The world as it should be

In advertising, there is a principle that says something like: “People don’t want fertilizer, they want green lawns.” The idea is that ads should focus on the green lawns, not on the chemicals that made it that way because you are then giving people what they want. You are meeting their needs.

Newspapers can learn from this.

People don’t want a play-by-play, inverted pyramid story on the city council meeting last night, they want to know what the decisions mean. Tell them a story if you have to, but put the news in your readers’ terms, in your readers’ lives. Most newspapers still cover the same ol’ bureaucratic beats the same ol’ ways, and modern readers are bored, bored, bored.

So newspapers, which still hold the franchise for local news — the names and faces inherent in chronicling the quotidian — need to continue their solid community coverage. They just need to break free from the old and embrace new ways of approaching the story(see the “experience newspaper” at readership.org).

Many changes in newspapers occur at the big papers and trickle down to the smaller. But with this more personalized approach to writing and presenting the news, I think it is the small dailies and the weeklies that can lead the way. They are less tied to the traditions of newsroom management and organization.

In many ways the future of newspapers lies with them, not with the circulation giants.

And it’s my own drum. Two “new” ideas:

A lot of traditional media folks are still wringing their hands about the Internet, blogs, podcasts, iPod downloads and so on. Still trying to figure out how to “fight” the onslaught. The answer is, of course, not to fight, but to hop onboard.

My first “I Told You So Award” to myself comes from re-reading an article I wrote 20 years ago. In it, I addressed the newspaper publishers who were worried about audiotext, videotext and even local cable television (which were like our public access stations now). Even way back then, I pointed out that they were not in the newsPAPER business, but the NEWS business and that they needed to get that news out using whatever technology was available. 1986. What’s new?

My second award, the “I’ve Been Saying This for Years Award,” was brought to my attention by an article in the Boston Herald (4/13/06). A BU j-prof is apparently getting a lot of ink for saying that public relations and advertising programs should not share a department with journalism programs. Been saying that for years (That’s why I won. . . .).

Every time I have brought this up, I have been almost booed out the door. But it just has always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Journalists, even those who work in the belly of bean-counting conglomerate beasts, are trying to get at the Truth. Journalists and PR folks have nearly always had a bit of an adversary relationship. No matter how much PR folks claim that they always tell the truth to journalists, their jobs depend on spin. And advertising? Don’t even get me started (see post below).

Yet we put all these students together in the same program. Journalists need a different training environment. Been saying that for 20 years, too.

End of drum beating.

I hate to connect William Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury and advertising, but here we go.

I usually teach journalism students because of my professional training. Even with the turning over of too much journalism to the gods of infotainment (the bean counters) and the journalebrities (see also entry below, 1/05/06), I truly believe that the main goal of the journalism “industry,” if you will, is to get at the Truth, as difficult as that is in our postmodern world.

On the other hand advertising and even public relations people manipulate the facts for their own benefit.

Example: I am certain we all get in the mail those envelopes that try to pass themselves off as a government document or check. The idea, obviously, is to trick the recipient into opening the envelope. Golly, that’s sure aboveboard and ethical.

One recent one (below) came in a brown official looking envelope with “Department of Communications” in the upper left, followed by a stern warning to anyone but me opening it. There is the threat of five years imprisonment or a $2,000 fine, according to the cited U.S. Code. Inside? A form letter from a mortgage company saying I qualify to borrow “up to 125%” of the value of my home. Gee, thanks for inviting me into a dangerous level of debt because a company wants to make more money.

The other one that came yesterday also looked official and came from the “Disbursement Center,” with an address in Washington, D.C. “OFFICIAL BUSINESS” is under that, in bold. It is a window envelope and it looks like my name and address is printed on a check. It even says “Pay to the order of:” next to my name. Inside? A faked (though “non-negotiable”) check for nearly $50K. Golly Ned, how generous of them to offer me the opportunity to take out a huge equity line! They make more money, and I get to increase my debt.

I understand that sometimes people need this information for entirely legitimate reasons. But don’t try to trick me. That’s underhanded. But that’s advertising.

I think one of the results of all the cutbacks in newsroom budgets has been a lack of originality in news coverage and a laziness when it comes to following up on stories.

Has anyone besides me noticed that local television news, and to a lesser extent newspapers and national TV news shows, aren’t able to, for instance, tell us ahead of time about potential dangers? We don’t get reminders about sharks here in Florida as spring arrives, but as soon as we get the first bite, we’ll get a rash of stories about sharks, shark attacks, how to avoid shark bites, are our children safe anywhere at all any more, and blah blah blah.

That will last until a bicycle rider gets hit and killed by a car. Them we’ll get, “Ten Ways to Ride Safely,” “Bikes: Two-Wheeled Death Machines,” and “Bike Helmets: Is Your Child’s Brain Really Safe?” And the shark stories will be forgotten.

It’s fine for media to report what has happened, but I’d like to see more about what might or will happen. That would be helpful.

Then there’s the lack of followup, as with the young woman who went missing in Aruba or the lone surviving coal miner in West Virginia. For more than a month it was all-Aruba, all the time. Then suddenly the media feeding frenzy ends and silence sets in. They whip us up for weeks and then let us down as fast as a cold french fry. Time to move on to the next frenzy.

This whole hoo-hah about James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Oprah’s apology for her on-air call to Larry King defending Frey brings up the journalist’s job of using facts to create Truth. That’s what journalists do, you know, use facts as a means to an end. The trick is knowing which of the thousands of gatherable facts should be kept and which left out. There are always too many facts, and the mere choice of one fact over another demeans Truth to the absolutist, to the Modernist who believes only in facts.

William Shawn, the great former editor of the New Yorker, sets us up here: “The New Yorker has devoted itself for 59 years not only to facts and literal accuracy but to truth. And truth begins, journalistically, with the facts.” (He said this, apparently, about a non-fiction story that used made up characters and quotations.)

Great quote, but notice that he says truth begins with the facts. Facts and literal accuracy can get us off the ground, but can relying only on the facts without the writer’s weaving of them create Truth? Can we have woof without warp? Doesn’t the very creation of narrative sully the purity of Facts?

I know I can step on a few toes here, but I believe the old saw may be right: “Don’t let the facts get in the way of the Truth.” (It ranks right up there with: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”) I don’t think a simple reliance on facts always makes for a good story, and it certainly won’t always drop you off at Truth’s door.

I am not advocating making up facts, but I think intelligent inferences in some stories (such as cerainly went on in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) is acceptable, if not necessary. If we know that 2 plus X equals 5, then is it a lie to say that 3 plus X equals 6, even though, technically, X is still unknown to us? If Capote reconstructs conversations the murderers had from their own recollections, is that wrong? The factual accuracy may have been lacking, but wasn’t the Truth shown?

I suppose this is why my colleagues keep me out of teaching the reporting classes — they think I will ruin our students. . . . I do think it is a worthy topic for discussion, and I hope the students get that.

Oprah, in her apology to her viewers today, made this exact point in her call to LKL. She said during the call, in essence, that just because Frey lied about some facts, the Truth of his story had helped all sorts of people, so what was the big deal? She was right to recant today, but it shows the issue and the power of Truth in the face of facts.

Frey was wrong. I do think, however, that sometimes an over-reliance on the facts can get in the way of the story, and maybe even keep us from getting at Truth.

I can’t figure out why my local daily fishwrap still has the remnants of the old 1950s “society” pages. That’s right, they still run police lineup-type photos of the truly rich, the pseudo-rich and the nouveau riche. Do other daily newspapers do this?

What’s the point of these people at some local gala celebration, sometimes holding a glass of wine or other high-end beverage? This is news? If it is for a charity, fine. Tell us the money. But don’t line up the glitterati and take a picture just to show off their pampered faces. Wasted space.

On the other hand, this is perfectly acceptable, even desirable, for those local weekly papers in most of our communities. That’s what they are all about: names and faces, and the more the merrier.

The dailies should stick to news and do it better. Stop trying to be all things to all readers. The community press does it better anyway.

“Schrodinger’s cat” is a famous mind problem from Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of quantum physics, as reported in a WSJ column last week. It occurred to me that information “spin” acts the same way. Or maybe I should be on the other side of the coin and say that it is about Truth or Reality. It’s all very postmodern, and it gives me the shivers.

Here we go. The story is that there is a cat in a box with a vial of cyanide and a radioactive atom. As explained in the WSJ, if the atom decays, the emitted radiation particles smash the vial, releasing the cyanide and killing the cat.

Now, let’s say the atom has a 50-50 chance of decaying by noon. When you open the box at noon, is the cat alive or dead?

You may think the simple answer is that it’s a coin toss, but quantum physics says it’s more complicated than that. QP says that at noon, right before you open the box, the cat is in BOTH states, that it is BOTH alive and dead. Only when you look does one state emerge. This is how atoms work, but recent studies have found that the weirdness of quantum physics continues to work in larger and larger settings, thus impacting (if we are willing to really think about it) the very nature of reality.

What does this have to do with the media and spin?

While thinking about the cat in the box, it struck me that stories in the media work almost the same way. Written objectively, some stories can be read one way or another, depending on the preconceived notions the reader has. To simplify it, let’s say a story quotes some numbers (“lies, damn lies, and statistics”) and those numbers can either support or not support a certain position.

Before the story is read, it exists in the either/or world of neither truth nor spin — in fact it is both. Then, read by a proponent or supporter, the story settles into one state and contains truth. But when a non-supporter reads the same story it becomes something else: spin. Same story, different realities. Not different readings, different realities.

It’s no wonder those godawful media pundits are yelling at each other all the time.

I may edit this after I think about it some more.

Generally speaking, I consider advertising evil, though necessary. The WSJ ran two stories this week that laid out a vision of the future that is a bit ugly.

On Wednesday, in “Night of the Living Debt,” Jesse Eisinger talks about how in 2005 the personal savings rate went negative (i.e., we spent more than we earned) for the first time since the Great Depression. So as always doing the right, ethical thing, companies are advertising deep discounts and/or cash-back deals to keep American consumers buying, despite being in debt over their eyeballs.

The hell with the average American’s $8,000 plus in high-interest credit-card debt alone. Let’s do what we can to entice them to spend more.

This while CEO pay is soaring beyond mortal belief and the average worker is worse off than they were in Nov. 2001!

Eisenger’s article refers to spending “zombies” and makes comparisons to Romero’s film, “Dawn of the Dead” from 30 years ago. I think a better comparison flick is ‘The Matrix,” in which humans exist only to feed the machine: American consumers’ sole value seems to be in funding CEO pay and shareholder profits, even at the expense of their own financial well-being.

In a Tuesday article, the WSJ pointed out how the splintering of the mass audience on radio and TV is leading to the demise of the 30-second spot (The demise of the 60-second spot was years ago when it was discovered that American TV-watchers have the attention span of an over-caffeinated squirrel.).

So companies are looking at different ways to get out their message of spend, spend, spend, and the hell with tomorrow.

I am reminded of another movie, “Minority Report,” in which consumers are identified by retinal scans as they walk by store windows and then are bombarded by personalized audio messages to spend, spend, spend.

Advertising and marketing folks are probably heartened by these movies. They scare the hell out of me.

Now back to my regularly scheduled job, which is — you guessed it — teaching advertising design. I promise to do my best to instill a sense of social responsibility along with creative thinking.

I had just returned from my Christmas break from design and computing — from doing, not from thinking about them — when a welcome online article fell into my consciousness from UX land.

I had been thinking about how my earlier posts (some of which, ahem, are quite good) slowly fall off the first page and into the relative obscurity of the archives. Once there they become virtually invisible, even though some of the remaining posts may refer to them. No threading is available, at least not through Blogger. No way to indicate commonalities in any way, unless you do it manually and continuously. It is a bad design.

Hope springs eternal, and someone brighter has written an interesting article about what changes could be made. It can be found at LukeW Interface Designs. The article includes some good links and illustrations. Luke Wroblewski also has a number of good articles beyond this one.

More thoughts to come . . . .

I have beeen wanting to get into this for the past few weeks.

NEWS ITEM: The U.S. military is “secretly” paying Iraqi newspapers to run positive stories (written, apparently, by U.S. soldiers) to fight what the military called “misinformation.”

And a lot of people are upset by it. Huh? First a quote or two from the Christian Science Monitor story on 12/1/05.

“Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we’re breaking all the first principles of democracy when we’re doing it,” said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

And

“In the very process of preventing misinformation from another side, they are creating misinformation through a process that disguises the source for information that is going out,” said John J. Schulz, dean of Boston University’s College of Communications and a veteran journalist. “You can’t be creating a model for democracy while subverting one of its core principles, a free independent press.”

Now, I’m no fan of most public relations (or the war in Iraq), but isn’t that really what’s being done? Simple PR?

Subverting a core principle of a free independent press? If we cut out the placing of favorable stories in the news media, a lot of flacks would have to get real jobs. Maybe I am missing something.

Now, the president’s OK of the NSA spying on us — and we DO believe him when he said that all civil liberties were protected — that’s a horse of a different color.