Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Newsroom Body Count - Why is this still news in mainstream, new media

Every day, both mainstream media such as THE WALL STREET JOURNAL and new media such as Mediabistro.com carry a detailed body count of layoffs at the nation's newspapers and print magazines.  Today, for instance, Shira Ovide reports in the WSJ that the LOS ANGELES TIMES will cut about 10-percent of its 1300 workforce.

The Adversity-as-Career Enhancer Movement: Its Dark/Boring Side

The new wrinkle to the career game is to preach how adversity, ranging from getting fired to being passed over for a promotion, can give the victims a distinct career edge.  Well, that's an improvement over the more harsh - you learned a good lesson - that sidelined careerists used to get hammered with.  But, it has its dark side.

Not too shabby - Do things come together or do we pull them together

It's sustained: Success in the two communications boutiques I set up after the old-line ones tanked or I allowed them to fail.  I have none of that panic that I'm fooling myself about things coming together.  My question is:  Did I finally decide it was time to stop experimenting with new businesses, a new me, and a whole new circle of friends and to put it all together. Was it up to me to say that this was the kind of success I wanted and to declare it mine?

Miracle Insomnia Cure: Going to Bed Dressed for Work

Since I was 11 I hadn't been able to sleep - during the night.  I got by with catnaps during the day.  In 1987, I started a communications boutique specializing in executive and marketing communications which allowed me to catch a few winks when the sun rose instead of having to get up and start the commute to a conventional job.  Of course, I tried going to sleep at night.  Sometimes I did fall asleep.  But that very trying created another wrinkle in this sleep-disorder saga: I developed a phobia about getting in bed at night.

Ted Kennedy wants to make amends to ex-Joan

Dying Ted Kennedy, the tabloids have it, has been calling his ex-Joan to make amends.  His sin?  In his eyes he "made" her an alcoholic through his womanizing.  My advice?  Do a lot more soul-searching, Ted.  Your sins seem lots more global - like depraved indifference and deliberate cruelty - than simple shirt-chasing.  In addition, no one "makes" anyone an alcoholic, not even a Kennedy can do that.

Molly Mittens - June 30, 2006, she left us

I made it through these two years after my dog Molly Mittens died.  No one could have told me that I would somehow survive.  And that's what we do, isn't it.  We don't make peace with the idea of a pet's death.  We don't look for meaning or message.

Newbie College Grads - If you're among the 48% heading home, you didn't learn game theory

I have no idea what they teach in college these days but it must not include game theory.  Otherwise, the 48 percent of the newbie graduates who, reports Monster TRAK, are heading home wouldn't be.  They would have great jobs or have already passed the startup phase of the businesses they launched in their dorms or rundown apartments near campus.  My hunch is that it was game theory, which was the rage when Rupert Murdoch was matriculating at Oxford, that turned this raw mass of rebellion and protoplasm into a guy who sure knows how to make a buck and bounce back beautifully from profesional setbacks.

Darien, CT - Will it become a slum?

It could just be that outlying affluent communities with their McMansions - like Darien, Connecticut - could become slums.  That's right: Slums.  Given the escalating cost of transportation fuel and energy for heating and cooling, those places which house families of the men, and increasingly the women, who journey into the city for high-paying jobs could become land and buildings no one wants to pay for any more. Like those scenes from the Russian Revolution, the riff-raff could be taking over the McMansions.

Presidential Candidates & Wealthy Wives

Maybe we aren't connecting to John McCain for the same reason we didn't connect at all to John Kerry.

HARTFORD COURANT - Very Black Wednesday

Four years ago this month, it was in the HARTFORD COURANT that my "comeback" "piece on pet grief was published.  What came back was my professional self-confidence.  And it was several months earlier that one of its reporters Sue Campbell did a feature on how my once wildly successful communications boutique had tanked.  She pleaded for homes for animals I could no longer afford. That was then.  The now is good, at least for me.  I have a new business.  It is earning plenty.  And I did the work on my "inner technology," as one spiritual adviser called it, to hopefully prevent another implosion.  With me live three cats who were abandoned.