Even though I was a daily newspaper journalist for several years way back at the start of my career, I still love it when journalists open up about their day-to-day life and what the trade means to them. Therefore, esteemed writer Calvin Trillin's new compiliation, The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, is set up to be a page-turner for me.
The book includes “disparate pieces from various places in various styles” and amounts “to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years.” It’s true: Trillin has written stories for many outlets, including The New Yorker, The Nation, and one of my old favorites Brill’s Content. Broken into sections on the trade, reporters and reporting, big shots, R.I.P., controversies, niches, and closings.
His first topic in the book is “the lede,” a term I still use often in my strategic-communications work and often feel apologetic for using, having to explain that "no, I haven’t misspelled something." Trillin calls himself a “collector of ledes.” Like many old-time journalists, he appreciates a story told grippingly from the start. It can be a one-word crime article that begins (and ends) with the word “Dead” or it can an obituary in The New York Times that packs an entire life into a first sentence.
When I started my first newspaper writing job out of college, I was paid $17,000 a year and worked incredibly hard and very long hours. I was a known entity in the community yet the people I was covering - coaches, judges, lawyers, politicians - were all making way more money. I never really thought much about this. I loved to write. I loved to report. If that's what it paid, I would have to be happy with that, even if Trillin points out that news people are odd members of society. Is it a job befitting a college graduate? About all you might be truly guaranteed is a “decent obituary.”
I also always wanted to work at a magazine and never truly did (I freelanced for National Geographic and other magazine-like publications), but Trillin’s essay on the downfall of magazines is interesting. Time Magazine invented the genre in 1923, with Newsweek coming along 10 years later. It was originally designed like The Week (which is my favorite magazine these days, essentially an upgrade from Time and Newsweek), presenting “the week’s news succinctly to ‘busy men’ who were too involved in their important endeavors to spend time wading through a lot of newspapers.” Time started as “a rewrite operation” before moving into enterprising original reporting. The magazine’s founders invented a fact-checking system that pitted the all-male reporting staff against the all-female research staff with the thought that it “would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process.” This was in the era of “group journalism,” before bylines were introduced at Newsweek then Time. Columnists followed.
Trillin himself left Time so he could work for The New Yorker and then, realizing that “the civil-rights struggle had been covered mostly in terms of organizations and court cases and disruptions,” he wanted to write a book all by himself telling the stories of people who had been involved. He has continued to write for The New Yorker and the rest of this book promises interesting stories about it, even if, as Trillin jokes, there hasn't been a person who has worked at The New Yorker who hasn't written a book about working at The New Yorker.
Chuck Klosterman has become one of the icons of contemporary pop-culture commentary. His latest, The Nineties, is an essential overview to a decade worth remembering through his eyes. Here are some of my favorite takes from the second half of the book. You can also read my takeaways from the first half.
“What seems weird now didn’t seem weird then … for example, that Pauly Shore spent much of the nineties as a bankable movie star.” All five of his move viewed today are “astoundingly insipid.” At the time, The Weasel hitting it huge was just what it was, it made sense somehow.
Presidents, like Shore, were also celebrities. In fact, they are always guaranteed to be celebrities, no matter how lacking their accomplishments might be, for all time. Day-to-day policy-related news the presidents make is largely forgotten in the future as people come to only remember, perhaps illogically, the men themselves. Bill Clinton, for example, will always be remembered as a serial adulterer, primarily for his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky. People who didn’t live through the nineties will never embrace him, especially in the post-#MeToo era. Another way he might be remembered is his embrace of centrism, which could be seen as setting the scene “for pretty much every dilemma of the twenty-first century (including the election of Donald Trump).” Part of Clinton’s centrism came from his consultant Dick Morris, who polled Americans and really only cared what undecided voters in those polls said, all the while keeping Clinton very close to those answers as part of their “Bridge to the 21st Century” messaging.
American Beauty was highly acclaimed as the best, Oscar-dominating film of 1999, but it no longer holds up in terms of content. Kevin Spacey plays a middle-aged suburbanite who fantasizes after his daughter’s 16-year-old best friend. This is taken to be a standard fantasy of married men at the time. Meanwhile, his wife, played by Annette Bening, is seen as cold for having an extramarital affair. The problems loudly examined in the film are “micro-concerns” at best for today’s younger audiences and it’s probably “the last time in history such problems would be considered worthy of contemplation.”
The Y2K problem that fascinated people throughout 1999 was based on a theory that was posted on a digital message board in 1985. People and the press were so frenzied that people truly thought elevators would start dropping through their chutes, for example, and the federal government updated their computers at a cost of $8.5 billion. Some ended up saying it was an example of preventative science doing the best possible job, but it’s tough to tell if there really ever was any type of real threat.
Looking back at the Bush-Gore debates of 2000, the three events had terrible ratings and Gore kind of looked like the loser in hindsight. While Bush could barely express cogent thoughts on the topics, Gore’s sighing and grimaces and condescension at Bush’s clear idiocy made him look like a jerk while Bush came off looking ok to the low-brow masses. The announcement of an old arrest for drunk driving just a week before the election didn’t even stop people from preferring to have a beer with Bush than with Gore, according to a survey taken at that time by the Sam Adams beer company.
To recall just how close the Gore-Bush election was (although Al Gore did win the popular vote by a half a million): if just 1 percent of the people who voted for third-party candidate Ralph Nader in Florida - just in one state, Florida - the Supreme Court chaos would have never happened and Gore would have simply won.
Klosterman ends his book by looking at the headlines on September 10, 2001 and noting how markets all had their own news and journalism. Sure, there were some overlapping stories - such as the previous day’s NFL scores, the latest from the Chandra Levy murder, a suicide bomber in Israel - but there were still no viral stories or trending celebrities. “The world was big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cares if you did or did not.”
The next morning, as papers arrived on people’s doorsteps at the same time as 19 men passed through airport security at four airports with box cutters and the eventual result of killing 2,977 people … “the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.”
This is a very entertaining book, and enough time has now passed since the decade that most of us have probably largely forgotten the events or at least they have become somewhat blurrier. So it’s partly a nostalgia trip, but also a substantial contribution to placing the 1990s in context as the end of a fairly long era, mainly due to massive technological change in mass communications.
The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by Timothy Gallwey is a somewhat legendary tome in tennis circles. First published in 1974, I'm finally reading it for the first time and I'm taking away lots of helpful tips.
I long grew up as a John McEnroe-inspired tennis hothead, quick to throw my racket or belt out loud questions to myself asking why I hit a ball a certain way when I knew I should have hit it another, better way. In other words, I'm the perfect audience for this book. At least I used to be. I'm a lot calmer now on the court, but I'm hoping the Inner Game philosophy will get me even closer to tennis zen.
The book, in the most simple of terms, is all about focusing on the present moment, quieting the mind to enhance performance, and letting go of self-judgment. It introduces the concept of Self 1 (the conscious mind, which must be quieted) and Self 2 (the unconscious mind, which must be trusted) and how that inner battle affects the level of success for tennis players.
The book starts with a quote I love from Maharaji: "If I’m entertaining myself in the game, I will win."
And Gallwey writes that the secret to winning any game is in not trying too hard, adding:
Players must perform spontaneously and with a calm mind.
The will to win unlocks energy and is never discouraged by losing.
This is similar to a natural process, the one we used when we were learning to walk and talk.
When coaching or learning tennis, it’s important to remember that images are more effective than words, showing is better than telling, and too much instruction is worse than none. In fact, trying too hard at either often produces negative results!
Talking to yourself and coaching yourself - almost like you are two separate people - can make you more tense and worse on the court. Self judging will typically grow and grow until the ego turns it into self-fulfilling prophecies, or generalizations like “my game is trash” or “I’m a poor server.”
However, making your inner instructor nonjudgemental - seeing what is happening rather than how good or how bad it is happening - will help keep you from trying too hard and will help achieve a relaxed kind of concentration.
What does all that mumbo jumbo mean in practice, you may now be asking? Well, here are some tennis tips that I'm hoping to have taken away from reading this book:
I'm thinking that the way I may be able to process all of it - in both practice and in the heat of battle - will be to bring out the old sports journalist in myself and report my practices and matches in my head from a neutral perspective, without overly criticizing or overly congratulating myself.
The author makes the point that there is no problem with assessing your serve and noting that your first serve, for example, was in 50 percent of the time in a match. It’s ok to assess that and try to make improvements. But judging that your first serve was bad will likely lead to tightness, trying too hard, condemnation, and other results that will not be helpful while playing. Blocking out the judgemental will allow you to pick up on details that you might have otherwise passed by while you were either admiring yourself or criticizing your shots and form.
In order to return Pete Sampras’ serve, you would have about a half second to make an incredible array of movements and decisions. Even with just returning the serve of an average player, there is about one second for all this. It is “a mind-boggling achievement … yet it is not uncommon.” Keeping in mind all this silent intelligence can allow us to “dissolve the unnecessary self-instructions” and over-control. Here's an experiment: tighten your muscles in your hand and wrist and you will find that the snap of the wrist that generates much of the power of your serve will not snap nearly as fast as if your wrist is not tightened. Similarly, if you’re constantly telling yourself what you did wrong on the last point, your cheeks and other parts of your body will tense and tighten and your game will suffer even more.
Players are usually aware of how they hit the ball but not as aware of where they want the ball to go. Don’t try to hit the ball deep or the serve over the net. Just ask Self 2 to let it happen. Step back and envision the arc needed for the shot. If it doesn’t go where you intended, don’t make a conscious effort to correct it, just let go and see what happens next time. One way I'll practice this will be to set a tennis-ball can somewhere on the other side of the court so I can tell myself that that’s where I'm going to aim. Then I'll try watching my improvements with detachment and not by attempting to get it correct.
Try role playing as a different type of player than you normally might be. Some players play defensively, some offensively, some play with a “formal” style in which they care more about looking good and stylish than winning, and some will do anything to win and hit the ball in a way that their opponents seem to find most bothersome. Try role playing and being different than your normal type of playing. It will be fun and could extend your range.
I'm going to work on these tips for a while before coming back to read the last two-thirds of this book.
In my day job, I communicate about flashy topics like driverless vehicles, supply chains, e-bikes and e-scooters, and the psychology of how people think (or don't) about how they get around.
I also spend time trying to understand things like how culverts impact geology, more sustainable pavements, and how "accessible floating bus stops" can be safer for blind people or others with disabilities. These are parts of our highly complicated infrastructure network that allow us to get from point A to point B without batting an eyelid. But should anyone else want to try to figure out how this highly complex puzzle fits together, Deb Chachra's new book - How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World - is as good of a place to start as any.
In fact, many people should want to understand infrastructure better, whether it's transportation-related or how we get our water or electricity, because President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act is starting to funnel more money into the industry than has been done at any time since FDR's New Deal to combat the Great Depression nearly 100 years ago. Much of the future of the U.S. workforce will depend on how much a wider net of people knows how the system works.
Chachra is a materials science professor at Olin College in Massachusetts and is a great communicator about tough topics. She details how we drive or take transit on a highly integrated system, turn on lights from a complex grid, cook dinner with gas, and drink water from separate grids that might be bringing the materials from somewhere close but more likely quite far away.
The Washington Post's book review notes, "As Chachra explains, you are living in the lap of luxury without realizing it. The great gift of our infrastructure is that it gives us agency over our lives, liberating us from everyday drudgery."
This luxury, on the other hand, turns into a political liability in that we don't honor or consider "essential" our utility workers in the same ways that we do our firefighters and police officers, which leads us to forget and neglect these systems in ways that can result in catostrophic events like bridge collapses and river breaches.
Chachra says we need to think big, like they have done in Wales with a place called Electric Mountain, where, inside a beautiful, seemingly unperturbed mountain water flows down inside and is then sucked back up in a perpetual renewable energy turbine system generating power to nearby communities. She argues that these kinds of projects can be done both sustainably and humanely, unlike her example of Niagra Falls, which saw the U.S. governement using eminent domain to flood the land of the Tuscarora Nation.
She writes that this system of displacing apparently less powerful people in the name of progress for those living in higher and varying degrees of luxury has got to stop. Part of this could be accomplished by making electric grids much more local and not tied to the national grid, and also using the source (water, wind, solar, geothermal) that makes the most sense for their own situations.
The other major change needed that she writes about is the need to take profit motives out of the infrastructure equation. The systems need to be resilient to the many growing threats presented by increasingly regular natural disasters. That, over profits, needs to be the focus of the massive investment about to hopefully create a whole new revised infrastructure system for the country.
As the Disney company celebrates its 100th birthday on the same day as I celebrate my own (my birthday, that is; not my 100th), I was thinking back a little on how many great films this company has made.
While I'm no diehard fan, I have a major fondness for its earliest works like Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. After this flurry of impressive and massive hits, along with a few other features, between 1937 and 1942, it's curious that there was a break in Disney's filmography until 1946's controversial Song of the South.
That's because, during World War II, Disney shifted from major motion-picture entertainment to producing propaganda as its contribution to the war effort. "Der Fuehrer's Face" in 1943 had the look and feel of any other Looney Tunes-type cartoon short, featuring Donald Duck living under Nazi rule before realizing the endless Nazi feel-good tactics under very harsh rule in the name of national patriotism is actually a terrifying nightmare. He wakes up to thankfully find himself in his trusty American-flag pajamas.
It's pretty funny stuff and possibly the highlight of Disney's 1940s war activism.
Other really interesting Disney shorts from the time include "Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi," from 1943, which uses Disney cartoon magic to describe what was going on in world events and how German families and their very young children were put under Hitler's sway. "Reason and Emotion" is another one worth watching from 1943. Disney also spent these years creating instructional films for the military on basic combat training and other topics.
As a communications professional, I’m a big fan of branding and understanding why people and organizations choose the logos they do.
One of the greatest logos of all time, especially in terms of brand recognition (we all know what it means when we see it), is the poison symbol. Its creator, Dr. Richard Moriarty of the Pittsburgh Poison Center, has passed away at age 83.
Mr. Yuk was created in 1971 as a way to show that certain products on the shelves should not be ingested. He knew his audience, and enlisted kids to help design the logo since of course kids would mainly be the people who would need to recognize it.
The Washington Post's Kery Murakami decided to dig deeply into data about growth patterns of people moving into spaces within a half mile from Metro stations throughout the DC region.
He contacted me (representing Arlington's Mobility Lab) because our expertise is on how important initiatives other than infrastructure are to the transportation choices that people make. Sure, running safe, reliable trains on time is really important, but it straddles the line between infrastructure and the education aspect we focus on.
In places like DC where the transportation grid has been built out about as much as possible, the only way to go is to win people's admiration and loyalty to various ways of moving around. The good news is that it can often be effective (if done well, which it often isn't), and it's a heck of a lot less expensive than building new highways and train stations.
Anyway, this is a good article, with excellent reporting and (I think) some pretty great quotes from me! :-)
But even though that meant 38,000 more people were living near a station, ridership didn’t grow. According to Metro’s figures, it fell. Weekday boardings in the District dropped by 13 percent between May 2011 and May 2018 — or by an average of about 57,000 boardings daily — while all those people were moving in around stations.
That was “absolutely” a lost opportunity, said Paul Mackie, research director of Mobility Lab, the research arm of Arlington County Commuter Services. “It doesn’t help that the SafeTrack repair program has led to a general decline in both service and loyalty to Metro,” he said. “But Metro needs to promote itself harder, especially in light of competition from other options like Uber, Lyft, carpooling, e-scooters, bikes and bikeshare, and the rise in teleworking.”
Mackie also said Metro hasn’t done enough to reach out to all the additional people moving in around stations.
“There is a huge TransitScreen on the marquee at Gallery Place/Chinatown that lists when the next trains are leaving,” he noted. “Why aren’t those signs in every neighborhood and bar and restaurant and library and hotel promoting transit?"
“We’re seeing the rich get richer – in both wealth and quality of life – and low-income people having to keep fighting to stay afloat with everyday tasks – like getting to work or daycare,” said Paul Mackie, research director for Mobility Lab, an Arlington transportation research center funded by local and federal governments.
Our panel at SXSW in Austin last month, How to Uber-ize public transit to save it, agreed that there is a lot that public transit can learn from Uber in terms of selling the public on its worth. At the same time, we also agreed that Uber absolutely can’t replace transit.
The PowerPoint slideshow that ran in the background throughout the session
I moderated and asked the panelists (Doug Kaufman of Transloc, Mike Russel of Texas Christian University, and Marlene Connor of Marlene Connor Associates) a series of questions, including:
In what ways should and shouldn’t public transit become like Uber?
Is transit nearly perfect in any place in the world, so much so that services like Uber and Lyft aren’t even necessary? Where are the candidates in the U.S. for making an “ultimate connected city?
What things do you think could get people in the U.S. to change our 100-year-old habit of always defaulting to driving alone?
What needs to happen with data sharing for public transit, private service providers, and even roads to all truly work together and make our transportation system benefit from where we are technologically?
What do you think autonomous vehicles will do to transit?
We don’t know much about what President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao will do, but it seems safe to say they will want private services to complement transit as much as possible. Is this smart and how can it happen?
Thinking of technology and AVs, if car companies and tech companies become the big breadwinners, in what ways can that trickle back down and provide jobs and income equality?
If the public sector’s role in mobility were reduced (it has been doing some great things like USDOT’s Smart City Challenge and FTA’s Mobility On Demand Sandbox grants), what do you think would happen to the transportation opportunities of unbanked people and people in rural areas?
What do you predict we’ll be discussing 5 years from now if this panel reunites?
We finished by fielding about a dozen audience questions from the 200 or so people in attendance.
This is part 2 of a two-part series at Mobility Lab on how advocates can create connected cities. Part 1 examined public agencies reshaping their transportation priorities.
Pinellas County, Fla., just west of Tampa Bay, is one of several local governments in the nation to essentially embed Uber and Lyft into the local transit system. Transit riders can get $5 back if they use those ride-hailing companies to connect to a bus stop.
Such a program from the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority encourages a healthy public-private relationship and, more importantly, should make it easier for more people to not rely on private car ownership or be left in isolation because of their distance from transit.
Transportation should be viewed like a smartphone. It should allow everyone to be connected to opportunities throughout the rest of society, at reasonable and low cost. And this ride-hailing partnership with transit is a crucial example of how local governments can catch up and be responsive in a fast-moving world of technology-driven transportation options.
No longer should agencies partition buses and rail from all the newer private solutions. Simply put, shared services can be complements to transit. But this is just one way that cities can look beyond traditional thinking in their mission to better connect their transportation systems.
Public agencies must engage with private service providers
Like the auto companies that have begun aggressively investing in ride-hailing efforts, many transit agencies are ramping up efforts to form partnerships with providers like Uber and Lyft. Paratransit is one area ripe for cost savings and real-time service (rather than having to book rides days in advance) through transit agency use of private services like Lyft.
The major caveat here to work out is whether ride-hailing vehicles – with drivers who can spend lots of time driving in between fares – are actually making traffic in cities worse. The only place this has been measured, New York City – which has a unique, data-sharing contract with providers – shows that Uber and Lyft are worsening congestion. The research from the American Public Transportation Association, the University of California-Berkeley, and others have said the jury may still be out on the traffic impacts, but this is an area for local governments to concern themselves. Uber at least has taken steps to help the greater cause, having entered an agreement with Washington, D.C., and several other cities to share data with transportation planners in an effort to better manage traffic flows.
Once ride-hailing arrangements are smoothed out, the next great frontier is autonomous vehicles. In 2016, the U.S. government announced a $4 billion program for self-driving cars, and Pittsburgh took steps so Uber could use the city as an AV testing ground. How can other local governments feel comfortable and confident when considering to do what Pittsburgh has done? Or what Local Motors with its mini-bus Olli – formerly operating outside Washington, D.C. – is doing? For starters, cities need to map out all the pluses and minuses (especially financially) that AVs will bring. From there, they can implement regulations, policies, and plans to safely integrate in this mode of the future.
Don’t forget about transit
“The first thing we need to do is talk with our public institutions to try and make more partnerships, more connectivity, between the different modes, new and old,” said Paul Lewis, vice president of policy and finance at the Eno Center for Transportation, at a panel I moderated at this year’s TransportationCamp DC. “It’s not an easy task. Transit is one of the biggest areas we can do this.”
Indeed, the cities that create connections best will do so basing it off the existing core infrastructure of roads and mass transit. But we also can’t forget that to truly make this ultimate city work, people need to buy in to the concept of multimodalism. To help get there, companies like Ford are leading the way toward one interactive pass or app that allows people to book, pay, and communicate with all travel options from anywhere. This seamlessness is key for the commute of the future.
Broadening the possibilities of the transit ride is also key. Where partnerships for transit might make the most sense is to have private companies “get people to transit from in-demand areas during off-peak hours,” according to Mobility Lab Director Howard Jennings, quoted in APTA’s Passenger Transport. This can reduce costs to transit agencies for pricey, low-ridership routes and bring in a wider customer base – a prospect that should be a more aggressive part of the mission for transit agencies. So-called “first-mile, last-mile” options are an area ripe for transit agencies to get involved, and some places are even going so far as to subsidize rides to and from transit. Orlando suburb Altamonte Springs, Fla., became the first city, about a year ago, to subsidize Uber rides to transit.
Another APTA report finds convincing evidence that on-demand modes, in many cases, complement – not replace – public transit. Transit consultant Jarrett Walker notes, “Many people who work inside of big companies [like Uber and Lyft] understand perfectly well how the profit motive conflicts with what you’d do if you were just trying to foster a better city, and many welcome regulation precisely to plug that gap.” As evidence appears that Uber may not be the answer to traffic dilemmas, the necessity for companies like it to work within a congestion-reducing framework grows even stronger.
And pricing itself will need to be worked out between all travel modes, which means car travel and parking prices need to reflect their true costs. When it’s cheaper to drive and park downtown than it is to take the bus or train or Uber, the multimodal, connected city goal will remain a fantasy. But there are signs of creativity to balance incentives: some European cities are paying residents to bike to work rather than drive.
Ideas for breaking molds
There are many directions cities could go to become “connected.” And while it could take larger cities with more staffing power to be able to do everything well, smaller cities could at least focus on a handful of these ideas, and do them well.
And as ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft get even more attractive as alternatives to transit, with dynamic in-ride app entertainment and cheaper casual-carpooling options, more and more transit agencies are examining how to use software like TransLoc that can make it easier to take services like Uber and Lyft to and from transit stations. Journalist Esther Dyson, who also spoke on my recent TransportationCamp panel, thinks this general idea can succeed far beyond city centers. “[Uber and Lyft] would have a real opportunity in small, less dense communities where there are people without jobs but with cars. They can dynamically schedule themselves,” she said, adding that hubs like hospitals and campuses could be ride-hailing hubs.
Parking is a ripe place for innovation, as it is generally overbuilt and underpriced. Santander, Spain, has become “the most connected city in Europe” because it’s focused on installing “smart” infrastructure such as sensors that monitor parking spaces. Sensor infrastructure can improve information about parking, and help people choose whether to drive or take other options.
Autonomous vehicles seem to be the elephant in the room. Cities want to prepare for them, but they don’t know how. Federal regulations and standards would certainly be a help in order to even the playing field, but there will likely be large shifts – more people might drive, parking and signage will need major reconfigurations, housing patterns will need to change – involved for the least-prepared places. A draft manifesto from several Cal Poly professors examines how AVs interact with pedestrians and people on bikes, but what about how AVs work with and complement mass transit? I’ve asked before: When cars can be summoned with a button and don’t require attention from humans, will it become even more difficult for transit to compete with the experience of autonomous vehicles? Grush Niles Associates have noted that planners should start mapping out various scenarios in which AVs could be linked into the existing transit foundations, including loops, small areas, large areas, cities, megaregions and routes where buses negate the need for AVs.
And last but far from least, transportation demand management – which includes clear information about options – presents an inexpensive, effective path for forging and solidifying those connections. Arlington Transportation Partners in Virginia works with 221 local organizations in its Champions program to make sure residents and employees know about the many transportation options throughout the county. Places are also learning that their front-line transit information – maps – simply need to be clearer, because most of us don’t understand them. And, finally, to catch up with the allure of the personal car, TDM and marketers can promote these options to connect in more exciting ways that portray transit as the norm.
Having the freedom to walk from home to take bikeshare to the subway to get to work, then maybe take a Zipcar on the way home, should present an exciting opportunity for cities. Racing towards the ultimate connected city could allow for places to provide innumerable benefits like improved traffic, health, safety, environmental conditions, and overall quality of life for many more people.
Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab, www.kittner.com
A brand is really only an idea. Strictly speaking, a brand doesn't even exist. That said, a brand is much more than just a logo or TV ads. If your airplanes fall out of the air all the time, that's what defines you, not your social media or those other things.
Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits is a book featuring conversations with marketing and communications leaders, and what it mostly boils down to is that brands exist in each person's mind whoninteracts with them.
The word brand originates from long, long ago. Ancient Egyptians branded their livestock with fire. But the phrase is much older than that even. The kind of mass-market branding we think of today really originated with the UK's trademark registration act in 1874 and now, a little more than a century later, there are more than 100 brands of bottle water alone.
Debbie Millman
While people like Naomi Klein in her legendary No Logo book may consider this a good or bad thing, Brand Thinking's interviewer/author Debbie Millman is most interested in asking why we behave this way, why we split into tribes who choose one water over another, and why we proclaim our various allegiances.
Conversations in the book include:
Design research and the inadequacies of branding consultancies
Procter & Gamble's move to purpose-driven brands
Why wit is crucial in branding
Smart Design's emphasis on creating cooking tools that work for all people, from experts to novices
The balance between enlightenment and commodity
How top brands embody archetypes
Whether we see ourselves as a Patagonia person or a Prada one is entwined in all sorts of cultural, economic, spiritual, and even mysterious processes. Stay tuned as I dig through this book and dig into some of the most interesting ideas.
My colleague Adam Russell wrote this up originally on Mobility Lab, about this 40-minute interview with me on the Talking Headways podcast that aired last week.
How can cities and transit agencies better reach out to commuters and guide them towards modes that aren't driving alone? How is the transportation landscape changing to include a greater breadth of transportation options?
Mobility Lab's communications director Paul Mackie recently discussed these questions and more with host Jeff Wood on the transportation and urbanism podcast Talking Headways. Referencing a communications struggle raised by previous guest Peter Norton, in which automakers dominate the culture of transportation by making cars the default "cool" mode, Mackie said the transit and active transportation industry has its communications battle cut out for itself:
“Maybe public transportation can’t afford to have 20 Super Bowls [like the car companies], but it feels like we’re so defensive. [The industry] reinforces the idea that biking, walking, and taking transit are unsafe activities, maybe even unfriendly activities. Why don’t we tell more positive stories about public transportation?”
Catch this discussion on the below episode of Talking Headways:
As I prepare to give a talk as part of a panel at tomorrow's National League of Cities Conference in Washington D.C., here are some of my thoughts about what I'll say.
Slide 1: Things like equity and making traffic bearable are things that government should be good at. That’s their rightful place and role. But something that the private sector, and increasingly businesses like Coke and Red Bull and Casper's Mattresses, to name a few, are good at and getting better at is what the mainstream media has been so good at for so long: telling stories.
Slide 2: Local governments can and should be: 1.) Their own media, and 2.) Hyper collaborative with their community.
Slide 3: Mobility Lab is based in Arlington, Virginia and is a project of Arlington County Commuter Services. This is just a small division that’s part of the transportation department, which is part of the environmental department. It doesn’t seem like there would be resources to have a media and research company, does it?
But, about five or six years ago, Arlington was smart. It wanted to get better at making its research about the incredible transportation work it had done be more accessible to the public. That home became Mobility Lab. A couple of years after that, about four years ago, Arlington wanted to start telling stories about the research, to make it even more accessible to the public. Those stories would be all about what makes Arlington special. Forty years ago, the county was an industrial, ugly, pass-through from the Virginia suburbs into Washington D.C. Arlington made important decisions to build Metro underground along a corridor that was not alongside Interstate 66. That gave the corridor room to breathe and grow for a completely walkable, bikeable five-mile stretch from the Potomac River at Rosslyn west to the Ballston neighborhood.
This corridor development has made Arlington famous, and Mobility Lab is a way to communicate that unique success to others around the world, while also bringing back the success of others so Arlington keeps informed, can learn, and can continue to become a better place.
Slide 4: So we built a media site because we identified that nobody else had a good website completely dedicated to the very specific topic that Arlington is great at. And the mainstream media was never going to give it the focus it deserves.
Yes, the corridor was built, but the key was getting people to continue using the transportation services offered. Tons of other non-profits, companies, and media are focused on transportation infrastructure and technology, but we wanted to focus on getting people to use transit.
Slide 5: We think we have been very successful, rapidly growing followers on Twitter, through our newsletters, and at our website.
There’s been a big media-relations push as part of it as well. We came up with our central messages and talking points, and have constantly worked to refine and update those. This work has led us to become national transportation experts, getting quoted everywhere from WIRED to USA Today to NPR to all kinds of transportation trade publications. We also focus when we can on other assets like podcasts and videos, while hopefully not hindering the growth our two or three top-level communications priorities.
One reason we've been able to do so much is because we have brought more than 100 contributors into our ranks. This is a topic that produces an endless stream of enthusiasts who want to get involved, and they are our army that spreads our message far and wide. Local governments have a duty to give these kinds of people a voice. We had to set our minds to not being afraid what people would say but to embrace what they say and try to learn from them.
Slide 6: And we’re not just aiming to influence the media, which of course in turn influences policymakers, business leaders, and the public. Our Transportation Techies group started from scratch less than a year-and-a-half ago and now has 1,400 members. This is a D.C.-only group. There are somehow 1,400 Transportation Techies in this town. I suspect other places would be similar. This group meets monthly to have a show-and-tell of the best hacking, big-data storytelling, and other innovations in this space.
Slide 7: And the Techies have influenced perhaps their biggest target: WMATA Metro, which runs buses and the subway here. The first Techies event ever held at WMATA headquarters just happened. The Washington Post wrote two features about it. And people are going to eventually benefit from the Techies’ work in helping agencies open data in order to tell better stories and get trains and buses running more dependably.
Slide 8: We also run a thing called TransportationCamp that happens every January in Arlington. About 400 attended this year, and these attendees consist of transit industry folks, but also of enthusiasts, and to see the two come together is heartening. People outside the inner circles of power have a chance to influence policy and planning, and they are doing it at this "unconference," which is now expanding to happen all over the country and world. You can organize them in your hometowns, and Mobility Lab will help.
Slide 9: Finally, don’t jump into all this without a plan, a vision, a strategy, and something you are sure you can do better than anyone else. Don’t give people reasons to leave you for your competitors. Be valuable and the rest will take care of itself. So how to do all of this? Take after Arlington and Mobility Lab.
Transit communications needs to catch up if transit ever hopes to catch on.
When it comes to communicating that people have transportation options besides their own drive-alone cars, the transit industry is getting its lunch handed to it, and has been for decades.
It must face that it’s a fringe player that wants to become mainstream. And it’s not getting any easier. While we hear so many great stories about options presented by bikeshare systems and technology and Uber, the fact remains that people are buying cars more than ever.
Take the people who attend TransportationCamps, for instance. They are clearly transportation experts, but then again, just about every single American is a transportation enthusiast by way of traveling every day. And 95 percent of U.S. households have cars. Most of us love our cars, or at least have been seriously duped into thinking we love our cars.
So communicating to people that we don’t truly love our cars is a tough path to take for transportation advocates. Where an opening may be is that so many people hate driving, especially for the purpose of commuting.
The fact that we’re a car country is stating the obvious. Fifty-three percent of Americans want more spending on roads and 40 percent want more spending on transit. That stat actually seems pretty generous to transit.
But I don’t think advocates should make this a road versus transit thing. It’s best to learn from cars and from the auto industry. The Super Bowl, for example, is filled with car ads (there were at least 14 during this month’s Super Bowl 50), but driving is rarely like the ways the auto industry represents it in the ads.
Do the car companies care about their misrepresentations? No, they’ve got a product, a lifestyle, to sell. And they sell that fantasy extremely well.
Putting obvious funding questions aside, where are the Super Bowl-esque ads about public transportation? Where are all the transit ads representing freedom to explore and observe, safety, good health, cost savings, sustainability, community, patriotism, and happiness? Transit communications needs to catch up if transit and alternate modes ever hope to catch on.
To get people to ride transit, the bus, rail, biking, walking, teleworking, and ride-hailing communities must catch up with the auto industry on communications and marketing. There needs to be simple, powerful, consistent, and, most importantly, positive messages about the experience.
We know transit can be productive, better for your health, and cleaner for the environment. We don’t seem to care about the endless benefits of active transportation because we don’t know about them. The messages that might get us to even contemplate these options aren’t being communicated widely enough, and they’re certainly not being repeatedly pounded into our heads like the entertaining and endless mental queues from car commercials.
We still think of trains and buses as dirty, disgusting, and communal in all the wrong ways. Bicycling and walking “aren’t for us” and often bring preconceived notions that there must be something wrong with people who do those weird, not-normal types of activities. While there are certainly problems with all these forms of travel, more needs to be done to accentuate the many positives.
I hate a message like this, probably the most well-known transit ad in existence: the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s “If You See Something, Say Something.”
Its take-home message for people is disproportionate to the rational facts, laid out in one study by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute:
Commuter rail is about 20 times safer than driving
Metro or light rail is about 30 times safer
The bus is about 60 times safer, and
About 360 times more people are killed in auto collisions than in incidents of terrorism.
These points should be messaging gold for future non-car advertising. And when agencies and others must go down the safety road (which is, of course, important), they could follow the example of the Denver Regional Transportation District’s co-opting of the wildly popular Australian “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign:
This is another example of a transit ad, from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, that does better at potentially generating curiosity about trying transit.
I thought the Washington, D.C., Metro’s commercial showing a good-time party breaking out on the newly opened Silver Line was exactly the kind of thing that could inspire ridership.1
I have no doubt that journalistic storytelling and content marketing will be a long-term path to the better overall health of the non-auto transportation industry. Not only does the industry need to sell its services, but it must do something new: become hyper-focused on selling the lifestyle.
Organizations like the American Public Transportation Association, Amtrak, the Association for Commuter Transportation, the League of American Bicyclists, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, the Eno Center for Transportation, and Mobility Lab, to name a few, need to form a messaging and communications coalition with the goal of changing public opinion.
All kinds of tactics could be used. For example, FamiliesUSA built a story bank, where people can share their personal stories that relate to bigger societal issues sweeping the mainstream news. The organization then very successfully feeds those personal stories to the media, which is actually one of the reasons we see so many personal anecdotes within our national news stories.
Communicating outside of just the transportation arena is also crucial, and transit conversations need to somehow overlap into the tech, health, environment, business, city planning, and pop-culture worlds. It’s important to get others, not just the transportation experts, to spread the message about why support is needed for transportation options.
Industries, sectors, and businesses that get this storytelling strategy are winning. My favorite example is Red Bull, the energy drink company, which publishes the Red Bulletin Magazine. It has about the same amount of subscribers as Sports Illustrated.
Red Bulletin tells stories about the adventurous lifestyle. Maybe back at the very end, it might have a Red Bull energy drink ad. But the magazine is about telling the story of the lifestyle. The company knows that if you buy into that lifestyle, there’s a chance you’ll drink its product. It’s brilliant.
The list is quickly getting long of the industries that are doing content marketing and storytelling right, and their creativity is reflected in their profits and popularity: AirBnB has Pineapple, Uber has Momentum, Intel has IQ, Coca-Cola has Journey, American Express has Open Forum. You get the idea. Most of these organizations are pumping out more (and not just more, but also great) content than Time Magazine did in its heyday.
Because if you want someone to buy your product or buy into your lifestyle, you don’t immediately start screaming at them to buy, buy, buy the moment they approach you. You try to nurture them and build a long-lasting relationship. You do that by telling them great stories and then telling them more great stories.
Finally, here is my advice for agencies, organizations, and even individuals, on how to tell better stories. This stuff won’t break the bank, and anyone involved in non-car transportation should find the money to incorporate most or all of these elements into your strategies.
Build compelling websites that go beyond selling customer fares and sell a lifestyle.
Pick your social networks and devote yourselves to them, and remember, they might not be around tomorrow or might change their rules, so have a backup plan.
Engage with the public, there are free contributors who would love to get published or promoted through your channels.
Hold hackathons or regular events, like Mobility Lab’s Transportation Techies, to turn your big data into stories or ideas that your public agency can consider.
Engage thought leaders to trumpet your cause. Once they get it, others will start to.
Leverage research from other places if you can’t do your own.
Create messages and talking points that are relevant to your community.People in Alameda, Calif. are particularly interested in environmental and green causes, so the city created transportation messages that paved the way to policies that reduce carbon pollution.
In my hometown of Edwardsville, Ill., there are amazing trails to every corner of town and beyond. But it seems to me very few people ever ride bikes or walk to get to work or to go out and socialize. The trails are often busy, but almost entirely with people seeking recreation. There is a huge opportunity to educate people and improve traffic, which can be pretty rough there even in a 30,000-person St. Louis suburb.
It can be really difficult to find photos of people happy on transit. That’s the first problem to take care of in every city. Work diligently to find great photos of people using public transportation.
Calls to action. People must be inspired to get involved.
Hire a journalist or two, because their passion and perspective might actually be the brand journalism that puts your organization and the industry over the top.
