Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

"You couldn't wait to get out of Jersey City," - The Greek Chorus at My Sister's Funeral

Those who stayed in blue-collar, ethnic, Roman Catholic Jersey City, New Jersey never knew what happened to those of us who left.  Sure, I would return for funerals.  The last one I would attend was in 2001 when my older sister Camille Genova Klinga died.  She had remained, at least in spirit, in nearby in working-class Edison, New Jersey.  At every one of those funerals I got in and out.  I grieved back in my other worlds.  And when you flee your beginnings, you sure do wind up in many strange lands.  This time I couldn't get in and out.  The death of a sibling is a unique experience: The parallel past we shared went with her. I was thrown off my game, every piece of it but especially the running.

Newbie BAs, BSs - Let the job find you

The media are having a lot of fun scaring newbie college graduates about the difficulty of finding a job.  That's what the media are supposed to do: Get our attention through fear.  Good for them.  But the reality is that jobs find us, if we allow that to happen. 

That 4-day workweek - Lousy Plan

Some government entities and community colleges are probably patting themselves on the back for switching their employees to a four-day, 10-hour a day workweek.  The reason is to help cut their commuting costs.  And today in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Josee Valcourt and Justin Scheck describe how this is in-place in-place here and there across the nation.  Unfortunately Valcourt and Scheck don't drill down to the downside of the 10-hour day.

"I Love Jersey City" Images - For JC Museum Summer Exhibit

For those of us who love Jersey City, New Jersey, there's a way to show it. 

Keeping Your Brand From Going Stale - Wisdom from the heart

Those once-blockbuster brands are going stale everywhere.  Oprah's TV ratings are down three years in a row.  Talbot's, once the name in affordable attire for the professional woman, is struggling.  The Red Cross has taken successive hits.

So, I called in an expert - actually a very unlikely one.  She's Sue Gunderson, the Executive Director of nonprofit CLEARCorps.  The organization's mission is to help families deal with the possible hazards of lead paint.  Hardly a sizzler.  Yet, within that cause Gunderson has built and nurtured a classic mystique branding.

Barring scandal, established brands die slowly - The O Brand will be around a long time

Every measure of the O or Oprah brand shows decline.  According to Nielsen Media Research, average viewer audience for her talk show is down 7 percent.  That's the third year the numbers are down, not up. Her magazine circulation is down more than 10 percent in the past three years, reports the Audit Bureau of Circulations.  And neither her fans nor the Obamas felt her move into politics was wise or effective.

Common Biz Sense: Stedman's Tell-All Book Won't Tell Much

The cover of tabloid NATIONAL ENQUIRER [June 2] tells us that coming soon is "Stedman's $10 Million Tell-All Book: The 22 years of secrets."  Don't count on Stedman, as a working stiff in the public relations biz just like me, telling much at all.  He can't afford to cross Oprah.  Few can, at least not those who depend on her six degrees of separation for their biz. 

Remember when we all sounded like Tom Wolfe

Now I find out.  "I trust my writing most and others seem to trust it most when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am,"  Kurt Vonnegut.  Actually I found out that I had to take the risk of using my own voice in 2003 - after decades of being a mediocre imitator of Tom Wolfe.  The cruel irony is that in order to be a writer, we have to be outrageous narcissists.  But most of us fear to let the world know - or ourselves - who we are. 

CSI Effect - "Lawyers are not going to be able to rely anymore on their advocacy skills," Alan Dershowitz

In criminal law, Harvard Law Professor and part-time litigator Alan Dershowitz predicts science replacing attorneys' rhetorical skills.  Juries are picking up their state-of-the-art science lessons from watching the "CSI" series.  A fave is the one set in Miami with David Caruso as Horatio.  So much has this crime-scene-investigation science caught on that it even has a name: CSI Effect.  Lawyers now take seminars to deal with jurors' expectations of clear-cut evidence.  But, Dershowitz insists in a chapter of the 2008 book "What's Next: The Experts' Guide" by Jane Buckingham that it's going to go much further than that.

Gas at $4.01 - The New Apartheid

As the morning slid into afternoon, I-95 N here in New Haven, Connecticut started to form a four-mile gridlock.  The financially comfortable could afford to leave work early and could also afford to burn $4.01 a gallon gas stuck in traffic.  By 6:00 PM that four miles increased exponentially, all the way south to Norwalk.  Is the new way the haves and the have-nots get segregated is by not being able to get out of town on a holiday weekend?