Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Media: Surviving on a lot less

Maybe it started when I shifted back to executive communications from social media.  Then it could have reached a tipping point when Mediabistro.com morning media news feed kept being released later and later in the day.  I stopped keeping up with all the developments reported by the media.  Nothing happened, at least negatively.

Assignments in executive communications, unlike the trending keywords in social media, don't demand up-to-the-minute tracking of what's going on in the world. Also, those assignments require time and focus.  They are not short takes.  Currently I start my work day not checking about 10 news sites.  I have to plow right into the book, article, and speech.

Who really needs so much media, in addition to SEO players?  Well, David Letterman's writers do.  And, of course, those in the media niche themselves. 

An accidental benefit is that I'm more social.  I don't share with everyone breaking news.  They seem to be responding better to me this way, more interested in them and less frantic.

OUT and THE ADVOCATE: Will they modify upbeat tone?

Alternate-sex lifestyle publications OUT and THE ADVOCATE still arrive snail mail in a plain gray wrapper.  I subscribe to follow trends in outlier media.  However, in the past several months the tone in both has been upbeat.  As it should.  Across generations we have accepted not only gay culture but also gay marriage.

However, with the recent violent hate crimes against gays in Manhattan, a usually liberal mecca, that tone might become more subdued.  NEW YORK Magazine chronicles three incidents.  The battle has not been won.

The success of gay rights, I am convinced, is a model for Baby Boomers to have our own aggressive campaign for better treatment.  We are invisible.  Also, as soon as I walked into job interviews (obviously they hadn't googled me), jaws dropped.  Actually that worked out fine since I have returned to freelancing and am making more money doing that than I would have in any full-time position.

If gays continue to suffer, so will we the aging.

Watergate 2.0: Take it from survivor of Watergate 1.0, there will be tremendous loss of productivity

It's not Watergate 2.0 yet, Bob Woodward tells POLITICO.  For example, there's no clear line to the White House on the IRS' providing extra scrutiny on the tax-exempt status of conservative organizations. 

However, take it from a Baby Boomer who survived Watergate 1.0: Productivity will take a hit.  The hit will be bigger than when the Watergate 1.0 hearings were broadcasted on television.  That's because there are so many more venues for presenting the news and opining.  Name one person who will not be caught up in this?  I will be hitting all my three syndicated blogs, tweeting, and commenting on Facebook.

Back during Watergate 1.0, everyone took the time to express thoughts about government, human nature, power, the GOP, Richard Nixon, all the president's men, and Everyman.  In addition everyone caught snippets of the hearings. Sometimes in university towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan, where folks have flexible schedules, we had Watergate-hearing parties. 

Watergate 2.0 will bring the nation a nice pause after so much tragedy.  If there is no Watergate 2.0, there will probably be great disappointment throughout the land. 

Mirror Neurons: Why man the social animal is returning from virtual

In the presence of each other, a number of species, including us human kind, affect each other cell by cell. Some of us always knew this.  For example, our moms told us to stay clear of "bad companions." The transmission process happens across the species. My dog Molly Mittens could pick up that I was depressed before I did. The vet, part Dr. Phil, told me she had been hanging on despite her bad heart trying to keep me together.  

But how we resonate off each other was confirmed by researchers such as Marco Iacoboni on mirror neurons in Italy. He made all that science user-friendly in his book "Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others.  Last night at the New Haven Zen Center in Connecticut we discussed why meditating together in-person can center us so quickly.  As a guiding teacher noted, we feed off each other's strength.  The same principle operates in 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

No surprise, we are returning to in-person speeches, meetups, chats by the water cooler, author presentations at bookstores, and church services. Virtual social networks were fun but they left us, well, unconnected.

For the past four months, although I was doing my time virtually on Facebook and LinkedIn, I would get attacks of extreme alienation. They were brutal enough to dry up the creative processes as I tried to write.  When I packed up the laptop and went to the public library in North Haven, CT, the juices started flowing again.  Clients raved about what I had created there.  Blog posts done there went viral. The help-wanted I answered there brought in good assignments.

We need other human beings around us. They don't have to even actively interact with us. For this very reason, we speechwriters have been busy preparing what speakers are delivering in the flesh, not on webinars. Social networks have proved to be unable to transmit from mirror neurons.

Being Snooped On: The new symbol of power

The nose knows.  It smells power and the rest is the material for some of the most audacious scandals which have hit since Watergate. 

Bloomberg News has been caught snooping on masters of the universe as well as the crowd at the Federal Reserve.  POLITICO chronicles the snooping by the IRS on conservative groups and that of the Department of Justice on reporters. 

Not being snooped on can be perceived as a negative, transmitting the message that we aren't powerful enough to bother with.  Not since I was deposed about a trial I covered in 2005 through 2006 have I been snooped on.  That was heady stuff, with lawyers representing both sides flying into New Haven, Connecticut to grill me. That included questioning me about what I had posted on my blogs.

Likely I am not alone in craving the attention of being watched.

 

Everything Changes: Hillary Clinton no sure thing for '16

The Democrats, so recently riding high, are now under the kind of attack which could keep them out of the White House in 2016.  Hillary Clinton as the first U.S. President is no longer a sure thing.  Be ready to read plenty in the media about conservatives who are being groomed and funded for campaigns for 2016. 

Scandal is one of the most effective tools for cutting the legs off a political party.  It could be driven out in the wilderness for several election cycles. Since Clinton is associated with one of the them - Benghazi - Democratic party leaders may already be searching for other suitable candidates for the next presidential races.  Other scandals, as POLITICO reports, include the IRS' targeting conservatives and the Justice Department's snooping into members of the media's phone records.

Shell-shocked Democrats might decide to start studying zen, the philosophy which teaches that everything changes and provides tools, including meditation, to stay centered amidst the flux. 

Entrepreneurs: They can pay as well as Fortune 500

Entrepreneurs, the super heroes of our times, usually were shunned by us ghostwriters.  We figured they wouldn't pay as well as the Fortune 500.  That was a few years ago.

By now, some of them have become successful enough to be able to match establishment compensation.  They also have become famous enough to be in demand to produce books, bylined articles for brandname media, and keynote speeches, including for TED.  In addition, in the Fortune 500, some have set up entrepreneurial or enterprise units to get new products and services out there in the marketplace.

This has expanded the pool of possible assignments for us in executive communications.  For the first time in a very long time I have had to create a waiting list.

Fame: Is the need for it getting re-wired into our brain patterns?

"Neuroplasticity" is the term researchers use to describe how human beings can re-wire the patterns of their brains.  Most commonly this is accomplished through mindfulness training.  MRIs show, for example, how monks' gray matter changes.

But our brains can also be changed through the collective push of contemporary culture which salutes fame. In some circles it has become a dominant value.  Of course, that makes a growing number of us vulnerable to doing anything which we assume will lead to fame.

This fame mania might have taken hold during the "Me Decade" we Baby Boomers are known for.  The Me demanded all the attention we can get.  The drawback from that was that too many of us, including myself, became public nuisances.  We clamored for more than a sensible share of attention.

Ironically, that addiction, like all dependencies, can hurt professional success.  Through mindfulness I am exiting a lot of that noisy self-promotion and just settling down to doing the work.  Amazing results are happening.  For example, without my going after attention, more and more professionals, from diverse  fields, are checking my LinkedIn profile and contacting me about possible assignments in ghostwriting and speechwriting. 

Fame or at least the pursuit of it may be counterproductive to enduring success.

Bloomberg Brand: Competitors are licking their chops, politicos can get edge

Bloomberg competitors, ranging from Thomas Reuters on the terminal side to News Corp on the media side, probably can't believe their good luck.  That huge and respected Bloomberg brand just took a major hit.  Could it be fatal? Time will tell.  Meanwhile, the politicos could get an edge by zeroing in investigating what has just been disclosed.

THE NEW YORK POST, owned by News Corp, broke the story that the 2,400 Bloomberg News reporters had access to the activities of Wall Street subscribers on the 315,000 Bloomberg terminals.  Now, THE NEW YORK TIMES has made that story legitimate.  Here you can read the detailed coverage of a scandal which can make the high-risk trading at JP Morgan Chase and the allegedly non-client-centric folks at Goldman Sachs seem like petty stuff.

In a nutshell, Bloomberg News reporters could log into the accounts of terminal subscribers and track a lot.  That could provide the reporter with unique insight about what the traders could be planning to do.  For example, if they kept checking X category, reporters could parachute in and start nosing around that area, gather information, and try connecting the dots. 

This could spread beyond Wall Street.  As THE NEW YORK TIMES reports:

"Banking regulators at the Federal Reserve are examining whether their own employees were subject to tracking by Bloomberg reporters, according to people briefed on the matter." 

The scope of the possible mischief is the stuff new brandnames are made of and current brandnames can be given a major boost.  Could Bloomberg terminals and Bloomberg News go out of business?  That will depend on how aggressively competitors and politicos pursue this matter.  Meanwhile ethics experts can opine on how our society has to re-think the extent it will go to in order to get an edge. That edge could turn on the edge-holder, delivering a deadly wound.

Layoffs at VILLAGE VOICE, NEW YORK POST, Say Media, and additional ones at DAILY NEWS

What will be next for those laid off (or as it is sometimes called "accepting a voluntary buy-out") from Say Media, the NEW YORK POST, VILLAGE VOICE, and (again in a second round) at the DAILY NEWS?

In pre-digital times, journalists, especially those getting older and having families, could arrange plum jobs for themselves as public relations representatives at agencies or in corporations.  In covering stories they got to know the game and the players and became valuable commodities.  Often offers were made to them rather than their chasing after The Next.

Now, journalists and editors are being tossed on the street, with little warning, and with a glut ballooning. They should beware of radical career changes.  Email and ads on the subway are full of messages of how easy it is to become a nurse or substance abuse counselor.  The reality is that career change is a painful experiment which doesn't always pan out. 

When executive communications went into the dumper at the turn of the century I tried a lot of things, ranging from providing content for social media to part-time sales.  The parts of those ventures which went okay paid peanuts.  Also, every day was filled with angst. As the career-transition folks hammer, yes, I left my comfort zone but outside it I remained unsure of myself. 

Had I to do it over again I would have remained as much in my comfort zone as possible and embraced the reality that I wasn't as easy to remold as the ads for career change claim.  Executive communications as a field is back.  There are more assignments than I can handle.  And because I am again confident, I can shrug off clients who are unhappy. 

I wish those laid off less pain than I had in their struggle to make a good living, again.