Garbage In, Garbage Out

New research appearing in the International Journal of Business Administration suggests junk content consumption lowers the quality of your writing.

Sixty-five adults participated in the study.

They provided the researchers writing samples and reports of the time spent reading various books, newspapers and websites.

Using an algorithmic tool, the researchers compared the quality of participants' writing samples to samples taken from the books, newspapers and websites the participants most read.

The comparisons show a strong correlation between reading and writing skills: people who read more complex stories have more complex writing, and vice versa.

The researchers blamed junk peddlers like Reddit and Tumblr for participants' worst writing habits.

Consumption of content rife with jargon, slang and shorthand threatens an adult's ability to compose complex sentences.

Neuroanatomy is also to blame.

"Neuroanatomy may predispose even adults to mimicry and synchrony with the language they routinely encounter in their reading, directly impacting their writing," the researchers say.

Or as Ludwig Feuerbach once said, "You are what you eat."

The researchers prescribe heavy doses of literary fiction and academic journals to counteract the effects of emojis, memes, tweets and listicles on writing skill.

Outdated

Fifteen years ago, there were two flacks for every reporter. Today there are five.

"As the PR field flourishes, journalists are becoming a vanishing breed," says Mike Rosenberg in Ragan.com.

Searches on job sites for "reporter" and related keywords yield ads for openings "that have nothing to do directly with producing the news," Rosenberg says.

For every one opening for a reporter, a search yields 10 for candidates with journalism backgrounds or degrees willing to try PR.

It should come as no surprise—especially to acolytes of David Meerman Scott—brands are skirting the news industry to tell their own stories.

If you're not alarmed, fathom this: newspaper reporters are becoming extinct.

According to the American Society of News Editors, the number of staff reporters has dropped 40 percent in eight years.

As every flack knows, newspapers are the starting point for the original coverage picked up by all the other media outlets.

"The drop in newspaper reporters means the amount of real news out there has taken a wallop," Rosenberg says.

The gap in original coverage means more "earned" and sponsored placements make their way to audiences. 

In other words: less news, more propaganda.

Rosenberg recently tweeted the stats.

David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of the HBO series "The Wire," retweeted Rosenberg's message, adding, "This is how a republic dies. Not with a bang, but a reprinted press release."

Trivial Pursuits

The CEO of a large corporation sought to parade his gravitas on LinkedIn this week by posting a lovely bromide.

Before deleting it, he inspired the multitudes to mockery.

But who, really, cares nowadays about spelling and grammar?

Truly, spelling and grammar are trivial.

Trivial comes from the Latin word trivium, "a place where three roads cross." In short, a "commonplace."

Medieval scholars borrowed the trivium to describe the first three liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric and logic. They thought grammar, rhetoric and logic were the very core of all learning.

What did they know?

The liberal in liberal arts, by the way, comes from the Latin word liberalis, "worthy of a free person" (as opposed to an ignorant slave).

Why trouble yourself with trivia, when you're busy being a thought leader?

Show your thankful.

How to Handle a Hard Presentation: 22 Sure-Fire Tips

Marketing maestro Edward Segal contributed today's post. Edward helps corporations and organizations generate publicity about their activities and shows leaders, staff and members how to deliver effective presentations.

What’s the most important thing you can do if you know that you will be making a presentation to a skeptical audience, at a challenging venue, or in an otherwise difficult situation? 

In a word: prepare.

While it is impossible to ensure that every presentation will go smoothly, there are definitely steps you can take to help stack the deck in your favor.

Here’s how:

• Don’t accept speaking invitations for which you are unqualified or unprepared. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

• If you spoke to the same tough group or in the same difficult setting before, ask yourself: What did I learn from the experience?

• Think twice about giving breakfast speeches if you are not a morning person, or evening presentations if you like to retire early.

• Do your homework about the audience (demographics, knowledge of the subject matter, special interests or concerns, etc.); ask the sponsoring organization if there are any red flags about the audience you should be aware of (forewarned is forearmed).

• Ask others who have spoken to the organization what it was like, and what you can learn from their experience.

• If you accept the speaking invitation, know what you want to accomplish with your remarks.

• Know the basics about the speaking opportunity (format, length of your presentation, time, location, etc.).

• Arrive early so you can get a feel for the room where you will be speaking, greet and chat with people as they arrive, etc.

• Make sure that the layout of the room is to your liking and meets your needs (classroom-style, theatre-style, roundtables, etc.).

• When you arrive, check with your host to ensure the arrangements, purpose and topic of your presentation have not changed.

• Know where things are, such as lights, microphones and audio controls, AC and heating controls, water, restrooms, etc.

• Ensure that you and your audience will be comfortable by checking the heat or AC settings, microphone settings, lighting levels, extraneous or distracting noise, etc.

• Check out any that stairs you must climb to get on or off the stage. This will help you to avoid tripping over unfamiliar steps.

• Don’t tell jokes unless you’ve already proven that you can tell jokes well. There’s nothing funny about no one laughing at your jokes.

• Make sure your audience can see you. Don’t hide behind the podium.

• Do not hide your gestures. Keep your hands up where your audience can see them!

• Maintain a good posture when standing or sitting. No slouching!

• If audience members do not have access to a microphone, be sure to repeat questions before answering them. This helps ensure everyone in the room hears what was asked.

• Respond honestly to questions. It’s okay to say "I don’t know."

• Don’t allow one person to monopolize the session. ("Let’s meet afterwards to talk about this.")

• Summarize/rephrase lengthy questions for the audience. ("Let me make sure that I understand what you are asking...")

• Do not allow Q&A sessions to drag on. Signal to your audience that the session is almost over. ("We have time for one more question.")

A Call to Armchairs

Midway through his fireside chat at SXSW last month, President Barack Obama issued government communicators a call to arms.

Or, more accurately, armchairs.

It's communicators' fault that citizens only associate government with failure and corruption, rather than humming infrastructure, the President said.

"A significant part of the task at hand is telling a better story about what government does," Obama said.

Sadly, the President's call for storytelling comes a little late. 

His second term will soon be history.

Not that private-sector storytellers are much better at the craft, as Hill+Knowlton's content director Vikki Chowney notes in PR Week.

Private-sector flacks are too technocentric to tell stories customers care about.

"In an age in which people get their information from digital platforms, it’s our responsibility as communicators to not just think about building new things—but also think about what we say and where we say it in order to get people to care more," Chowney says.

Private-sector flacks should shun the shiny objects swimming before their eyes and get back to PR basics, Chowney says.

"Cutting through the overwhelming noise of online content with a clear, concise message is something we should all be reminding ourselves to focus on daily."

Big Data Meets Big Idea

J. Walter Thompson wondered whether big data could be assembled to paint "The Next Rembrandt" for client ING.

So a team of art historians, scientists, developers and analysts created scans of Rembrandt's 346 extant paintings and used a computer to catalog the data based on commonalities.

They then asked the computer to paint a Rembrandt.

The resulting portrait combines 160,000 fragments of the artist's oeuvre.

HAT TIP: Appraiser Todd Sigety alerted me to this story. 

Short and Easy

"It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’"                               

― A.A. Milne

Most often, your purpose in publishing is to inform and persuade. Why mask your meaning with long, difficult words?

Why say your product "will provide seamless multi-user functionality," when you mean it "supports up to 15 users?"

Why sound like some abstruse academic or dodgy bureaucrat?

"Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, " George Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language."

Latin and Greek words are grand, but their use in business is dreadful.

Just look at this balderdash from Accenture:

Insurers will need to open up to their ecosystem partners, sharing not only customer data, but customers themselves. To encourage and support such ecosystems, IT architectures will need to evolve, ensuring flexibility and interoperability with external partners and providers. A key challenge will be to orchestrate innovation and legacy evolutions while simultaneously managing security threats and changing IT processes to roll out and manage new products and services faster and cheaper.

Acccenture means:

Insurance companies need to upgrade their IT systems so suppliers can use their customer data. But they can't let the changes interrupt routine business.

This morning's lesson: short and easy.

Now, what about lunch?

Fish Story

Here's a story with a hook.

Skift reports SeaWorld's CEO, after denying his employees posed as animal rights activists to infiltrate PETA, has admitted to conducting a covert operation.

In a report to stockholders, Joel Manby acknowledged corporate spies were sent by SeaWorld "to maintain the safety and security of employees, customers and animals in the face of credible threats.”

But a PETA spokesperson says SeaWorld sent agents provocateurs to bait PETA's people.

“SeaWorld’s corporate espionage campaign tried to coerce kind people into setting SeaWorld on fire or draining its tanks, which would have hurt the animals, in an attempt to distract from its cruelty and keep PETA from exposing the miserable lives of the animals it imprisons,” Tracy Reiman said.

SeaWorld's spokespeople have clammed up, claiming further comment would disclose "confidential business information related to the company’s security practices."

SeaWorld has been angling to fix its damaged brand for three years, after the movie Blackfish sent park attendance reeling and put profits in the tank.

As a case study in floundering PR, this one's a keeper.

Content Marketing and the Agony of Defeat

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Digital agency Sticky Content asked 283 marketers what's defeating their content efforts.

Their answers are no surprise:

• 37% said they have no strategy

• 33% said management dings content

• 46% said demands change after content has been created

• 66% said their organizations waste a quarter of all content; 15% said, half

Is your organization lumbering toward self-defeat? If so, ask:

• Is management serious, or not, about content? Are they merely entranced by this year's "shiny object?" If they're in earnest, then what's our strategy?

• Do reviewers understand what to approve? Message? Accuracy? Style? The reason the content exists? What are the ground-rules?

• Does management trust the content creators? If not, why not? Do they rewrite the lawyers' briefs and the developers' code, too?

• Does management care about waste? One way to boost marketing's ROI isn't to create more content, but to publish and promote what's been created.

• Can I improve things? Or is our situation impossible? (Remember what Napoleon said: "Impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools.")

Government Communicators: Send Outreach into Orbit

Award-winning video producer Ann Ramsey contributed today's post. She is a senior producer at the US Department of Health & Human Services in Washington, DC.

Although traditionally a favorite of corporate communicators, the Satellite Media Tour (SMT) should be part of every government communicator's toolkit. 

SMTs make efficient use of time-starved spokespeople who want to reach multiple media markets. This winter, for example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services held weekly SMTs throughout the Health Insurance Marketplace Open Enrollment period. The benefit? Without leaving Washington, busy officials reached broadcast journalists all over the country with continuing updates about healthcare enrollment.

Not every government communicator knows the ins and outs of the SMT, so here’s a rundown. While some agencies use PR firms for their SMTs, I will assume your agency has its own broadcast studio, or at least access to one. 

What is an SMT? An SMT is a series of video interviews featuring a spokesperson responding in front of a camera to the audio of each remote interviewer’s questions. The broadcaster remotely receives the sound and picture of the spokesperson, usually via satellite, for play-out in a live news program, or as a recorded media file for editing into a package for later broadcast. SMTs generally take one to four hours of the spokesperson’s time, and interviews are typically scheduled in 10-minute windows. If radio broadcasters are included, the interview series is referred to as an SMT/RMT.

Advantages. An SMT is an opportunity to tap broadcasters in order to introduce, or respond to, a newsworthy or time-sensitive topic. It allows for targeting of media markets, for direct interaction between the spokesperson and reporters, and for the opportunity to tailor the desired message to each market.

Must-haves. At minimum, you need an available spokesperson; a satellite-capable broadcast studio (look up: is there a dish on your building’s roof?); the manpower to pitch to the networks; and a modest budget to rent a block of satellite time.

Prep. First, send out a pitch notification (media alert) that includes your desired topic or announcement, the planned date of the SMT, the spokesperson’s bio, and any pertinent facts that can be used to leverage an interview. Target your top media markets, stations and networks, and work up a schedule of time-slots to fill. Most SMTs are aimed at some combination of TV news shows (morning, noon, evening) and/or radio drive-time shows. Contact local and network news divisions to pitch your SMT. Once your agency’s broadcast studio has a block of satellite-time arranged, notify all participating stations of the satellite coordinates and signal format details.

Pitching tips. Local TV/radio news divisions are busy places. Nonetheless, a government agency can appeal to them by offering the twin advantages of authority and topicality. That a national authority, such as the Secretary of a cabinet-level department, is available to speak directly to a reporter about a hot topic is attractive to a network, particularly a small, local affiliate. Furthermore, offering a local angle can be helpful, if you can tailor your statistics and examples to each media market. Once a news producer is interested in the interview, the concept and timing normally need to be cleared with a news director at the station. That’s why each time-slot may take a couple of phone calls or emails to confirm.

Day-of. Your agency’s broadcast studio will likely handle booking and supervision of the makeup artist, production crew and satellite link-up, as well as delivery of any non-live interviews to the network producers. You will be assigned a studio SMT producer and floor director to oversee the production. You will need to provide the studio talking points to be loaded into the teleprompter, so your spokesperson can refer to them during each interview. It’s smart to confirm that the studio team has all the information for each interview, including time-slot, the station’s network control room telephone number, producer name and number, interviewer name and number, IFB (“Interruptible Feed Back”) number (used by the studio to dial into each station), backup/engineer number, and delivery method (live or taped).

On-air tips. As a communications professional, you should coach and assist your spokesperson. Be aware that on-air time with the reporter will be short; perhaps just a few minutes. Often the final story is only 90 seconds long. So reporters need your spokesperson to make between one and three points concisely. You should be on site with the spokesperson during the SMT, and coordinate with the studio’s SMT producer and floor director. Let your spokesperson know the first name of each reporter (the reporter will be speaking directly into your spokesperson’s headset). For each interview, the IFB number for the remote station is phoned by the studio’s audio engineer to create a direct audio link between the interviewer and the spokesperson. If needed, this link can be interrupted by the studio SMT producer or floor director, in order to keep the spokesperson informed. (Think of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show listening to a fake mic in his ear and saying, “Wait… I’m being told…”). If any linkup is lost, or any station has to cancel or delay, the studio SMT producer will make on-the-fly changes to maximize the scheduled line-up.

Afterwards. Your agency broadcast studio will deliver any non-live media to stations that have requested taped versions for editing or later play-out. As desired, you may want to follow up with broadcasters for feedback and to confirm that post-delivery airing took place. You can also get a tape of your spokesperson’s on-air answers from your studio, for media training purposes or to keep as an archival record.

Trends. Downsizing in broadcast is having an impact. Today you may find the network news producer and interviewer are one and the same person. If something urgent takes place, the floor director or studio producer must use the IFB to reach the interviewer. Another new wrinkle is that the interviewer may want to do the interview remotely, and so, rather than dialing into a station’s IFB number, the studio dials directly to the interviewer’s own mobile phone. It can be tricky! Social media is also having an impact. You can research the Twitter handle of a given broadcast station, in order to follow and interact on social media before and during a given live interview. And it's now possible to create so-called “air-checks,” permanent internet links to selected news show segments that make them available in play-back to stakeholders after the fact.

Go Ahead, Back Up

As January's "Snowzilla" bore down on the Nation's Capital, the head of DC's Metro told The Washington Post it was wiser to shutter his incompetent agency during the storm than tread "a false floor that everybody knows is false.”

While candid, the exec's expression of foreboding " may not soothe the frustrations of stranded customers," The Post said.

It's easy for customers to blame failures of government on lack of drive (in fact, it's a hobby of mine).

But then you can't explain the shipwrecks of driven profiteers like Target, which last year lost $7 billion on its calamitous rollout of Target Canada.

Its also easy for customers to blame failures of government on "pointy-headed" government execs. 

But then you can't explain the blunders of smart CEOs like Carla Fiorina, who halved HP's stock value while she ran the company.

So what's to blame for systemic failures—both public and private?

As turnaround experts observe, it's leadership's refusal to abandon a strategy that simply doesn't work (like the one illustrated in this insightful video). 

How to Write a Killer Abstract for Your Next Presentation

Marketer Tony Compton contributed today's post. He is the founder and managing director of communication coaching consultancy GettingPresence.

When you’re scheduled to give a presentation, chances are you’ll have to provide a session abstract that titles your talk and describes your session.

Session abstracts enable readers to evaluate an event in advance, playing a vital role in helping them determine if the event is worth the investment in attendance.

On site, abstracts compete for attendees, as they choose which sessions to attend when multiple presentations are being given.

Unfortunately, far too many session abstracts are poorly written. Writing one is an afterthought to most presenters, and is usually delegated to a marketing manager who isn’t the presenter and who's largely unfamiliar with the presenter's content.

Writing concise and compelling abstracts for your presentations will give you a clear competitive advantage.

My recommendation is to write your abstract as a condensed case study:

• Title your session with the solution to a common business challenge; for example, “Increasing Customer Retention by 30% with Predictive Analytics." 

• When writing the session description, state a common problem your audience faces; summarize your strategy behind solution-development; and itemize supporting tools you have used to help solve the problem.

• Close by hinting at the payoff of the work, using several bullet points that quantitatively highlight results.

Remember, too, that audiences see through thinly-veiled sales pitches, and their session descriptions. Always keep in mind what the audience will learn from your presentation, and your session abstract will be a winner.

Chipotle Serves Up Nonsense

"I have a bluntness problem," says a character in Mozart in the Jungle.

I wish Chipotle had.

Fresh from rehab, the chain tells us it's cured, in a January 19 news release:

Chipotle’s enhanced food safety program is the product of a comprehensive reassessment of its food safety practices conducted with industry leading experts that included a farm-to-fork assessment of each ingredient Chipotle uses with an eye toward establishing the highest standards for safety.

Chipotle may now wash dirt off its tomatoes.

But it obviously won't scrub its announcements of corporatese.

Jargon destroys credibility, as journalist Phil Simon says.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called quaggy statements like Chipotle's nonsense.

And as he insisted, there is no such thing as deep and important nonsense.

There is only one kind of nonsense, and it's fundamentally suspect.

PS: To be blunt, I would've advised Chipotle to say, We asked food-safety experts to help us improve both our own and our suppliers' procedures.

Potpourri

Concise writing achieves communication in pure form.

So it's considerate on his 207th birthday to celebrate Edgar Allen Poe's "one-sitting rule" of writing.

In "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe extols brevity for the effect it creates.

"If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed."

Long-windedness deprives a piece "of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect," Poe says.

"It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting."

Using the right tools are just as important, Poe insists in "How to Write a Blackwood Article."

"In the first place, your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib. No individual, of however great genius, ever wrote without a good pen a good article."

Should You Ever Talk Turkey?

According to ex-"cast members," a terminated Disney employee is never told, "You're fired." 

The employee is told instead to "find your happiness elsewhere."

Certain subjects—tough ones like death, poverty, addiction, insanity, intolerance, financial risk and job loss—are magnets for euphemisms.

Grammarian Jane Strauss detests them.

"A euphemism is a lullaby, a sedative, a velvet glove enfolding reality’s iron fist," she says.

But euphemisms don't merely function as kindly cop-outs, Strauss says.

"A euphemism can transform a narcissist into a temperamental perfectionist, a bigot into a traditionalist, or an unhinged demagogue into a passionate idealist."

Ain't it the truth, ladies and gentlemen.

So should business communicators ever talk turkey?

To my way of thinking, 99% of the time.

Audiences prefer candor to cant. Even the targets prefer it.

And you need not be ruthless to be straightforward.

Harry Truman was once accused of giving his political foes hell.

"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."

PS: In case you're wondering, Native Americans coined the phrase "talking turkey."

The Web is Too Much with Us

Our Tower of Babel has been under siege for well over 500 years.

Peeved about the patchwork of books in Renaissance libraries, bibliographer Konrad von Gesner complained in 1545 of "the silliness of useless writings of our time."

Annoyed by the algorithms that drive content-streams, blogger Hossein Derakhshan complained last month that, while homely people's brilliance is ignored, "the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant internet presence."

Griping about TMI in fact began with the birth of literacy, each generation thereafter seeing hobgoblins on the horizon.

But maybe, just maybe, the web is too much with us.

So before you release more pap, ask yourself if it's on strategy.

Because, as writer Arjun Basu says, "Without strategy, content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff."

HAT TIP: Mark Schaefer's blog {grow} brought Hossein Derakshan to my attention. I urge you to listen to Mr. Schaefer's recent podcast.

The Dirty Little Secrets of a Technical Writer

Technology journalist Michelle Bruno contributed today's post. She covers technology and face-to-face meetings in her weekly newsletter, Event Tech Brief.

One might marvel at how I, someone who literally cannot navigate the remote controls of the television set, can write about computer networks and software. It’s really very simple.

The first thing I do when confronted with a particularly complex project is avoid panic. I know now there will be a point at which everything makes sense. It’s just a matter of time.

If the client has not given me source materials, which is rare, I create my own library of research—pulling from Google Scholar or scientific journals and magazines accessed from the library of a local college (a benefit of being an adjunct faculty member).

Almost always, I print the resource materials out on paper and highlight them with a colored marker. As I scan, I begin to formulate an outline in my head.

If I become blocked or overwhelmed, I take a nap.

No writer, even the most experienced, can know everything about everything. That’s why subject matter experts are my best friends. Most software engineers or network administrators are interested that I’m interested and indulge my curiosity.

No matter what I write, every word on the page is still a part of speech: noun, adjective, verb, adverb and so on. 

For example, network, cloud, and machine are nouns. Virtualize, orchestrate, and provision are verbs. It’s critical to get everything in the correct slot.

Structure is very important to me. Even in technical writing, I try to make sure every opening paragraph gives the reader a clue about what they will learn as they read on. 

Every paragraph I write has a topic sentence. If I start out with a list in the first paragraph, I make sure the explanatory paragraphs in the body are in the same order as the items in the list. 

While attempts to be humorous or ironic are normally ill advised in technical writing, I still try to be elegant and clever. Words are still my children and I try to present them in the best light possible.

When I’m not writing, I read. I look for structure and elegance even in the most technical of articles. It’s a blessing and a curse.

I edit as I write. Most of the time I spend more time on the opening paragraph than I do on the entire article. I can’t get comfortable until my direction for the piece is set.

When I finish a project, I deliver it to the client and never read it again for fear I might find a comma out of place or begin agonizing over a word choice.

Technical writers receive exactly zero feedback. Most of the time, my efforts aren’t even acknowledged (one reason I blog). So, to get some warm fuzzy, I share the paper with my husband, who always says, “How the hell do you write stuff like this? You can’t even turn on the TV set.” I just smile.

Postscript by Bob James: Want a weekly dose of wicked good insight?

Subscribe to Event Tech Brief. It's free, and nobody covers the beat better. 

Nobody.

Marketers, Keep Out

The chief reason Adobe's CMO.com is among the web's best branded content titles is its chief editor, Tim Moran.

When it comes to repulsing over-eager marketers, he's combat hardened, thanks to 20 years' experience as a trade editor.

Moran has kept Adobe's marketers from meddling with the corporate blog—without resorting to hands-off policies.

"We don’t have any official or formal policies about church-and-state," he told Velocity.

"The traditional marketers at Adobe have simply come to realize that CMO.com’s job is not to push brand or sell products—there are many other places for that to be done within and around Adobe. They understand our role as the purveyor of thought leadership and insight and have been quite clever about finding ways to get the Adobe POV across on the site in ways that are perfectly acceptable to our media image."

Adobe bought Moran's blog six years ago because it wanted to become a thought leader.

Moran has made it clear to marketers in the meanwhile thought leadership is different from lead generation, and that the two don't mix.

If you want to understand the difference, check out The CMO's Guide to Brand Journalism, courtesy of Hubspot.

How to Take Advantage of the Challenges Facing News Organizations

PR expert Edward Segal contributed today's post. He has placed stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, and is author of Profit by Publicity.

The challenges you face in convincing the media to do stories about you or your company is matched only by the challenges editors and reporters face in gathering and reporting the news.

In order to produce their news products—such as a daily newspaper, the latest posts on their Web site or social media platforms, or nightly TV news program—editors, producers and their staff must contend with a never-ending series hurdles. These include:

• Making decisions on which events or activities to cover, especially in the face of late-breaking news.

• Weeding out the truly newsworthy press releases from the hundreds of apparently superfluous, irrelevant or poorly written ones that they receive every day.

• Fact-checking stories.

• Finding the best available experts to interview, explain or provide perspective on  technical or complex stories.

• Maintaining staff morale in the face of budget cutbacks, mergers and acquisitions among news organizations, and the creeping influence of some advertising departments on the news judgments of editorial personnel.

• Providing enough time and resources so reporters can adequately research stories and be properly prepared to interview people for them.

• Ensuring that the work of their reporters, editors and producers meets the criteria of good journalism. 

How do you turn the media’s lemons into your lemonade? To ensure that, despite their problems and difficulties, you’re able to convince news organizations to do the stories you or your company want done? By going the extra mile to help make their jobs—and their decision to do stories about you—as easy as possible. Here’s how:

Help them with their homework. Provide them with as much background information as you think is appropriate about your story, including news releases, fact sheets or other stories that have been written about you or the topic. 

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Give editors and reporters as much advance notice as possible about scheduled events such as news-making special events.

Show them the story. Find the best possible visuals to "show" your story as well as tell it; and be sure to let the news organizations know about your visuals when you contact them. 

Give them ideas. Call editors and reporters with story ideas that you think they may be interested in, even though those ideas may not result in news coverage about you. By showing them you are a resource of information and ideas, they will be more receptive to your calls later when you pitch them a story about yourself. 

Provide good sound bites. Once you have the media’s attention, take full advantage of the opportunity by providing them with the quotes they need to help tell their story to their audiences. The better your quotes, the more likely it is that they’ll be used… and that the reporters will come back to you in the future for more interviews.

3 Phrases You Must Not Use in 2016

The year's about to end.

It's list time.

Mine consists of three pretentious phrases everyone in business should retire.

Across the enterprise. Romulans fired torpedoes across the Enterprise. Throughout the company is clear enough.

Take offline. Employed by teleconference leaders to quash unwelcome discussions. If drop it is too brusque, hold that thought would work.

Go viral. Shared content shouldn't be likened to SARS and Ebola. Become popular sounds just fine.

Which phrases would you ban?