What Journalists Can Learn From God.

via Flickr's '..Catherine..'
via Flickr's ..catherine..

Tomorrow is the first night of Rosh Hashanah, and for the second time in the last four years, I’m headed to services in a city not renowned for its Jewish population. (My previous experience in Columbia, Mo., was especially enlightening.)

But with another year upon us — we Jews are up to year 5770 — I wanted write about someone whose teachings have a few lessons that journalists might want to take note of.

I’m talking, of course, about God.

To succeed in a digital age, I believe that journalists need to create and distribute original content. But when it comes to original content, nobody’s been more prolific as a creator than God. (N.B.: the platypus.) God’s gone multi-platform. (Anybody else operating in both the heavens and the Earth?) And talk about keeping readers entertained: have you read the Passover story recently? As far as storytelling is concerned, you won’t find more epic game-changers than the plagues or the parting of the Red Sea.

So with a L’Shana Tova in mind, this New Year’s installment of “What Journalists Can Learn From…’ is all about The Man Upstairs.

1. Engage Your Readers. If God has time to talk one-on-one with some of the chosen people, I know journalists can make time to talk to readers. Via chats or Twitter, or in the comments, good journalists engage readers in a conversation.

2. Be Upfront With What It Is You Stand For. I believe that news organizations should come out with statements of purpose, explaining what is it they do and how it is they do it. Consider these each news outlet’s basic commandments. [1. I’m not talking about stuff like Bloomberg’s Thou Shalt Not Tweet policy, though that is a pretty biblical-style example of the Almighty Boss trying to set policy instead of helping to shape it.] Note an older statement from a paper like the San Francisco Chronicle. Check out how a 21st century outlet like Politico states their purpose. Both are examples of the founding principles upon which journalists have announced they’ll work. They set the tone for readers, keep news organizations transparent and, most importantly, allow the public to understand and trust the stories being told.

3. Sometimes, Rest is a Good Thing. We work in a 24-hour news cycle. But oftentimes, ‘news of the day’ isn’t what journalists excel at. Finding stories, analyzing complex issues and serving the public good is. Sometimes, we need to pause to remember that. And maybe we should do it more than every seven days.

On: Choosing Your Words Carefully. (Or: Why a Dead Russian Guy Is Affecting White House Policy.)

Late Saturday night, two days into a Labor Day weekend, a special adviser to President Obama resigned. Now, this blog post isn’t about the politics of the issue, but it’ll be helpful if you watch Newsy.com’s roundup of the issue. Pay particular attention to the one four letter word that keeps coming up over and over again:

Did you catch it? It’s four letters, and it seems to have Americans scared out of their minds:

Czar.

In the same way that the federal government failed to brand the H1N1 virus correctly — leading to the still-used nickname “swine flu,” and causing short-term damage to the pork industry — the White House hasn’t gotten a lid on this “czar” title. And as long as it’s around, it’ll continue to cause confusion for the American public.

The White House does not — in official documents — refer to people like Jones as czars. As Politico points out, “the Obama administration has about 30 czars — a term used as shorthand for long, wonky titles such as Jones’s ‘Council on Environmental Quality’s special adviser for green jobs.'”

What it comes down to is this: for reporters, Jones’ full title takes up too many seconds to say or too many inches to publish. ‘Czar’ seems to get across the point just fine.

The problem is, it doesn’t. Czar isn’t a neutral word; it’s a word that connotes any number of Russian or Slavic leaders who had occasionally-ruthless territorial and economic expansion in mind.

Oddly enough, the word was first used in American politics to attack a rival of President Andrew Jackson, and later used by Democrats against a Republican Speaker of the House. Back then, when Czar Nicholas I was still in power, the phrase carried a significant amount of baggage. Today, it still does.

So here’s where the issue of branding comes in: as long as the American public is still subconsciously connecting Presidential advisers on drugs, climate change and urban affairs with a Russian leader who died in 1855, the White House is going to have a tough haul.

Politico notes that there are more than 30 ‘czars’ in this administration. We have an AIDS czar, a California water czar, a Great Lakes czar and even a Sudan czar.

But in official policy, the White House does not refer to these advisers like that. In speeches, Obama refers to the Sudan czar as Scott Gration, a Special Envoy to Sudan. And the AIDS czar is Jeffery S. Crowley, Director of Office of National AIDS Policy.

But reporters — who don’t really have time to explain to Americans in a 45 second live shot what a special envoy does or where Sudan is — have taken these jobs out of context. From a journalist’s perspective, we’ve caused harm by not explaining who these men and women are or what they do, and it’s the reason why I’m seeing women in El Paso scream out, “I’m here because I love my country. I want to take it back from Obama and his czars!”

Had the White House tried to accurately label their advisers — and make sure that the media reported about them as such — I’d imagine we wouldn’t see revved-up west Texans yelling things like, “I want to take back this country from Obama and his team of mid-level, non-Cabinet policy advisers with no formal budgetary control!”

The White House hasn’t helped their cause. In official releases, they use the formal titles. But during press conferences, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs does slip into informal terms. Prompted by a query about the drug czar, he’ll respond, “Let me address the czar question for a minute.” Or the President, while talking about how he’ll hold his advisers accountable, will mention, “Well, the goal of the border czar is to….”

There’s an easy way for the President’s team to fix this: they need to choose their words carefully. If the media isn’t going to responsibly label non-Cabinet officials — and the onus is on us journalists to do so — then it’s up to the White House to correct reporters. This isn’t spin control; it’s simply an exercise in logic.

Right now, due to poor branding, the White House is letting a Russian leader who’s been dead since the Civil War affect policy decisions. That seems odd.

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Post-script: Turns out that right after Jones took the job, he actually sent out an email saying, “I am not going to be any kind of ‘Czar.'” Guess that didn’t work.

A Brief Word About Why It Is I Keep Breaking Into Christopher Walken Impressions At Work.

I’ve started commuting for the first time in my life. It’s 25 or 30 minutes round trip on the highway, and for a while, listening to music was enough. Then I started to feel like I was wasting time. If I was going to spend a full 10 hours each month in my car driving to and from work, I might as well do something useful.

So I gave in to my grandfatherly ambitions and decided that I’d listen to books on tape.

I started out with a copy of “Born to Kvetch,” a book about Yiddish, but I couldn’t stand the narrator’s voice; it sounded like a weird cross between Jon Stewart and Stephen Hawking. The narrator took the last vowel of the last word in every sentence and held it two beats too long. I gave up on “Born to Kvetch” after a day.

I’ve since settled in with “Gasping for Airtime,” a memoir by Jay Mohr about his two years on “Saturday Night Live.” It’s not exactly a linguistic challenge, but at 6:15 in the morning, I’m not looking for one. Mohr has a bit of a drone in his voice, but it’s forgivable, because he tends to read lines in the voice of Lorne Michaels or Adam Sandler, and I’ve always been amazed by people who can just break into spot-on impressions.

The only problem with the book is that in the mornings, after 15 minutes of Jay Mohr, I find myself talking like him. We use the same sentence structure. We tell the same stories about Chris Farley. Sometimes, we even start using the same voices.

I want to tell my co-workers, “Look, it’s not me! It’s the audiobook’s fault! I don’t really talk like this!” But I’m not so sure they’d understand.

So I’ve made a decision: I’ll keep listening to audiobooks, but not by writers with usual voices or narrating styles. From here on out, I’m picking audiobooks with cool sounding narrators, guys like James Earl Jones or Samuel L. Jackson, or at least ones that feature inspiring stories from Vince Lombardi or Winston Churchill.

I want to walk into work in the morning, my voice booming, and have co-workers ask: “What the hell happened to you?”

I want to be able to look back at them and cry out: “I commuted!”

Mojo.

Sorry for the slow week of blogging here at danoshinsky.com. I’m working on a big piece that has to with the photo above — and this book. Should be up later in the week.

The San Antonio Theory of Relativity.

Ignoring the contradictions and laziness in general sentence structure for just a moment, I’d like to suggest that context is everything. [1. Technically speaking, “context is everything” makes no sense, because placing something within context means taking it out of the general text and inserting into a more specific subtext, which does not and can not encompass the whole of everything. But that’s just semantics and me taking an idea entirely too far. Too far out of context, really.]

When I was a kid, a 45 minute drive to Baltimore was an interminable exercise. Maybe it was just childhood antsyness [2. This does not appear to be an actual word.]; maybe it was just that at that point in my life, 45 minutes amounted to a fairly significant chunk of my existence. But when I went to school out in the Midwest, my concept of time changed. Suddenly, an hour and a half seemed like the normal amount of time it should take to drive to the nearest airport. Strangely, a four hour drive to Omaha seemed short. Oddly, at the end of a two-day, 23-hour marathon from Phoenix, I found myself saying, “Wait, it’s already over?”

So time became relative within the particular regional context. The Midwest is enormous; it’s no surprise that people there have to tailor their concept of time to local geography.

Which is why I find it strange that in Texas — a state that touts itself with the tagline “Everything’s Bigger in Texas” — their concept of relativity is so different.

It’s true: they embrace big here. The people are, on average, morbidly obese. Their trucks have beds that extend beyond the limits of modern metallurgy. The two biggest Jumbotrons in the world are in this state.

And yet, there is one thing that Texans do not like more of: walking.

I’ve seen locals happily pay $10 to park a block from the Alamo, even though just two blocks from the landmark, there’s street parking available for a quarter (which buys you 75 minutes in the meter). I’ve seen Texans sit in their cars for twenty minutes at a drive-thru, even though they could just as easily get out of their cars, walk into the restaurant and leave in a third of the time.

But nothing compares to what I saw last Saturday at the AT&T Center, home to the San Antonio Spurs and the Silver Stars. I went to go see the latter play in a WNBA game last Saturday.

Upon arrival, I pulled into the AT&T Center parking lots. There were two lines of cars waiting to enter the lots. Actually, that’s not entirely true: there was one massive line of cars, and there was another lane that was completely empty.

The lane on the right was for the $8 parking that’s closest to the stadium. That lane was filled. The lane on the left — the empty lane — was for $5 parking farther away from the stadium. (For the visually-inclined, note the infographic above.)

So, logic suggests, the $5 lots must’ve been infinitely farther away from the stadium to warrant a discounted price — and a lack of interest from fans. And thanks to Google Maps, I’ve done the calculations.

Based on the approximate location of my parking space in the $5 lot, I walked a distance of about 0.14 miles from my car to the stadium’s entrance. Had I parked in the pricier lot, I would have walked a distance of about 0.08 miles — or less.

I can only assume that eventually, the AT&T Center will began offering even more expensive parking — perhaps for $20 or even $50 — in which fans will have the opportunity to allow their muscles to completely atrophy as an airport-style moving sidewalk guides them into the stadium. We can only hope.

What Journalists Can Learn From the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

More than Dirk Nowitzki or the hole in the roof of their stadium or even the words “Who shot J.R.?,” I think the thing the majority of Americans connect with the city of Dallas is their cheerleaders. And it’s a strange thing, really, because cheerleaders are so ubiquitous now that one exclusive group of females in north Texas shouldn’t make such an impression on Americans. Every sports team in this country has a squad of short short-wearing ladies, but somehow, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders have become the preeminent name in cheerleading (even moreso, perhaps, than L.A.’s famed Laker Girls).

And if not for the Radio City Rockettes, the Cowboys cheerleaders would be the most famous high-kicking organization in the entire country.

But there’s something odd about group so visible despite the fact that they perform only eight times a year (not counting preseason or playoff games). Somehow, they’ve managed to take cowboys boots and the simplest color scheme this side of Syracuse University and turn it into a cheerleading empire.

That’s why the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders are the focus of this installment of “What Journalists Can Learn From….”

1.) The Brand Comes First.
Quick, off the top of your head, name one member of this year’s Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad? How about any cheerleader on the squad dating back to the squad’s inception in 1972? You can’t, because the squad isn’t about individual achievement. The Cowboys cheerleaders are a brand, one of the most powerful ones in sports. They’re carefully managed to make sure that the brand — not the individual members — is the star.

Now look at a news organization like Politico. They’ve managed to connect their brand with politics, and with great results. When one of their writers breaks a story, it’s hailed as a victory for the entire organization, because at Politico, the brand comes first.

2.) Sell It — Across Platforms. Throughout the team’s history, the Cowboys have done a remarkable job of marketing their cheerleaders. Their cheerleaders have appeared in swimsuit calendars (in print and on TV), toured internationally and even had their own feature film (starring, quite naturally, Jane Seymour.) The Cowboys cheerleaders were platform agnostic long before the concept even really existed. They’re a model for journalists willing to brave the multi-platform world.

3.) Be Visible in the Community. I don’t think journalists are doing a good enough job actually making their way into the community and interacting with the public. Some are doing a good job of it digitally — N.B. The Washington Post’s ‘The Fix’ — but actually getting out of the newsroom and being visible is another matter. It’s one thing that the Cowboys cheerleaders excel at, especially when it comes to showing up at public events or youth camps. For journalists, maybe it means attending more forums or speaking at schools. But whatever it is, journalists have to do a better job of reminding people that we’re out there, working for the public good.

Of course, there’s one more thing that any journalist can learn from the Cowboys cheerleaders: whatever it is you’re putting out in the public sphere, make sure it really kicks.

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H/T to KENS 5’s Jeff Anastasio for the photos.

Extreme Makeover, Blog Edition.

Pardon Our DustThe blog has relocated to, well, the exact same address. But it looks different. And the font is a little bigger, which my parents will immediately assume is a backhanded way of me reminding them that their vision is decaying due to old age.

To which I say: I could’ve made a balding joke instead, pops.

I’ll now return you to your irregularly scheduled blogging.

(H/T to Omid Tavallai for the photo of the sign at right, which translates roughly as ‘Pardon Our Dust’ in Japanese. Anyone else a bit weirded out about the cartoon man’s belt-over-the-suit-jacket combination?)