MEMO TO TOP MANAGERS: Athletes use coaches, why not you?

When a corporate communications team calls us seeking training for its senior leader, one of the first questions we ask is... "is your exec open to the process, or are you dragging them in kicking and screaming?"  But even inhabitants of the executive suite need mentors, argues the former president of PayPal and OpenTable and senior vice president at eBay.   

"Growing with the business required the rapid acquisition of entirely new skills," writes Jeff Jordan.  "However, It's tough to learn new skills when bigger and bigger groups of people are watching you make stupid mistakes."  The best way to respond?  "Regard that scrutiny as a valuable asset," and "engage a coach to help you work through your issues and develop the skills you need."   Courtesy the Harvard Business Review.

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EVEN LESS TIME TO THINK

Social media raises the ante on the dangers of media speed

Media commentary by Charles Feldman

When Howard Rosenberg and I started thinking about, and then began to write, what became No Time To Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle (Continuum Publishing), the year was 2006. (The book was published in 2008.)

Facebook, founded in Cambridge Massachusetts, was barely two years old in 2006.  Twitter was just getting started in San Francisco.   We mentioned them in the book, of course - but our focus was primarily on the impact of 24-hour radio and television news, as well as blogs, which had forced journalists to greatly accelerate the pace at which they reported the news.  

All speed, little light, has too often been the consequence of instant social media, argues Feldman. 

This acceleration led to mistakes - some small and relatively unimportant, others large and of potentially enormous consequence.   But what seemed fast in either 2006 or 2008 is positively snail-like today.  

In No Time to Think, we headed one chapter, “All the News Before It Happens.”  That is even truer now than it was when we went to press.

The iPhone, with its photo and video capability, has made potential “citizen journalists” of all of us.   But the emergence of instant social media, which mobile technology helped spread, has backed even the most staid of mainstream journalistic institutions into a corner.  

In this corner, rumor and innuendo sometimes pass for “news.”  That’s been the case in the past, of course.  What’s different today is that a new, more insidious ethic has taken hold - one that not only makes it okay to “report” things that turn out to be factually wrong, but almost relishes the notion that others (presumably our so called “citizen journalists”) will quickly catch the mistakes and correct them.  

This occasionally happens, to be sure - but not nearly enough.  And it is hardly the point. Getting it right, rather than being first, used to be the cherished standard.  Now, getting it first is often the goal: damn the facts, full speed ahead.

It is said that journalism is the first draft of history. But if this is so—and I think it is—then social media is the first letter (or perhaps the first 140 characters) in that history. The speed at which these characters now flow - going viral sometimes in mere minutes - is presenting journalists, not to mention the consuming public, with uncomfortable challenges.

We did not—and could not—argue in No Time to Think that the genie needed to be put back in the bottle.  Of course, it cannot, and I am not advancing that argument now. The world we have is the world in which we all must live. 

It's self-evident that speed has always shaped journalism: the telegraph was faster than the pigeon; radio and television carried information at the speeds of sound and light.  

And yet, serious journalistic institutions tried to, and did, maintain standards to restrain the compelling desire to get the news out quickly at the expense of facts.  We did, after all, still control the microphones and cameras and transmitters that carried our stories to the far corners of the globe.  

We still do.   Which is what makes the current rush to be first, rather than right, so unnecessary.  

If we were to update our book, we would no doubt subtitle it, “The Menace of Media—and Social Media—Speed and the 24-second News Cycle.”  Alas, by today’s questionable standards, even 24 seconds may be too slow.

Charles Feldman, special consultant to Dunlop Media, spent 20 years as an investigative reporter at CNN.  He is based in Los Angeles. 

RAY RICE "APOLOGY": How not to conduct a crisis press conference

Imagine this.  You represent a professional football player who has been arrested on a charge of assaulting his wife.  You get your client into a pre-trial intervention program to avoid prosecution, wait for the smoke to clear, then schedule a mea-culpa news conference at which you expect he will, at minimum, offer a heartfelt apology. 

Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice checking notes on his smartphone during an "apology" press conference.  At left is his wife, Janay Palmer.   Image from nfl.com. 

The player does apologize - to his fans and to professional football - but he neglects to do so to the wife at his side. Then, as this real-life story of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice stumbles from bad to worse, he tries to read key messages from his smartphone - in full view of the reporters assembled.  

"He kept picking up the device and paging through it while the room hung in awkward silence," writes TV critic David Zurawik.  "The one thing written on that screen should have been: Apologize to the woman sitting next to me.”  Courtesy The Baltimore Sun.

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THE FUTURE MEDIA LANDSCAPE: View from the NY Times Public Editor

What has become of journalism in the last 20 years causes many veterans of the news industry to lament - but it causes Margaret Sullivan to think.  The public editor of The New York Times was recently forced to distill her views on the subject to an especially important audience: young people just starting out in the field. 

After noting (as an NYU professor has observed) that we are living through the most monumental communications change since the invention of the printing press, Margaret Sullivan told her audience that "no one can say what the landscape will be, even five years from now."  But she does identify several trends worth tracking - and perhaps more importantly, a few certainties to hang your hat on.    Courtesy The New York Times. 

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ED SULLIVAN: A broadcasting icon, in spite of himself

“I've tried every way I know to smile into a camera,” he once confessed, “but I can't do it.”  How did he score triple the ratings of Oprah? 

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Almost all of us, whether we realize it or not, have the innate skill to pull off a TV appearance.  Not all of us have the talent to host an entire show.  But even there, a canny personality who recognizes his limits can, with hard work and a bit of luck, become a first-rate broadcaster.  Just look at Ed Sullivan.

Ed Sullivan, center, with four young men from Liverpool, England. February 1964. Original image at time.com.

No figure analogous to Sullivan exists today.  He was more than a TV host.  He was a cultural arbiter.  In his heyday, roughly one out of every eight Americans – that’s 12 percent of all people, not just households - watched The Ed Sullivan Show on a typical Sunday night.  Far more tuned in on special occasions, like the 1956 national debut of Elvis Presley, or the Beatles’ historic appearance in 1964.

Comparing the success of weekly versus daily programs can be tricky - but hour for hour, Sullivan’s average Nielsen ratings in his prime years were roughly triple those of Oprah Winfrey in hers.

Granted, The Ed Sullivan Show did have the advantage of being in prime time, and being first on the scene.  When his broadcast, originally known as “Toast of the Town,” went on the air on June 20, 1948, television was still an electronic desert. 

Celebrities regarded the new medium as a demotion.  TV’s paltry audiences were deemed to be beneath the dignity of the biggest stars.  And the small screens, fuzzy images, harsh lights and pasty makeup were simply no match for the movies.  

CBS decided that Sullivan, who was already one of its radio commentators as well as one of New York’s two leading Broadway gossip columnists (Walter Winchell was the other), was just the man to turn that around. 

Sullivan moved with ease in the smoke-filled, bourbon-drenched barrooms of Manhattan café society.  He trolled for news from a regular table at the storied El Morocco nightclub, where the Citicorp Building stands now.  (His rival Winchell held court at the Stork Club, just a few blocks away.)  

Since he was already in a position to control what was written about them, persuading celebrity guests to appear on this new thing called television was probably one of the easiest jobs Sullivan ever had.  But there was one thing that did not come easy.  That thing was Ed Sullivan himself.  

Sullivan with Topo Gigio, the "little Italian Mouse," a character that was a regular on the program in the 1960's.

Videos of Sullivan show a man stiff and self-conscious on live television.  He routinely missed his stop-mark when walking onstage.  His delivery was halting.  Some viewers thought he looked drunk.  The tension produced famous mispronunciations, most notably that “tonight we have a really big shoe" (instead of show). 

“His smile,” wrote Time Magazine in 1955, “is that of a man sucking a lemon.”  No wonder he acquired the nickname Old Stone Face.  

“I've tried every way I know to smile into a camera,” he once confessed, “but I can't do it.”

That inability clearly bothered Sullivan, despite his success.  The "Stone Face" moniker alone would have been enough to send a lesser man scurrying back to the newspapers.  

But it didn’t.  In fact, it may even have been liberating.  

While Milton Berle rattled off one liners on NBC and endured pies in the face while dressed in drag, Sullivan settled on a vastly different approach - tailor made for a career theater reporter.  It played not to his lemony smile, but to the size of his Rolodex - or what we would call today his “contacts database.”  

The Sullivan show enthusiastically embraced the breadth of the entertainment universe he inhabited.  A typical Sunday night might feature a big name singer, a Catskill comedian, a puppeteer, a European ballet troupe, a vaudeville piano player, a magician or juggler, a big band or folk singer, or a number or two from a hit musical.  

Today’s TV programs focus largely on one or two demographics, leaving others at the curb.  Sullivan’s success hinged on something more noble.  Whatever your interest or age, he had an act for you.  Generational tastes were cross-pollinated, even challenged, in a way that no longer happens. 

In that era, it clicked.  There was only one screen in the house.  And instead of drifting off to their own interests on Sunday nights, families actually gathered around that screen after dinner.  They watched Ed Sullivan, and were comfortably taken out of their comfort zone.

It is ironic that some of the cultural forces Sullivan helped unleash proved harbingers of his own demise.  The events of the 1960’s, and evolving technology, were making his job obsolete.  CBS cancelled The Ed Sullivan Show in 1971.  He died a few years later. 

An Ed Sullivan operating in today’s media environment would soon find his eclectic program sliced and diced to accommodate this target demographic or that.  His big tent approach would be focus-grouped to death.  (They’d even send in a media trainer to address his awkwardness.)  But that very awkwardness, and his ability to confront and even joke about it, as he did in this brief clip with Jerry Lewis, was precisely what endeared him to many millions.  

"His 'act' was no act at all," wrote TV producer Marlo Lewis.  "And the American people found that beguiling." 

FOR FURTHER READING:  "Right Here on Our Stage Tonight!  Ed Sullivan's America," by Gerald Nachman.   University of California Press, 2010.