Fondly recalling “the trade” from my early-career journalism days, with Calvin Trillin

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 takes us back to what the 1990s means, Part 2

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.

5 out of 5 stars

Nancy Pelosi’s daughter shows that discussing our political differences is key for a more empathetic future

My main hard-news media sources are The Week Magazine (which is great because it tells all perspectives - right and left), The New York Times, and The Washington Post. To me, these seem like the most balanced and most well-funded in order to do the most in-depth and investigative journalism. 

I can’t go so far as to listen to the entertainment/ratings-driven news at the likes of FOX, Breitbart, Newsmax, or any number of other “outlets” that will tell subgroups of radical conservatives the kinds of conspiratorial misinformation they somehow want to hear. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear what's being propagated in those worlds. It’s interesting, even if it is fanciful and devisive.

That’s why a minute or two of The Righting is my answer each day. It’s a website (I get it as an email newsletter) that sums up what the far-right Trumper press is talking about. That press, in short, is obsessed with thinking Biden is the anti-Christ, DeSantis will stomp out the woke that is destroying this country, and how anything that's not white and male is a clear and present danger.

The Righting also alerted me to an interesting-sounding documentary that was just released on HBO MAX, created by famed lefty politician Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra Pelosi. 

The Insurrectionist Next Door ran the risk of being a preachy takedown of the idiocy of the people who attacked the U.S Capitol on January 6, 2021. But it is instead a thoughtful and entertaining glimpse into the worlds of several Insurrectionists who each had at least loose reasoning for being there that day, and somehow it doesn’t ever feel like Pelosi is in danger around these characters, even sitting down to “break bread” - or, rather, eat cake - with a Tesla-driving Trumper who says he wants to do his part to keep the world from being destroyed. 

The documentary is definitely no glimpse into the minds of geniuses, but it does serve as a painful reminder how dreadful the mental-health crisis has become in the United States.

I found it hard to take my eyes off any of the character studies, which each lasting about 10 minutes, as Pelosi tries to understand what led them to D.C. that fateful day and also hears their backstories and what makes them tick. 

The documentary is only about 80 minutes and kicks off with a Florida muscleman (pictured) who dreamed of becoming a pro wrestler but filled the hole in his life from that failed attempt by becoming a diehard Donald Trump fanboy.

That profile is mesmerizing as is the one about a very misguided young woman (pictured at the top) from outside St. Louis who follows her uncle to D.C. only to get caught up and then later kills someone as she drives drunk down the wrong way on a highway. 

There’s the gay diehard Trump fan who plans to run for office once his sentence ends, the parkour enthusiast who just apparently went along blindly with his sister to D.C., the emotional redneck who says he’s not racist but just had to align himself with the Aryan Brotherhood to survive in prison, the family-man rapper with "Proud Boys" tattooed across his forehead, and a few other notable deplorables.

This was one of the best documentaries I’ve watched in a while. And it’s interesting to go back and see the January 6th-ers and how they are faring nearly three years later. Some have some regrets about that day, but overall, their futures do not look bright.

5 out of 5 stars

Storytelling has a direct result on building transit that could compete with cars

I recently wrote an article on Mobility Lab calling for transit agencies to launch a full-on effort to make commercials for transit that are as enticing as the many excellent car commercials that the auto industry has been pumping out for decades.

As a communications professional, it's often difficult to show exact influence and results of the blogs, videos, tweets, and other materials we create. But when The Rapidian, Grand Rapid's local citizen-run newspaper, published an article this week, Mobility Lab can be proud to see that our advocacy has had a direct success.

Brittany Schlacter leads off her article this way:

Paul Mackie, one of the nation’s foremost mass transit bloggers and the communications director of the Virginia-based nonprofit research organization Mobility Lab, recently posed this challenge to America’s public transportation industry’s leaders:

“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.”

At The Rapid, we have embraced Mackie’s challenge. We are launching a new campaign that informs the Greater Grand Rapids region about the merits of public transportation through simple, powerful, consistent and, most importantly, positive messages about the experience.

Transit communications needs to catch up if transit ever hopes to catch on. The Rapid presents a start.

Mental Health Suffers When We Surrender to Car Culture

Here's my latest article, originally published in the first issue of the Urban Design and Mental Health Journal.

Maria Hernandez, from Montgomery County, Maryland was always afraid she wouldn’t know how to use public transportation. But since deciding to learn, she rejoices in being “able to relax, read a book, and enjoy the scenery – which you really can’t do when you’re driving.” No doubt Hernandez is onto something that has been very difficult for most throughout the U.S. to muster since the auto industry began seducing us into its lifestyle nearly a century ago.

Of all the many things we surrender when we commit to making most, or all, of our trips by car, the most important may be the most difficult to measure: our mental health. Mental health, our state of well-being in which every individual can realize his or her own potential, allows us to cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively and fruitfully, and make a contribution to our communities. When mental health suffers, the damage can manifest in many ways, from depression to eating disorders to suicide. But our transportation habits – formed long ago but with endless opportunities to change– is one of the greatest tools we have to make sure our mental health remains sharp into old age. We can walk or bike to places and – bingo – that officially counts as regular physical activity. That means these behaviors are associated with improved attention, memory, and cognitive speed across our lifetimes.

What does the research say?

While numerous studies have documented the effect of physical activity on academic performance, extensive research on the connections between transportation and mental health is more difficult to find. Some of the most intriguing evidence includes:

• A Danish study that intended to explore the effects on school children of the food they ate for breakfast and lunch ended up discovering that the way they traveled to school was far more crucial. Those who bicycled or walked performed much better on tests than those who rode in a car or on public transit.

• A British study found that physical exercise and “active leisure” of a person aged thirty six had a significant effect on the levels of memory decline for that same person later on between 43 and 53 years of age. 

• In a study on walking and cognitive function, researchers found that older women who walked the equivalent of an easy pace at least 1.5 hours per week had significantly better knowledge, attention, memory, judgment, reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and comprehension, and less cognitive decline than women who walked less than 40 minutes per week.

• Many studies have found that being a frequent user of transit can affect mental health, from reducing emotional stress by improving people’s access to education and employment to providing an option that many people consider less stressful than driving. “These mental-health benefits are difficult to quantify but potentially large,” said Todd Litman, a researcher for the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

• Italian researchers found that just simply living near transit lines could be good for the mental health of older residents in Turin.

• Other studies have shown that bicycling helps ward off Alzheimer’s, depression, Parkinson’s, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Bicycling has also been proven to make people happier (and, one could assume smarter, since Albert Einstein supposedly came up with his theory of relativity while riding his bicycle).

• Mobility Lab lists several other studies linking active transportation to improved mental health.

Photo credit: Sam Kittner, Mobility Lab

 What should we do about it?

There are many things we can do to become more active in our travels. And one positive sign that we may get help from high up is the recent announcement that the U.S. Department of Transportation will reward $40 million (with Paul Allen’s Vulcan company pitching in an additional $10 million) to the mid-sized city that figures out how best to fix its transportation system. After all, once our crumbling and disconnected infrastructure is improved, cities can get down to the business of making it easier for people to choose the healthier, sustainable, and more productive ways of getting around town. All of this would lead to not just wealthier individuals, but wealthier communities. Cornell University found that, for one, “unwalkable communities cost Americans $190 billion a year in health-care costs.”

It all starts – or should start – at the top. And the federal government has taken at least one positive recent step. As part of its massive new Every Student Succeeds Act, children will not be prohibited from “traveling to and from school on foot or by car, bus, or bike,” as long as the parents have given permission and it’s allowed by local law. It may be sad that we actually have to write that into federal law, but it also may help bring back the good old days when kids were much more active in getting to school.

At the local and regional levels, leaders need to do something completely different than what has been done for decades: prioritize people who walk, bike, and use transit over people in cars, according to Chris Hamilton of Active Transport for Cities. He recently wrote at Mobility Lab, “If we make our streets more people-centered, and if we help make it easy for more people to walk, bike, and take transit, our cities will be more green. More prosperous. More physically healthy. And yes, more mentally healthy.”

Tech is Good, But We Need Transportation Planning for the City of the Future

This article by Howard Jennings and myself was originally published by Expert Sure, CleanTechnica and Mobility Lab.

What does transportation in the U.S. city of the future look like?

Mobility Lab gets asked this a lot because it’s clear that people have had it with the crushing traffic that dominates most of our cities, and 3 out of 4 people are frustrated by their lack of transportation options.

As Forbes recently pointed out, the average traffic delay – time spent in stop-and-go traffic – per commuter is 42 hours each year, up from 18 hours annually in 1982. We’re losing patience, getting less healthy, being unproductive, wasting money, and polluting the air. And from the flip-side perspective, a new report has found that reducing the time employees spend in cars is one of best things a business can do for itself, for a whole host of reasons.

So people and businesses are slowly getting around to realizing they need to change their transportation habits, and this mindset is starting to have a huge impact on the way people everywhere – but especially in dense cities – take their daily trips.

IT STARTS WITH TECH

It’s safe to say technology has been the top enabler of this trend. And all the talk about the on-demand economy and electric and autonomous vehicles is actually a lot more interesting and sophisticated (and realistic) than the many years we all spent infatuated with flying Jetsons cars as our vision of a transportation future.

Traffic smartphone apps such as Waze suggest the most efficient route from point A to point B, adjusting along the way based on real-time speed and traffic information from other “crowdsourcing” users.

Dozens of transit agencies have apps that offer real-time travel information. And after a media investigation discovered that nearly 10 percent of buses are late to Boston’s public schools, a new app called Where’s My School Bus? was designed so parents could know if their kids were missing class.

And when package-delivery drones like those proposed by Amazon get off the ground, they hold the potential to decrease the number of truck trips on city and suburban streets.

Austin is creating an app that connects cyclists to traffic signals, which the Texas city hopes will encourage more bicycling by making lights turn green faster as bicycles approach them.

Zurich, Switzerland has long had success alleviating traffic in this realm. If too many cars are coming into the city, sophisticated traffic signals are timed to vastly discourage people from driving in. With commuter rail strategically running alongside these roads, people can bail out of their cars and jump onto transit. It’s highly rational, it works, and the city is way more enjoyable because of it. More and more places – like New York, London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Buenos Aires – are utilizing car-free zones.

uberPool and Lyft Line have a huge opportunity to play a role in reducing the total number of miles driven on U.S. roads. While these new offerings are similar to traditional carpooling, which has been around since the need to ration rubber in World War II, the ability to hail a ride with more certainty from a smartphone is proving popular.

Public transportation really needs to catch up. Once trains, light rail, streetcars, and buses become interconnected services on our smartphones, we’ll see an uptick in ridership. One of the major drawbacks to transit is that it is perceived as unreliable. But if we can check real-time arrivals, pay, ride, and transfer to all the other transit possibilities from the comfort of our smartphones – or “smart wallets,” as San Francisco transit innovator Tim Papandreou calls it – the need to own a personal vehicle will decrease.

Singapore has an “ez-Link” card that travelers can use to pay for buses, trains and taxis, while London’s Oyster card does some of the same things.

RideScout recently announced its plan to launch something called RideTap, which will be a pilot in Portland to demonstrate on-demand rides to complement the existing transit infrastructure. In other words, TriMet users will be able to book a Bcycle or Lyft on their smartphones to connect them from the end of their train ride to their destination.

THE PLANNERS ARE A’CHANGIN’

Speaking of bikeshare, that is one of the major innovations helping planners see that cities are changing before their very eyes. Since 2009, when there were virtually no bikeshare systems in North America, more than 50 cities and towns – speaking conservatively, since there are also so many systems on college campuses – have added them to their transportation networks, most recently Birmingham, Ala. Even planners in smaller jurisdictions are finding flexible bikeshare options that best work for their size and resources.

One of the many presenters for Mobility Lab's Transportation Techies in the Washington D.C. region

Planners regularly attend Mobility Lab’s monthly Transportation Techies events (highlighted here in this Washington Post feature) and help advocate for governments to open their transit data to make systems more usable for more people. And events like our TransportationCamp – which is now happening in various cities around the country and world – and grass-roots planning by groups like ioby and Cards Against Urbanity are opening old-school planners’ eyes to the creative thinking about what people want from their cities of the future. (Like welcoming and enjoyable bus stops, for instance.)

Mayors in cities all over the country are listening and beginning to be less afraid of saying “yes” to pilot projects that can often become bigger when constituents see success and private partners assist with funding.

DRIVERLESS CART BEFORE THE HORSE?

Then there are driverless cars – the supposed answer to all our transportation troubles. Transportation-demand expert Todd Litman projects that these won’t fully impact traffic congestion, automobile accidents, and car ownership until 2060.

But we think that is wildly conservative. Large numbers of people will be using these vehicles over the next decade, and we hope to see good data soon thereafter on whether driverless cars are taking trips off the road and reducing vehicle miles travelled.

Equally important is that so much of the focus on automated cars has been on the tech, while not enough attention is being paid to what the impacts will be on people and our built environment. If these vehicles remove the stress of the commute, then that’s likely to induce a lot more people to ride in them, in turn taking them out of transit modes like buses, subways, and bikeshares. The trend might actually create a net increase in vehicles.

The cars will be able to cluster closer together in platoons on roadways and urban streets. The likelihood is that we will have much greater density of cars in urban environments, which could potentially diminish the quality of the environment that so many of us are striving for with transit-oriented development, complete streets, walkable activity centers, and livability and sustainability initiatives. This area needs to be studied, and good policies need to be put in place before the driverless cars hit the road en masse.

A good thing about our newfound sharing-economy mindset is that it sets the stage for fleets of autonomous vehicles to succeed, since many people are no longer automatically thinking they have to have their own driverless cars. Potentially there might actually be fewer cars on the roads.

INNOVATION WILL DRIVE SLOWER-MOVING POLICY

We know these are the innovations that will shape our transportation in the city of the future. The question is how it will happen.

If the right people aren’t at the table – like idea man Gabe Klein, for example – cities could end up looking like Cairo, Egypt, where people drive bumper-to-bumper, making the streets look like seething, inhospitable rivers of metal. That’s a worse-case scenario, but if we have the ability for cars to travel two feet apart, it’s also pretty realistic.

How we plan affects how quickly we get market absorption. For the most part, we don’t have the space to build new roads and highways in cities. And as the abyssmal level of federal transportation spending has gone on for many years now, and our infrastructure crumbles, we don’t have the money to build new roads.

So creative spending on relatively inexpensive throughways like bicycle infrastructure and walkable communities makes a lot of sense. And the intangible benefits of refocusing on modes other than drive-alone cars make spending in those directions even wiser.

Photos courtesy of Warren Antiola and  M.V. Jantzen.

Revisiting D.C.'s Newseum After Several Years Away

Being a passionate journalist and communications professional, it's flat-out crazy that I don't visit the Newseum in Washington DC, where I live, as frequently as at least once a year.

It has probably been five years since I set foot in there, when I helped run a press conference for the World Resources Institute. Even though it's one of the only museums in D.C. that you have to pay for, and it's a fairly steep $25 entrance fee, it's well worth it.

Unless you read all the front-page spreads of many of the newspapers from around the world, it's actually a relatively quick museum to make your way through. There are so many interesting and diverse things to see, always told with an element of how journalism or journalists fit into the larger story.

The first thing on display right now when walking in is a piece of the Berlin Wall, and also a tower from near one of the Checkpoint Charlie sites.

Next up our displays of the funny pages, the counterculture of the 1960s, and Vietnam coverage from that same era. Those each could actually be much larger exhibits, or exhibits of their own filling the entire museum.

Also of note is a display from the civil rights era featuring a jail cell door that held Martin Luther King Jr. and a lunch counter from Nashville, Tennessee where protesters sat before fights and riots broke out. There's a long theater-seating area that displaying many screens of live TV news. When I walked through, Hillary Clinton was stumping in Iowa.

There is amazing display of the RCA tower that fell from one of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Accompanying that is a spellbinding video of the one and only working journalist (amazingly) who died in the catastrophe, as he rushed towards the towers to take photos.

Joined by my dad and brother Tim, we didn't expect to sit in a room for nearly an hour watching a documentary, but that's exactly what we did, as the movie on the history of sports journalism was two fascinating to stop watching.

Finally, We stopped in to view the Washington Nationals baseball exhibit, which was quite a bit more interesting than actually watching the team on the field these days.

Final verdict: don't miss the Newseum when you visit Washington DC. It's a little bit of an under-looked gem.

Giving Thanks to Professor Bill Ward's Life Lessons in Journalism

Professor Ward

A couple of weeks ago, I found out through Facebook that my top professional mentor, Bill Ward, had died at the age of 85.

Since moving to Washington D.C. 15 years ago, I had known Professor Ward, the title all his students knew him by, had lived in nearby Reston, Virginia since his retirement from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. And I had always regretted not somehow reuniting with him out here on the East Coast.

At least we followed each other online and he occasionally sent me his latest compilations of poetry through the mail. I've always sensed that SIUE was one of the hidden-gem journalism schools in the country and, because of Professor Ward and Nora Baker, who also died this year, the nowhere school of very little acclaim was the source behind dozens or hundreds of the country's best and most driven and successful journalists, PR pros, and law professors who studied under Ward and Baker.

Bill Plaschke

Bill Plaschke, an L.A. Times sportswriter who Professor Ward often referenced in my classes and was one of Ward's most acclaimed students, wrote a captivating eulogy this Thanksgiving to Professor Ward. Here are the parts of his article that seem equally like snippets of my undergrad life back in those hallowed SIUE journalism halls:

• I was wandering the empty halls of SIUE, a state college in a swatch of pastures and woods down the highway from my parents' home. I walked into that cluttered closet [Ward's office] to announce my presence. That's where I first saw him, a middle-aged man who appeared to be a combination of Albert Einstein and Mr. Peabody, piles of frizzy white hair atop black horn-rimmed glasses, dressed in mounds of corduroy and surrounded by piles of newspapers. His name was Bill Ward.
• Professor Ward had created an environment where everyone would be given a fair chance, where even the worst of budding journalists would be evaluated with no judgment, no bias, and best of all, no ceilings. Professor Ward's first lesson was that it was OK to dream. And then he taught me to write. Those human interest stories that appear in this space often enough to make hardcore sports fans shudder ... blame Professor Ward. He insisted sports was never really about sports, but about the people who played them. "The best thing about sports is its humanity," he would say. "Write the humanity."
• Those short sentences and paragraphs in this column that drive everyone nuts ... Professor Ward again. He taught me to write as if I were having a conversation with readers around a campfire, nudging, explaining, infuriating, using my words to make them laugh or cry or think. "Write like you talk," he would say, and by now most folks know I talk fast and in spurts.
• Professor Ward taught those lessons to a generation of budding SIUE journalists with a loud snort and an iron fist. He was my toughest editor. He was my harshest reader. He ran our small and obscure department as if it were a daily newspaper. If your copy was filled with typos or misspellings, you flunked the assignment. If you missed any deadline, you flunked the project.
• I don't think I ever received an A. I don't think I ever even received an attaboy. Professor Ward had so much faith in me, in everybody, that we could never be good enough to justify it. I thought my sights were set impossibly high. He set them higher. Show up earlier than everyone. Stay later. Work harder.
• From that cubbyhole he built one of the nation's top journalism programs. Our funny four-letter school would regularly beat the likes of Missouri and Northwestern in college writing competitions. They would enter stories about big-time college athletics, and we would enter a Keith Schopp story about a morbidly obese failed college wrestler that began, "The big man laughs."
• It turned out I was not the best writer to study journalism at SIUE under Professor Ward. I'm not even the best Los Angeles Times writer to come out of his program. That would be our investigative reporter Paige St. John, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who would often sneak into a closed mass communications building and spend all night finishing her projects. "I sense I have not yet fulfilled his aspirations for me," she said this week.

I imagine that all of Professor Ward's students feel equally that they have not yet fulfilled his aspirations for us.

Pop-Culture Catch Up: Rum Diary, Enough Said, and Frozen

I'm not going to lie. Having two kids is often more difficult than having one. By the end of so many days, I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to read one magazine article, let alone devour something of pop-culture value and then report its worth back to you, my fine and faithful readers.

That said, it's time to catch up with a few artifacts I've explored over the past weeks. And, I'll try to start blogging more regularly again after a pretty unimpressive summer collection of quantity and quality.

The Rum Diary is the first Hunter S. Thompson I've read since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas back in college. The "long lost novel" was apparently written in the 1960s and not published until 1998. It is basically the tale of Hunter himself (under the name Paul) going from New York to live and work at a newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

He carouses with the lowlifes who work at the paper and risks life daily drinking and fighting and romancing in a foreign land. It's the epitome of gonzo journalistic writing and serves as an underrated highlight of Thompson's prodigious career. Johnny Depp found the manuscript and had it published, then starred in the movie, which I should now go see for the first time.

**** out of ***** stars

Enough Said is a small rom-com that gains weight by the very fact that it was about the last thing James Gandolfini filmed before his death. Julia Louis-Dreyfus seems a little less great than usual in the film, despite very positive reviews.

The couple wins me over by the end as they suffer a series of setbacks while firing up an unlikely romance, but I still was a little disappointed and not that impressed with the overall story, general awkwardness, and pacing of this film.

*** out of ***** stars

Frozen is of course all the rage with the youngsters, but I was bored silly, wishing I could rematch The Lego Movie, The Jungle Book, Snow White, or any other kid movie.

Tip of the hat to Disney for making it about the importance of family instead of the usual fare of the importance of the prince. But if I have to hear someone else humming or singing "Let It Go" again, who knows what I'll do. Bad music in a hack of a story. It doesn't help that I don't particularly like any of the actors behind the voices.

Way overrated and hopefully will lose some of its runaway-hit momentum as soon as some better Disney films are released.

** out of ***** stars

How Does Social Media Fit in to Traditional Public Relations?

I spoke on a really impressive panel on how social media is reshaping the world of public-relations this morning at the Mid-America Marketing Summit at USA Today's headquarters. 

Public Relations in a Social World (left to right)- Kevin Dando, Director, Digital Marketing & Communications, PBS
- Paul Mackie, Director of Communications, Mobility Lab
- Mike Smith, CEO, MSBD
- Elizabeth Shea, President and CEO, SpeakerBox
- Moderator: Jeff Davis, Partner, Sawmill Marketing Public Relations

It was an honor to be asked to speak on a panel with the likes of PBS's digital marketing director and other pros.

My main points were:

• That PR work is more transparent than ever, especially with social media
• Be great at social media, don't simply hand it over to an intern because it's simply too crucial to your full suite of strategic communications
• One of the most important traits of a consistently great PR person is the ability to be friendly, helpful, and a person who gets great stories out of himself and clients
• The ability to build an army of collaborators to help you spread your messages (on both social media and in person)
• Make your issues relevant, no matter how hard your organization may push back on that
• Practice and hone your storytelling and writing by having your own blog (on whatever topic you like)

Conference sponsor Speakerbox also covers our panel nicely here.