starts whispering in my ear.

“Why would anyone care about that?”

“Don’t you have anything worthwhile to say?”

“Shut up already and go mow the lawn, doofus.”

As I mentioned he’s a pretty mean-spirited guy.

I know everyone has one of these companions. Some of them are worse than others. For the most part, mine’s been largely vanquished. Writing professionally for a couple of decades will do that. But here on this blog, he’s found new ground. And that leads me to a bit about the medium.

If you give me an assignment — something you need written — I’m on it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a clear or complicated, long or short, studious or silly. It doesn’t even matter that much if YOU understand what you want to say. I’ll write it because you need it. That’s what I do.

But a lot of new media doesn’t fit that bill for me. Take this blog, for example. No one tells me what subjects to focus on, what each post should say, what absolutely positively needs to be said. It’s a soapbox, really. The same holds true for my Twitter account. It’s there, waiting for me to feed it. There’s no assignment, no task to complete. Just the soapbox, waiting for me to step up and have my say. But just because I can have a say, should I?

Consider something as simple as a Facebook update. Do you think twice before you fill in that box? Do you wonder if it’s pertinent enough or witty enough or important enough? Sometimes the answer to that question is simple and you post away. But when it’s not, do you point your browser elsewhere?

Clearly there are those who deserve a say, and there’s ample evidence of these new methods of having it are working and working well. If you are a public figure, or the least bit concerned about public perceptions, the climate of the blogosphere is critical. And I’m sure most of you already know that the story of the plane in the Hudson was broken by a Twitter feed. What’s more, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that the ability to capitalize on new media played a key role in electing our president.

But when it’s all said and done, I think striking this balance between what we can say and what we need to say remains an unresolved issue for many of us, even though my annoying pal says “What a load of hooey.”

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A white-knuckle ride.

Okay, bear with me here: a couple of decades ago, I found myself standing on the banks of the Nantahala River at the tail end of a wet spring, getting ready to climb into a canoe. I’d only been canoeing a half-dozen times or so, mostly on flat water or slow, lazy rivers. In front of me, the water was moving faster than any I’d ever seen, sucking white foam into eddies behind mammoth rocks. From downstream came the noise of a thundering waterfall. My partner was waiting for me to climb in. I did, and he pushed us off. Immediately the canoe lurched forward, as if on a rail. The river grabbed us, and propelled us forward. We steered as best we could, but there was no turning back.

When I think about social networking, I’m reminded of that feeling. The river is moving fast, and many of us in the communication business are dipping our toes in the water. Some of us have already pushed off, and are being carried downstream, navigating with varying degrees of success. Others are still on the shore, wondering a) if we really want to go where the river will lead us, or b) where the heck we’re going to use for a paddle.

There’s a certain sense of inevitability in the air. We all know how much these kinds of networks have grown, and we’ve all seen evidence of how powerful they can be. So, of course we are all tempted to jump in. After all, how long can you stand there watching your competitors barrel past you?

But before you shove off, I think it’s worth remembering that while you can guide your canoe — often quite deftly — that doesn’t mean you can go anywhere you want in it. You can’t pick a spot directly across all that white water and say “There. That’s where I’m going.” It’s just not going to happen. The current is going to pull you downstream, whether you want to go there or not.

In the end, I think it’s just like me standing on the banks of the Nantahala all those years ago. At some point, you just have to push off, hang on, and go.

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Which means that …

I can’t even begin to estimate how many hours I’ve spent in the last few weeks trying to help people tell their own story, and tell it in a way that will be compelling to others. I’m amazed sometimes at how hard this can be, even for people who have great stories to tell.

I’m not speaking, of course, about the kinds of stories that we tell one another as friends about how our weekend went, or what happened on our trip to the beach, or the funny thing that our son/daughter/neighbor/boss said. Most folks seem to manage those tales pretty well, though I’d wager we all know some who can’t. I can’t help them, and — thankfully — it’s not my job.

No, I’m talking about organizations that have to try to communicate what they are all about to a public that may or may not care. This is a far different  task, and generally speaking, there’s much more at stake. So why, then, do so many organizations have such a hard time with it?

My hunch is that it’s because they just can’t see themselves from the outside in. Many of the folks I’ve been working with lately are at the pointy end of the pyramid for pretty large organizations. One would think that such a vantage point would offer them a pretty good view of what’s around them, but my experience tells me that the opposite is normally true. These folks normally look straight down, and as a result, they are often consumed with the nuts and bolts of their organizations. They think much about how things work (or don’t work) and little about how their goods and services are actually experienced by those who use them. So, when asked to tell their stories, they can talk all day about the features of their organizations — we have this, we have that, we have a good program in this, we have this many options available in that.

But in the long run, customers are more readily persuaded by benefits, not features. What’s the difference?

Well, think of it this way –suppose I’m trying to sell you a load of firewood. I could tell you that it’s seasoned. That’s a feature. But I could also tell you that it lights easily and burns clean. That’s a benefit. I could tell you that I’ll deliver and stack it. That’s a feature. But I could also tell you that you won’t have to waste time, money, and energy to get the wood where you need it. Just step out your back door, and there it is. That’s a benefit. See the difference?

Many many moons ago, a mentor clued me in to a pretty blunt instrument that helps a lot of folks make this translation. Simply name a feature, then tack the phrase “which means that” on to the end. When you complete that sentence, odds are pretty good you’ve isolated a benefit.

For a house painter: I use only premium quality paint (feature) which means that you can put off repainting for a much longer time (benefit).

For a web designer: I’m up to speed on the latest technology (feature) which means that your web site will look and work like those of the big boys (benefit).

For a … ahem … freelance writer: I have nearly twenty years of experience across all kinds of business sectors (feature) which means that you won’t have to worry whether or not I can tell your story (benefit).

If you want someone to truly understand the value of what you offer, be sure to take this extra step. Don’t think only about what you offer — think about what benefit that conveys to your clients and customers.

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Say what?

In order to maximize the power within your day-to-day written communications, you should always and continually be on the lookout for words which you have written which may be excessive or unneeded. Or, to put that another way:

To write powerfully, eliminate unnecessary words.

I’m always amazed by how many words most folks waste. It’s a wonder we haven’t run out. I wrote a while back on eliminating some of those wasted words, mostly foolish buzzwords. (By the way, if you haven’t seen it, you really need to check out BuzzWhack, a great source for words to avoid.) But there’s much more that can be done.

To begin, forget about what sounds important, or at least get over the notion that more words pack a bigger punch than fewer words. Lots of academics have a hard time with this, and if you’ve read many academic journals (you poor soul), you’ve seen plenty of examples of the kind of language arms race I’m talking about. Back in the mid 90s, the magazine Philosophy and Literature ran a bad writing contest. Here’s the prize winning sentence — yes, that’s right, it’s a single sentence — from 1998.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Got that? I didn’t think so.

It’s worth noting that the professor who penned this masterpiece is no dummy. She is, in fact, a Guggenheim Fellowship winner and renowned scholar at UC Berkeley. It’s also worth noting that this is an extreme example.

But for most of us non-Guggenheim Fellowship folks who are not particularly renowned (in Berkeley or elsewhere), we ought to strive for brevity, not length. We ought to use accessible language, not jargon. And we really have to get over this idea that if we can only make it sound important or complex or just flat-out smart, then it will be powerful. Usually, it’s the opposite that’s true.

So, in the end, what I would say to you about learning to write powerfully is that you would be well-advised to take matters into your own hands and, wherever possible, eliminate any extraneous or unnecessary words or phrases that you may have used in your writing.

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Needless to say…

I was in the middle of a phone interview the other day, the second of the morning, when the candidate said something that pretty much made me stop taking notes and look at the clock to see how much time was left before I could safely say something polite like, “Well, I don’t want to keep you any longer.” In response to a question about tactics, he answered:

“Communication is key.”

He followed up this pronouncement with a longish pause, as though the weightiness of his comment demanded that we pause for a few moments to let it settle. It was 11:23 AM. I know because I looked at the clock immediately. He chattered a bit more about how communication is really key, and how he really, really meant that.

Maybe I’m being a bit hard on the guy (though there were some other shortcomings that already had him behind the eight ball), but that kind of throwaway language drives me crazy, particular coming from someone who aspires to take on a role as a key communicator.

Language is a pretty powerful tool, but not if you’re lazy in the way you use it. And while private, casual conversation is one thing, I think formal settings demand a bit more precision.

Of course, we all have pet phrases that we fall back on when the moment doesn’t lend itself to careful speech. My wife rolls her eyes (with good reason) whenever I say “The fact of the matter is…” and my whole life I’ve been perplexed by people who begin sentences with “Needless to say …” and then go on to say the thing that has no need to be said.

Business settings seem to be particularly fertile ground for this kind of thing. Marketing guru Seth Godin has compiled  a list of business cliches if you want to start striking them from your lexicon.

At the end of the day as we’re going forward, are we really committed to adapting a mission critical attitude to our language? Are we really looking for a robust, scalable turn-key solution to a more impactful dialogue? How many times must we shift our paradigm, or think outside the box? (A former colleague of mine once managed to singlehandedly bring an entire meeting to a halt when he suggested – very earnestly – that we unpack our paradigm.)

Alarm bells start ringing in my head when I hear this kind of stuff, especially when it’s coming out of my own mouth. My fear is that these phrases aren’t getting to what really needs to be said or, worse, that they are deliberately obscuring what needs to be said. Maybe if we all agreed to be a little more careful when we speak, to tolerate a moment or two of thoughtful silence in the midst of our conversations, we’d all be better off.

I know I’d be gavel down with that.

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Lost (and found) in translation.

I’ve just listened to a BBC podcast on language and translation that featured, among much else, a recording of a Ghanian poet reading his work in his native dialect. Amazing, really, how when you strip away meaning, you can hear the music of language so much more clearly. It was like a song, and even the best of translations aren’t likely to be able to recreate that.

I’ve often thought of what I do as something akin to translation. Many years ago, when I was first cutting my teeth in the business of writing, I took on a freelance job for a company that made software that analyzed stock on hand and optimized supply lines and production processes. Let me remind you — I was an English major. These are not concepts that I had ever once thought about. I met with the company owners and they handed me a sheaf of documents, each one more impenetrable than the next. They called this stuff “All You’ll Need to Know.”

It was ghastly — single-spaced, jargon-ridden, poorly punctuated, footnoted, chart-laden. And what they wanted was ad copy. Clean, solid ad copy.

I attacked “All You’ll Need to Know” with gusto, but it did not give up its secrets easily. In fact, I don’t think it gave them up at all. I had to beat them out of it. I went at the pile a second time, pulling a few key documents that seemed to hold the kernel of what this software did. I focused on these, did a couple of scrap paper diagrams — work flows, terminology, that sort of thing — and slowly, a big-picture understanding began to emerge. I framed that understanding in a creative concept that I thought illustrated the idea well enough, and — bang — all done. The clients loved it, though they subsequently butchered it with a design from a local freelance designer that — even now — is too painful for me to think about.

That may have been the first time that I understood how this process of translation works. These were men who knew their product backwards and forwards, inside and outside, up and down. They could describe in the most minute level of detail how it did what it did. But they could not speak plainly of its purpose. They could not boast of its benefits. They could not make it understandable to those who might buy it. In the end, that’s what they paid me for, though, like the design, my compensation for the job that is equally painful for me to think about.

Over the years, I’ve been struck by how often I feel like a translator. Sometimes I translate jargon. Sometimes I translate bombast. Sometimes I simply capture a feeling that someone wants to express, but cannot. All of this is what I do, and if I do it well, I get the satisfaction of having someone say “That’s exactly what I meant.”

I could go on, but I think that’s “All You’ll Need to Know.”

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A gamboling problem.

I don’t know about your house, but in our house, there’s a premium placed on using just the right word for the right job. Given that my wife and I are both writers and editors, that’s to be expected. What’s not to be expected — or at least what continues to surprise and please me — is that our children have the same sensibilities.

The other day at lunch, my wife and I were talking with our son when he described his lack of enthusiasm about a chore by saying that it didn’t exactly make him feel like gamboling through the forest. Yes, that’s right. He’s a teenager and he actually used the word gambol in conversation.

I know your geek alarm is probably sounding right about now, but I promise you he’s not a geek, anymore than my daughter — a 12 year old who described one of her babysitting charges as obstreperous — is a geek. The truth is that they are both very likable, very normal, very cool kids. They are also very well-read. This, as you can imagine, has done more for their language skill than anything we could ever do.

Of course there are times when you use the right word, and it drops into a conversation like a polysyllabic bomb that sucks all the air out of everyone in the room, leaving them mumbling to one another asking “What did he say?” and “I’m gonna have to look that up.” This happened to me in a meeting one day when I described a common occurrence as quotidian. Of the four others in the room, only one — a staff member of mine — had any idea what I was talking about, and she simply smiled at me as if to say “Oh, that went well.”

In that case, the right word was, in fact, the wrong word. This has as much to do with audience analysis as anything else. There’s a fine balance between a word that expresses the notion you are trying to communicate perfectly to your audience, and a word that makes you audience say, as Samuel L. Jackson does in Pulp Fiction, “Check out the big brain on Brad.” This is something you want to avoid.

Still, though, it’s a judgment call, but I think it’s one we ought to be comfortable making. Why shouldn’t it be okay if someone has to look up a word? Why shouldn’t we all be doing our part to elevate the language? Why shouldn’t we take that extra moment to think, and to call up just the right word? Particularly when the right word — exactly the right word for your purpose and your audience — has such a powerful effect in both your writing and your speech.

I think that’s kinda, like, important.

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