Newspapers are yesterday's news

This story by Paul Gillen states the plain truth about why newspapers are toast. In short, online sites handle breaking news and classified ads far more efficiently and cheaply.

The problem, of course, is that online sites have not been shown to handle long-range investigative reporting of the "follow the money" nature particularly well. They're best at telling you when things have finally blown up, not at figuring out that corporate or political bad guys are quietly cooking the books or systematically granting building permits to their cronies.

Freed of traditional newspaper scrutiny, mid-level bad guys (in city government and business) will soon be free to embezzle, rezone, pollute, and more -- as long as they don't piss off some partner in crime who outs them to a blogger.

It would be nice, but unduly optimistic, to think that local websites and bloggers devoted to watchdogging local businesses and government will spring up to take on this work (which newspapers have nearly abandoned already). We'll see.

Going on a trip? Let the credit card company know

These tips from Productive Strategies for planning international travel are outstanding, and in the post-9/11 world many are relevent for US travel as well. Such as this one:

Make sure you call your credit card company and let them know you plan to be out of the country. Otherwise they may shut down your card thinking it has been stolen. Also be aware that some stores process cards differently, so it is possible that your card might be rejected. Make sure you have other means of payment available.

I used to think that my credit card was good anywhere. But two years in a row I had a credit card frozen on the first day of the MacWorld trade show in San Francisco -- with no attempt in either instance to notify me by phone or by email. (I found out when the credit card was refused for a subsequent purchase -- inconvenient and embarrassing.)

When I caught up with the credit card company, they were unapologetic. A $49 piece of astronomy software from a Danish company? Clearly my card had been stolen and taken to Denmark. A camera purchased outside of Seattle? Suspicious.

In these days of frequent business travel, I was shocked to discover that buying something on a trip, other than food and a hotel room, can trigger a freeze on your card. While I had previously left most of my cards at home (to minimize damage from theft) I now take at least two on the road to protect myself from the credit card company. And, as the Productive Strategies folks suggest, I call the credit card company nannies in advance to let them know I will be going shopping.

Tips for writing a holiday letter

Holiday letters occupy a position just below fruitcake on the top ten list of Things to Dampen the Holiday Spirit.

This need not be so.

While fruitcakes are pretty much victims of their own cloying recipe of heavy and sweet ingredients, you have complete control over what goes in your holiday letter. Really, you do.

Each year we receive a few dozen holiday letters. Some have me yawning with boredom or rolling my eyes with incredulity by the second sentence. Others have moved me to tears, or had me eagerly reading them out loud to other family members.

Here are a few tips for creating letters that fall into the second group:

1. Write for your recipients, not for the senders. If two of your kids made the dean's list and one was in juvenile court three times last year, don't feel you need to go into detail about any of it, or invent something for the black sheep to balance out the other kids' accolades. "Janie is a junior at Oregon State, Pete is in his freshman year at Reed, and Susie is in her last year of high school. We look forward to having the whole family together for the holidays in Aspen," is just fine to keep old neighbors and college friends up-to-date (many of them can't remember the kids' names, anyway).

2. Keep it short, and focused. While you will probably start by drawing up a list of the key things that happened to your family during the year, select just two or three to highlight in the letter. Professional and scholastic achievements can be boring and off-putting. Travel and hobbies are almost always a better choice, as they give people not only news about what you've been doing but an insight into another region or field of interest.

3. Make it clear who's writing the letter -- that being you. It's difficult and a bit weird to have everyone in the family referred to in the third person as if a reporter were profiling your family. And it's even weirder to use "we" and then try to talk about things you did as individuals. Don't go there. It really is OK to begin the letter "Elizabeth and I opened a new bookstore in July..." and at the end sign it "Frank and Elizabeth." People will get it. (When I include stories from other family members describing their activities in first person, I set their words off from the body of the letter as indented paragraphs.)

4. Talk briefly about why you're writing the letter. "It's wonderful to take a few minutes to reflect about the year and share some highlights with friends," is the type of opening you're looking for. Don't apologize. If you feel compelled to open with something like "We hate to bore you all with another long, stilted holiday missive," you shouldn't be writing one.

5. Drop names. Not names of famous people, but names of mutual friends and acquaintances. This is a even good time to gossip, as long as you keep it positive. "We ran into Mark and Sandy Connors, our old neighbors from Denver, and discovered Mark left his job at Microsoft and is playing with a heavy metal group. Check out his new album..." This makes your letter a valuable source of genuine news, not just a brag sheet.

5. Keep in mind that the holiday letter isn't meant to be sent to everyone. Send holiday letters to people you see once a year (or less often) and with whom you genuinely like to keep in touch. Don't send personal holidays letters to people who are (or were) purely business associates. As far as the people you see on a regular basis -- they know this stuff anyway.

6. What about the people only one of you knows? Our increasingly mobile society, significant otherships, late marriages, and re-marriages, mean that quite a few people on your holiday list know one member of a couple extremely well and the other member hardly at all. These people are rarely ideal recipients for the holiday letter. The spouse or partner who knows the person should write a personal note instead, or put a personal note at the foot of the letter.

I'll be the first to admit that while some of my holiday letters have been great, other years they have been merely pro forma. I can always use tips and inspiration. Please feel free to add your comments and ideas!

A tourist in a strange land

"Literary authors sometimes like to take holidays in the shabby Third World genres like romance, thrillers and fantasy."

So begins Crawford Kilian's audacious review of Cormac McCarthy's new book, The Road, in which the acclaimed author takes a junket in to the realm of science fiction. McCarthy turns out to be "a tourist" who "can't hold his mescal," according to Kilian, but the book's more serious problem would seem to transcend genres:

"McCarthy's fatal flaw is that he can't go for two paragraphs without reminding us that he's a hell of a good writer, and that makes him a terrible writer."

Every sentence of Kilian's review in the Tyee is a gem. I don't think I've read such a fine review since the era of Peter Prescott at Newsweek.

Hot off the press: Vanishing Seattle

The Blogger site has been a bit recalcitrant today, but I've believe it's going to let me make this important announcement:

Clark Humphrey's new non-fiction book Vanishing Seattle (Arcadia Publishing) will be released Monday. The official release party is at Epilogue Books Tuesday, Dec. 19, 6:30 - 8 p.m.

I saw a proof of the book this fall, and it's a great combo of rare photos and Clark's wry and incisive commentary. I've only lived in Seattle for 22 years, but it is shocking to realize how many of the charming places that played a key roles in the city in the 70s, 80s, and 90s are gone forever (most of them replaced by Euro-style condos with 500-square-foot studio units selling for $500,000). Clark, editor of the Belltown Messenger and former staff writer for The Stranger, is a leading authority on popular culture of the Pacific Northwest.

Vanishing Seattle should be available at all the major Seattle bookshops next week; you can also order it on Amazon.

Top 10 Blogs for Writers

"The Top 10 Blogs for Writers - 2006" might better have been titled "Top 10 Blogs for Writers Who Want to Make a Living Writing." Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers reviewed open nominations and selected these 10. They span blogging, freelancing, getting published, business-to-business marcom writing, as well as general writing topics. I've added a couple of my faves from the top 10 to the sidebar at left.

How the communications cookie crumbles

I like to figure things out for myself. Of course, one of the pitfalls of this approach occurs if you follow a set of directions that look plausible to your newbie eyes but are, in fact, risible to any expert in the field.

That's what happened to me last year when I read a set of directions for icing holiday cookies that had been so oversimplified as to make it impossible to produce an attractive cookie. But, who knew? Not realizing the writer had cut corners, I flailed, snarled and plastered garish frostings and gels all over a whole batch of cookies. The result was hideous.

Today I paid $65 to watch a professional pastry chef demonstrate the right way to do it -- making and rolling dough, blending icings, and decorating cookies with outlining and flooding techniques. It was a big "aha."

I'll likely be going into detail about cookie decorating ingredients, equipment, and techniques later in the week at the Geeky Gourmet blog. What I want to note here is the difficulty writers face trying to produce something useful and accurate in today's "keep it short" culture.

Magazines chop articles to one page, and most of what's on that page is a glossy picture of a trendy model doing something hip. Complex research reports are given two sentences of explanation in the news. Even worse, research findings are reported by the press without any mention of contradictory studies, or any comment from other researchers in the field.

I'm sure the writer for the well-known food magazine who sent me on my trip to cookie-decorating hell last year had been told to make cookie decorating look "quick," "easy," and "fun". (Three words that have been thoroughly bankrupted by the birdbrains in marketing. The use of two of them in the same sentence should be grounds for electroshock; the use of three -- let's not go there.)

There are plenty of processes that are not quick and easy for newbies and never will be. That's because these they involve finding and using unfamiliar materials and tools. And they involve practice.

As communicators, we need to be up-front about the limitations of our guidance when we're serving up "Information Lite." The cookie article that misled me last year could have alerted me with something like:

"This quick and easy [ZZZAP!] guide won't yield the sort of smooth, polished cookie you see at the bakery, but it will produce colorful cookies your kids will enjoy frosting and eating. If you have the time to learn a more elaborate approach, consult Chef Julie's new book, Bite Me: The Ultimate Cookie Encyclopedia."

But it didn't. And when renewal time rolled around, the magazine lost a subscriber. On the other hand, the kitchen supply store that hosted this year's comprehensive cookie decorating class got not just my tuition money but $50 of business when I went shopping afterwards.

Surely there's a lesson in this, somewhere.

Genre bliss

I don't know who's behind Electric Storytime (the site provides no clues) but I love these short send-ups of literary fiction. For the cocktail lounge regret scene, try "A Time to Meow."

But sometimes negative is the only way to go

My previous post hinted at the possible advantages of writing in a positive rather than negative vein.

But sometimes negative is the only way to go. And no one can sound more positive when he's being negative than Chicago Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko. Watch a master in action as he vaporizes the Zune.

Accentuate the positive?

The late Stephanie Feeney, founder of the Northwest Gardeners' Resource Directory, was a superb writer and public speaker. I remember hearing her talk about English gardens at the Northwest Garden Show at a time when I was considering writing a travel guide to mystery locales. I noticed immediately that Stephanie managed to be colorful, amusing, and distinctive without ever falling back on two very common communications crutches: deprecation and self deprecation.

Anyone who's made a living writing criticism knows how much more attention accrues to a clever, withering attack on a book or film than to an equally well-crafted paean. Complaints and criticism, at least when initially (and creatively) expressed, can be highly entertaining.

And yet, over time, that attention-getting negative approach can come back to hurt a writer. Gradually, the reader comes to think of the writer, the column, or the blog as one long whine, rant, or pity fest.

This danger, I think, is particularly true when writing "how-to" pieces or advice. The writer who focuses advice on what to avoid and how to spot signs that you are screwing up runs the risk of coming across as a sanctimonious finger-waggler. Unless you know the author well, or she is addressing your specific situation, it can be very easy to decide the last thing you want to read is, well, an unsolicited lecture or a dose of negativity.

In September, marketing guru Daphne Gray-Grant wrote a piece for Marketingprofs.com on "Five Negative Thoughts That Can Sabotage Your Writing (and How to Shake Them)." This month she followed up with "Five Positive Thoughts That Will Turbocharge Your Writing (and How to Channel Them)."

Both articles are packed with good information. I'd be curious to hear your reactions to the titles, and to the pieces themselves. Which one did you want to read most? Did you enjoy reading one more than the other?

Five things you didn't know about my writing career

Deborah Ng of Writers Row, who compiles an excellent listing of freelance writing jobs and has been a perennial resource for the online writing community, passed along the blogging meme "Five things you didn't know about me."

I've adapted it to be "Five things you didn't know about my writing career."

1. I got my start in writing penning consumer complaint letters for my mother after our vacuum cleaner blew up.

2. My first short story was "The Christmas Tree and the Hanukkah Bush."

3. My first paid, published writing gig was music criticism for the New Haven Advocate. One of my pieces was a profile of a hard-working local rock singer who'd spent more than a decade trying to break into the big time but was getting discouraged by increasing violence on the concert circuit. A few years later, he finally hit it big (Michael Bolton).

4. My journalism thesis at Columbia was about court battles involving the drug paraphernalia industry. While working on the thesis, I met and dated a charming NYC civil liberties attorney whose clients included NORML and Dial-a-Joint. Our dates frequently included swinging by night court for arraignments.

5. I spent more than a year in the early 1980s working on two interrelated investigative stories involving illegal garbage dumping, corrupt local officials, and a lot of people with Italian last names. By the time it was over, I'd been chased by a garbage truck, had worn a wire while conducting an interview, and a landfill (seized by the FBI) had caught fire. Repercussions from the story went on for years, culminating in a landfill worker we'd exposed for illegal overtime taking a town official hostage. Fortunately, the official escaped by climbing out a bathroom window.

Please try this meme yourself! And let me know when you've posted it.

Hello? Hello? We're losing that mind-body connection

Yesterday's New York Times had a mindboggling article about a New York area fitness club that revoked a man's membership because he was making a grunting sound while lifting weights. He was bench pressing 500 pounds at the time, bless his soul.

If this were the independent action of a particularly fussy club manager, it would be one thing, but the "grunt-and-you're-out" rule is a policy of the club's parent chain, Planet Fitness -- a company whose management would, indeed, seem to be from outer space.

This article caught my interest because I'm currently doing a "trailer park" yoga program four days a week. It mixes yoga with weightlifting, jumping rope, running stairs, working with wrist and ankle weights, and working with heavier weights, including 15-pound handweights and a weight bench. I haven't heard anyone in our group of two dozen women grunt, per se, but I have heard plenty of moaning, shrieking, and screaming. And maybe a howl or two. The teacher, who is the most inspiring fitness instructor I've ever encountered, encourages the sound effects.

I tend to shriek, myself. Fifty leg lifts hurt.

According to the Times article, the club's no-grunt rule (and a few other weird ones, as well) has nothing to do with cutting down on distracting noise in the gym. It's based on the chain's philosophy that most members are intimidated and discouraged by body builders and other serious fitness types. The club therefore has crafted rules that discourage those fitniks from patronizing the gym and disturbing the place with sounds of physical effort.

Oh, heaven forbid anyone should connect hard work, physical or mental, with achievement. Americans are fervent believers in overnight weight loss, cosmetic surgery, and unregulated herbal potions. Hard work and discipline? Argggh! Fortunately Planet Fitness is here to protect us from the sight -- and sound -- of it.