communication. community. cognition.
Personal
Adrenalinholics Anonymous
May 4th
If we can’t get what we need, we’ll grow our own.
(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)
This is the very last of the mcarp essays, written over a decade ago by former broadcast journalist Michael Carpenter. I got his permission to share these, because they are not easy to find, and like most brutally honest musings, they deserve to be read.
After this essay, I’ll share a little about why this cuts so close to home for me.
I was a junkie.
An adrenalin junkie, that is. I was hooked on it.
I can’t speak for every TV news reporter in America, but I can speak for myself. I grew up in a household where there was a lot of suspense, drama, and anxiety. Mom and Dad drank a lot. They fought. They had affairs. After they split up, my mother drank even more, and disappeared for days at a time.
I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you this because it set me up for my career in television news. I couldn’t have been a reporter without it.
Living in that kind of environment produces the same physical sensation as parachuting from an airplane, or skiing down an expert slope. Except that you have it all the time, and it’s only noticeable when it’s absent. When you don’t have it, it feels like something’s wrong — like life is empty and meaningless.
A freshman anchor I once knew left the business after her first contract ran out, saying, “This is not a business for adults.”
Having grown up in the kind of environment she did, which is to say a fairly healthy one, TV news made no sense to her. Having grown up in the kind of environment I did, which is to say one filled with irrational demands and wildly inconsistent expectations, TV news made perfect sense to me. Well, maybe not perfect sense. But I was comfortable for many years with the notion that truth could change from day to day, and even hour to hour. One of my news directors had a name for it: “functional reality.”
I got the buzz living in the constant craziness of home, and I didn’t really have it again until I immersed myself in the constant craziness of television. It was no wonder I spent so many hours at work, and so rarely took a vacation — as sick and depressed and miserable as it eventually made me, the newsroom was the closest thing to a family I’d found since I’d left home.
Punch Drunk
I’m not the only newsperson I know from what is sometimes called the ‘alcoholic family of origin.’ And once you know what to look for, it’s easy to spot fellow travelers.
They’re the ones who, when the boss comes in drunk and raving, don’t bat an eye. They’re the ones who, when they’re reprimanded for something with which they were not involved, and over which they had no control, shrug it off as if it were nothing. (Even before I was familiar with the term ‘triangulation,’ I understood that principle. I was surprised to learn there was a name for it.)
They’re the ones who, when insulted or mistreated by abusive or chemically-dependent bosses, not only shrug it off, but make make excuses for them.
I once worked for a news director who frequently referred to his assistant news director as ‘bitch,’ and other sexist, demeaning terms. He insulted her and ridiculed her in front of the staff. A reporter asked her one day why she put up with it.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “He and I just have a very special relationship.”
“Yeah,” the reporter replied. “He treats you like shit, and you take it.”
Confronted for the first time by the undeniable reality of their years-long ‘partnership,’ she burst into tears. The reporter got fired.
It’s just my opinion, but I think most news people are hooked on adrenalin, and addicted to doubt and uncertainty. They judge their surroundings and relationships by whether they induce the familiar physical effects of an adrenalin rush: tightness in the chest, dry mouth, accelerated pulse. And if they don’t feel that, they think something’s wrong.
Noise and Narcissism
I think that’s why so many screamers and tantrum-throwers thrive and get ahead in this business. Their ‘intensity’ can give everyone around them an adrenalin buzz, even if there’s nothing happening to justify it.
Of course, nothing will keep that rush going like a steady stream of murders, accidents, fires and catastrophes. I don’t think you can blame consultants alone for the business’s infatuation with tragedy and violence. I think that if a group of TV reporters were allowed to operate their own newsroom, unguided and unrestrained by any management, most would instinctively gravitate toward ‘death and destruction’ reporting. That’s where the rush is.
And absent a real train wreck to keep the pulse punding, a lot of people in this business seem willing to create a metaphorical one — either in their own lives, or in their coworkers’. If newsgathering is job number one, leading a drama-filled life is job number two, and rumor-mongering is job number two and a half.
It’s worth the price of a six-month subscription to peruse the Newsblues web site, on which TV news staffers are encouraged to post anonymous rants and raves about their workplaces. A significant percentage are about the soap opera aspects of their coworkers’ lives.
You can also occasionally find complaints from anchors themselves on news-themed web sites to the effect that “I’m afraid people are talking about my personal life.” Which can be translated to, “I’m afraid people are not talking about my personal life, so let me get the ball rolling.”
And off the Internet, you’ll hear a lot more about that in the typical end-of-day shoptalk than you will hear, for example, about who’s on the take from contractors down at city hall.
My personal life? “Dull and boring,” as one coworker dismissed it. “You and your Moon Pies.”
Not that I didn’t try, you understand. I just wasn’t very good at it.
I get it.
This essay in particular had a very profound impact on how I viewed my job. There were so many things in hindsight that were wrong with the way news is produced and arranged, and it isn’t all about bias or lack of experience or agendas.
It has everything to do with the unprofessional way most newsrooms are managed.
In the business world, you can’t get away with the things that news managers do. To be fair, some news managers cross the line and get spanked, yanked or tanked as necessary. But it’s the little things that just don’t happen as often in other sectors. I was blessed to work for better-than-average news managers, but even then I had head-scratcher moments.
One glaring piece missing in newsrooms is any sort of program for professional leadership. My brother was fortunate to work for an NBC-owned station when GE was in charge, and he got the full benefit of the GE Management Training program. I don’t know of any broadcast ownership that commits a dime to it, and if it exists, it’s at a small scale. (Maybe Belo. Maybe.)
Most of the business world seems to understand that when you start getting higher up the chain, it’s about finding, motivating and mentoring people. You are a manager of people above all else. Not a manager of equipment or widgets.
In news, the managers of people are not promoted because they are motivators or have natural ability to lead. They are promoted because they came from the ranks of producer. The job of a producer has more to do with creation of a product and less to do with managing people. Unless you count yelling at people.
I don’t know of any stations (other than the NBC/GE combo, which no longer exists) that gave management training to producers who aspired for more. Producers became Executive Producers, who became Assistant News Directors, who became News Directors. And at no point along the way was there any development of the skills the rest of the business world takes for granted. If you A) Got the job done and B) Didn’t get us sued for harassment, then you got to move up.
In an ideal world, you break the cycle of dysfunctional leadership with positive examples. In newsrooms, it just doesn’t happen.
Opportunity Costs
The other epiphany had to do with the toll the industry takes on your life. Not measured in what you visibly lose, but in what you never attempt because of the nature of news.
It’s preached constantly that you are so lucky to be working, and only a fraction of those who dream of being in a newsroom ever make it. Competition is fierce, and pay reflects that in the form of depressed compensation. Your job is more than that, though… it is a calling of the highest order.
At least that’s what you are expected to believe.
The world will indeed end if you balk at the ten and eleven hour days. You’re there for greater purpose! If they need you for a six o’clock live shot 45 miles away, no problem! Can do!
After a while, you stop trying to plan social engagements during the week. Date night with the spouse, dinner with friends, Wednesday night church, softball leagues. They all disappear from your vocabulary, because you simply get tired of canceling things.
In that environment, you don’t recognize the odd position you are in. You’ve surrounded yourself with a peer group that places an inordinate amount of their self-esteem and identity into their employment. They cease being people, and instead are TV People. And when you are suddenly aware of what you’ve become, it’s both jolting and revolting. Even worse, everyone around you thinks you have either gone crazy, or are now a bad apple, newsroom poison, or a morale assassin.
There are many people who are perfectly happy in that environment. At this point, I am not sure they have ever known life any other way. I might as well show them a hypercube.
Only now, with audiences shrinking and staffing imploding to match, I am suddenly being asked for advice by those seeking life after journalism. And everything mcarp wrote above still applies to this day; I am just as much a psychological counselor as an employment one.
The Crowdsourced Looking Glass
Mar 22nd
We don’t really need a Reason to Be, but it certainly helps to occasionally step back and look at a larger picture.
What is Occam’s RazR?
What do I want it to be?
It’s not what we saw from the first incarnation of the “personal weblog.” I don’t share everything here. I have Facebook, and a Twitter account that I use for short thoughts. (I even started a “My Quotes” category to archive the witty pieces that shouldn’t be so ephemeral.)
I have a Posterous site, “Ike’s Online Scraptacular,” for the pieces that don’t fit in other places.
I occasionally contribute at Media Bullseye and Calling John Galt, so as not to litter this space with thoughts in niches.
So if I am segmenting my online output, what goes here?
Bucket needs a label
I suppose I need to refocus and answer that.
Or I can take the lazy way out and say “It’s whatever the heck I want it to be about, on any given day.” But that doesn’t help the reader develop a consistent expectation. And even if I don’t have a purpose for this audience, it doesn’t mean I ought to waste its time with scattered meanderings.
So, this is what I will try to live up to:
- Occam’s RazR will be a site about exploration and explanation.
- Occam’s RazR will be a site about communication and cognition.
- I want to write about thinking, and how we can strip away assumptions to arrive at truth.
- I want to write about writing, and how we can more clearly enunciate what we mean.
- I want to write about process, and how we delineate what we can understand from what we can’t.
- I may write about football, or politics, or economics, or television, or any of a host of topics that might seem to emerge from nowhere. But I will always aim for the spirit of revealing the hidden truth, the missing link or the unsupported assumption.
- I will do my best to bridge from knowns to unknowns.
What am I missing?
I know I am missing elements, but I want them to be explicit and not implicit.
I worked for a news manager once who got a lot of mileage out of sending me to places where news was happening, with the gameplan of “Send Ike there, and let Ike be Ike.”
That’s not enough. I want the outsiders’ perspective of what that means.
So tell me…
Taking the Long View
Feb 9th
(the following is mine and mine alone, and does not in any way reflect opinions or viewpoints of my employer.)
I understand when people get on indignant rants. You see something that is so clear to you, and you just feel like verbally slapping a few people across the cheek to wake them up, so they can see what is so plainly in front of their faces.
However, the Indignant Rant often reveals the boundaries of one’s concern. When I was a reporter, I recall many people who would call and berate me for not giving ________ more time and attention than it was getting. “But you don’t see, if they name Mr. So-and-so to the committee, it will mean the end of civilization as we know it!”
Okay, their lips weren’t foretelling the end of Western Civilization, but their body tics, tremors, and voice inflection certainly did. It was classic fight or flight, and it’s definitely not what our bodies evolved as a proper response to our anguish over the makeup of the school textbook committee.
The Whiffle Life
P.J. O’Rourke – in his classic Parliament of Whores, calls this the “Whiffle Life.”
My friend’s kid lives in a well-padded little universe, a world with no sharp edges or hard surfaces. It’s the Whiffle Ball again. The kid leads a Whiffle Life, and so does my friend and so do I.
The premise is that we’ve dumbed down our existence and taken the risk out of so many things, that we’ve literally knocked evolution for a loop. Some of us (in the modern, industrialized West) live in a world where our mistakes have virtually no consequences for survival. You can screw up often, and the worst that happens is you get a little unpleasantness. Much in the same way that a thrown baseball can hurt, so we replace them with Whiffle Balls instead.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about being eaten by hyenas, you worry about whether pets are spayed and neutered.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about your teeth rotting out, you worry about whether they are white enough.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about having access to safe drinking water, you fret over whether it’s the right flavor or brand.
When you live in a Whiffle World, you watch the thermometer like a hawk because of Global Warming, and doom the planet to extinction.
History in an Icicle
Yes, this is the Indignant Rant that reveals the boundaries of my concern. I happen to think that human beings are wonderful creatures, and we have shown an amazing capacity for creating beauty and hope. I also worry that in trying to preserve our accomplishments, we’re squinting at the tiny and ignoring the very real, big threats to everything we know.
I want you to look at this graph by J. Storrs Hall. It’s taken from a Greenland ice core:
Yes, that is indicative of temperatures increasing. But notice they’ve been going up since the 1830s. You could try to tie this to industrialization, but remember, this is just one sample from one location. What I want to do is change your perspective for a moment. Let’s roll back even further:
It would seem that 1000 years ago, we were warmer than we are now. But that’s not enough of a Big Picture.
Go back a little over 10,000 years, and look at where we were. Ice Age. Pay attention to that little uptick at the end that so many people are getting all frothed about. Watch where it goes when we dial the Wayback Machine to 50,000 years ago:
That tiny little tick mark at the end of that line, which is smaller than each of the commas in this sentence, is the danger? Seriously? Pay attention to the scale at the left of the graph. We’re looking at temperatures 10-25 degress Celsius cooler than what we have now. Human civilization, and agriculture, and iPods could not have emerged before now. And what makes you think we could survive when it does get cold again? Switching to the Vostok core in the Antarctic, we see this:
Where is that 150-year rise at the end, again?
Cultural Arrogance
I’m fairly certain, that even if the planet heats up a little more, that we could adapt. People along coastlines move a little inland. Arable farmland actually increases, so we’d be better able to feed the masses.
What worries me is that in concentrating on this tiny epoch of time, we ignore the real threat. It’s clear from the graphs that we live in an epoch that is an anomaly. Yet we pretend as though nothing ever happened before recorded history.
Every time someone shows you one of those pictures of a glacier from 150 years ago, ask them: “And just what is the optimal climate for the Earth?” They can’t tell you. But for some reason, the Arrogant Anointed have decided that the Earth is supposed to be exactly the way it was when their great-grandparents moved to Martha’s Vineyard. Or when their daddy was sworn into the Senate. It is foolish to believe the Earth is not in a constant state of flux.
There are people who believe God created the world 6,000 years ago. I am not one of them, and boy would I be pissed off if a bunch of them started crafting public policy that would wreck the economy, based on their belief that the world ought to be Eden, and Eden started the moment they opened their eyes and started drinking Enfamil.
There used to be astronomers who believed in the Steady-State Theory, that stars and matter must be continually created to fill the void left behind, as galaxies move away from each other. (Doppler red-shift tells us galaxies are all moving away.) Not as many do, because it requires a belief in spontaneous creation of matter.
And here we are today, with environmentalists who cling to the belief that our planet, the way it is today, is the way it has always been and ought to always be. They have absolutely nothing to base that belief upon. And in a way, they deserve even more scorn for that belief than the traditionalists who tout a 6,000 year world history.
I’m all for being a good steward of the environment, but before we wreck the global economy chasing a fantasy about a steady-state Earth, how about putting some research dollars into the threat we know is coming? How does man survive when it gets too cold? Are we going to move out and find new sources of food? Look for hospitable worlds elsewhere? We have the time and the resources to do it, if we don’t starve ourselves to death on granola and pray to Gaia as the ice envelopes us.
Fire From the Sky
Forget about how we’re overdue for an Ice Age for a moment. We know we’ve got at least a thousand years or so to lick that problem.
What about a comet strike? Or a sufficiently large meteorite?
In 1908, a piece of a comet nailed a remote section of Russia. It created an explosion and a mushroom cloud, and wiped out everything for miles around. If we didn’t know any better, it would have been called a nuclear bomb. In fact, it’s a good thing we didn’t know any better, because if it had happened 50 or 60 years later, the world would have been glowing from the remains of retaliatory strikes before anyone bothered to figure out it was a natural occurrence.
But what if the Tunguska comet had been larger?
Make it larger by a factor of 10, and it would have rocked the world. Make it even bigger, and it could wipe out nearly all intelligent life on the planet.
So while we’re dickering with Mars missions and Moon missions and all manner of foolishness, we’re ignoring the very real instant threat to civilization. (And that means all the puppies will die, too. And the Black Eyed Peas.) We’re investing next to nothing in discovering or tracking the large objects that sweep into near-Earth orbits. We’re investing even less in researching technologies that would allow us to alter their orbits, or even explode them remotely where they would pose less of a threat.
I’m talking about something that could strike tomorrow. Or a year from now. That’s the Indignant Rant that keeps me up at night.
The Big Picture
We’ll solve the plastics problem, and the Styrofoam problem, and the nuclear waste problem. We’ll figure out how to leave cleaner and meaner and smarter, because we’re humans and that’s what we’ve done for 10,000 years. Occasionally, in the middle of miles of steps forward, we take one or two back. That’s okay, because we learn from those missteps.
Or at least we do, when we bother to look back with enough perspective.
Angles Are Everything
Feb 8th
Peyton Manning is a nice guy, with a self-deprecating and healthy sense of humor.
But man, he looked positively evil on the sidelines of the Super Bowl. Some people started referring to him as ”Satan Manning.”
Now, is he an intense competitor? Yes.
You think he might have been frustrated by taking only six snaps in the entire second quarter, then waiting through “CSI: Halftime,” then not getting the ball to start the second half after the Saints executed a brilliant onside kick? Yes, yes, and yes.
But the “evil” that seeps through the photo and wants to tear out your liver is a function of the angle.
Take a look at these pictures of the very same Elmo party hat.
The angle makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it?
Elmo is an iconic symbol of acceptance and peace. His inquisitive nature instantly rings true with children, who recognize their own yearning to learn about the world around them. The fact that the party hat could appear evil must therefore be strictly a function of visual tricks, and the angle of perspective creating an optical illusion.
My son used to adore Elmo, and as far as we can tell it had no deleterious effects on him.
There is nothing inherently evil about Elmo.
Well, maybe I ought to re-think letting my son hang out with Peyton Manning when he grows up, too.
(content partially adapted from material at my old blog, with my permission.)
Out and About
Jan 28th
From Zoer on Flickr
Last year, I did a bit of traveling and speaking. While it’s been nice to share, it’s also nice to learn a little. For the next few weeks I’ll be doing a bit of both.
Friday the 29th, I’ll be at the University of Alabama, talking with the faculty of the College of Human Environmental Sciences about social media.
Sunday, I leave for New Orleans, where I’ll spend a day and a half learning about Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications from one of the best in the field, Dr. Barbara Reynolds. She plays a key role communicating for the Centers for Disease Control.
Wednesday the 3rd, I am back in house for a presentation to another department. Then on the 10th I’m back in Tuscaloosa, spending about an hour talking with Dr. Suzanne Horsley‘s Public Relations students about how to integrate social media with traditional channels.
Then I will be in Atlanta for the Ragan Social Media Conference February 21-24. I was privileged to present this past March in Las Vegas – this time I will be something between a spectator and a sponge.
What I Am Up To
Jan 28th
“You don’t write about your job anymore.”
After a couple of gentle prods, I was reminded that I don’t talk about my work as much as I used to. The nature of my work with Alabama Power is quite different than what I did with the American Red Cross. The Red Cross is in the spotlight whenever there is a major disaster, and I’ve had more than a few inquiries from people who wanted to know more about the relief effort in Haiti. In contrast, when a regulated electric utility deals with a storm, the goal is to work quickly and restore power, then fade back into the background.
So what are you doing there, anyway?
When I came to Alabama Power, fresh off having my position eliminated, my role was primarily in internal communications. I edited the news on the company site, inherited a number of geek-related communications projects. It involved a broad array of internal needs, including the exploration of social media.
You sold Alabama Power on Social Media Koolaid?
No, I didn’t really “sell” them on anything. I was, by every account, quite patient. No one wants to hear from the guy who busts down your door each morning screaming “Blog Twitter Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Foursquare Twitter Blog  Facebook Blog Blog!”
Instead, I merely posed questions to my boss. And we had some rich conversations about how and why some of these tools might integrate into communication goals. Not as enterprises in their own right, but toward a high-level purpose (like everything else we do.)
Then one day late last fall, my boss and my VP approached me and said “It’s time.” While I still play a role in scattered geeky-tech communications projects and research, social media will be a huge part of what I do.
So now you’re the face of Alabama Power on social media?
Nope. Not at all. Some companies have elected to take that approach. We’re not.
I don’t want to be the face of the company. I am not a company spokesperson, and that is not my role.
The way we’ve defined my job is as an internal facilitator. I don’t want to be the guy who “owns” the social media accounts. Rather, I am the guy who helps people in other departments and divisions figure out if they need to be in social media, how they might use it, and how to get started.
Photo by Linda N.
Maybe you could think of me as the Instructor Pilot. I ask you why you want to learn how to fly, help you chart some flight paths, show you where all the dials and gauges are, and fly with you until you’re comfortable enough.
I have no desire to be the “Social Media Guy,” because that doesn’t scale. I can only monitor so many accounts, moderate so many conversations, and cultivate so many communities. But if I can show others how to do it, with the right spirit and attitude, then I be a part of something bigger.
To that extent, we’re doing that too. I’m one of more than two-dozen Southern Company employees working on a committee to set some standards and direction. Unlike some corporations, it didn’t bog down into micro-managing, but has stayed at a high-level framework which leaves us purposeful yet nimble in an ever-shifting environment.
Coaching, Not Doing
Sure, coaches ought to have a little experience in what they teach. But the best manager is one who realizes his job is to bring the best out of others, not to belittle them by reminding him how much better he is at what they do. (Really great managers surround themselves with people who surpass their own skills.)
In a way, I’ve been teasing toward this for months. I wrote about “Building a Dynasty,” and the differences between practitioners, teachers and coaches. In “Coaching is an Art” I expounded on the qualities of a coach. I wrote those as I was developing the mindset for this position. Officially, I am a “Communications Strategist,” which is exactly what I was before. (Salary stayed the same, too…) However, I want to approach the job from the perspective of the coach – one who is graded on how many games his team wins, how much their skills improve, and not on how many free throws he can make in a row.
And that is what I have been up to lately.
Failure by the Numbers
Jan 24th
Sudoku.
It’s a logic puzzle that involves placing numbers or letters in a grid such that you get no repeating characters within a given row, column, or highlighted grid.
I got a book of puzzles for Christmas, and things finally slowed down enough I could check it out.
You’d think a publication so prestigious to be designated as the “OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SUDOKU AUTHORITY” would only promote and publish puzzles of the highest quality and rigor.
That there would be a painstaking process of editorial control, whereby the selected puzzles would represent the very essence of Sudoku as originally intended — and that the puzzles therein would go through a vetting round to earn their stripes as “Easy,” “Middle,” “Hard” or the pinnacle: “Devious.”
You might also assume that the publishers of “SUdOkU Fever” would choose to properly market their product with a sample puzzle right there on the cover. A puzzle that was chosen to establish the first pillar of Customer Satisfaction – that all-important initiative to properly establish and manage expectations.
A Sudoku book with a crossword or a word-find on the front, for example, would be a colossal failure, because not only would it not engage those seeking Sudoku, it would be mistakenly purchased by one seeking a letter-based, verbal puzzle.
In fact – since so many of my readers here have a more decided verbal orientation, maybe a little primer in creating a Sudoku might be in order.
You create a nine-by-nine grid where there are no repeating numbers in columns, rows or the smaller 3×3 grids. Then you turn most of the numbers into blanks. But for the sake of all that is holy, you start with a working grid. You don’t begin with a broken grid and expect it to suddenly blossom into a working puzzle.
And if you do have a broken puzzle, well, I suppose it’s okay if it winds up on the cover, just as long as that error isn’t too obvious — like having two of the same number so obviously in the same frame.
