Looking Back at a Crazy Job

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on my incredibly short, and incredibly long, eight months with St. Louis Public Schools. What began with the strangest job interview I ever had, the weirdest first day on the job, and the ongoing chaos of every single day ended with a very quiet farewell.  

In previous jobs in corporate communications, I’d experienced periods of media blitzes and controversies. But I’d never experienced a job in which every day was a media blitz, every day was a controversy, and I had to work and publicly communicate in a highly political environment where it was difficult to know who was telling the truth, whose information was accurate, and who was trying to help or merely trying to gain an edge on an opponent. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

6 Enjoyable Ways to Read Classic Novels –or Pretty Much Anything – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Goodness Will Come Back for You – Lara d’Entremont at A Mother Held.

 

Of Steamrollers and Hummingbirds – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Swan Upping on the Thames – Spitalfields Life.

The Scenes That Stick from a Chaotic Job

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for eight months. It was the position I worked for the least amount of time in my entire career, the most chaotic job I ever held, and the one that likely remains the most vivid in my memory.  

Perhaps it was the political battles inside the district, the arrests at school board meetings, the ongoing protests, my boss getting doused with a pitcher of water by a member of the school board, the typical chaotic day of an urban school district. It might have been the constat media exposure, starting my first day (eight separate interviews on a teacher sick-out) and continuing until my last day. I did more media meetings and discussions in those eight months than the rest of my career combined.

 

A lot of scenes have stuck with me; a few even got worked into my five Dancing Priest novels. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph of Headquarters by St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Van Eyck: The Portraits – National Gallery, London.

 

Does Christian Fiction Exist? – Tessa Carman at Mere Orthodoxy.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30. 

Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting. 

 

Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph via St. Louis Public Schools.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

End Game at Appomattox – Mike Phifer at Warfare History Network. 

 

Millennials Tried Being Angry. It Didn’t Work – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies.

 

A Memo in the Wilderness: Why does the Church of England now sound like an HR department? – James Martin Charlton at the Critic Magazine.

When Journalism Began to Change

When I read Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger, I was struck with how much his experience at the newspaper tracked with my own experience in corporate communications. The worldwide web and what followed was upending his world at the newspaper at the same time it had begun to change mine – and for the same reasons. We began to deal with it earlier, while The Guardianand other newspapers were affected more quickly, but we were grappling with many of the same issues and at roughly the same time (1995-2015). 

I left corporate communications for a time – almost four years. I felt worked to death, spun off, and finally laid off, and I was done. I set up my own consulting firm, and I was focused on two areas of communications – writing speeches and community relations. In late 2003, a friend dared me to apply for the top communications job at St. Louis Public Schools, which I did, thinking I’d never hear anything. I was wrong. They called, I interviewed along with nine others (we were all told to report at the same time and sat in the same room until we were interviewed). I got the job and started work the next morning.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"OOF" by Strobe Witherspoon

If you’ve ever wondered what an “OOF” is, it’s the acronym for “online outrage fiesta.” It’s also the title of a new novel by Strobe Witherspoon, whose main character is – a writer named Strobe Witherspoon. 

Witherspoon has landed a contract for a novel by a fictional former first lady (FLOTUS) who has written a memoir. She is originally from an Eastern European country, emigrated to the United States for her modeling career, eventually brought her parents over, and married a wealthy tycoon-type of businessman who unexpectedly became President of the United States. Not that there’s any similarity to people living or dead, of course.

 

The online world, both haters and supporters of the former president, get wind of the memoir’s existence and the bidding war from publishers. Outrage ensues (you know the kind of outrage – what has dominated Facebook, Twitter, and other social media from 2016 to 2020) The story that unfolds in an exercise in understanding how cancel culture from both ends of the political spectrum operates. 

 

What OOF does, and does remarkably well, is describe that cancel culture in all its permutations, including how mainstream media play their roles is ensuring cancel culture continues and thrives. The author does this through a creative narrative device – using articles, reports, studies, tweets, blog posts, email newsletters, and other kinds of communications. And what he nails is both The New York Times and The New Yorker, among several others, with chapters that sound as if they written by the publications themselves. 

 

What this story shows is just how close society is sailing to individual and mass violence, aided and abetted by our communication-soaked culture.

 

Witherspoon’s first novel was furtl (2014), which was selected as a book of the year by Kirkus Reviews. While Strobe Witherspoon is more than highly likely a pseudonym, the author can be found on Facebook, Medium, and Instagram as @strobewitherspoon and on Twitter as @strobewither.

 

 OOF is a riot of a read, with “riot” meaning both funny and disturbing, occasionally terrifying. It holds up a mirror to our culture and our institutions, and none of them, and none of us, look good in the reflection. 

Discerning the message and the medium

This week I finished reading The Life of the Body by Valerie Hess and Lane Arnold, the book we’ve been discussing this month at The High Calling. This final section covered the seasons of life, children, caring for the planet, and the conclusion.

As it is sometimes wont to do, kept moving away from these final chapters and toward another thought altogether (but there is a connection).

I kept thinking about where we get our information from. Are we as Christians discerning as we listen to news, watch entertainment, or read books (not to mention everything online), or do we let the culture saturate us as it saturates social, political and spiritual life around us?

Twenty years ago, for reasons related to work and my first surprising experience with electronic communications, I began to read about communication theory. I read writers like Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy), Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Eloquence in an Electronic Age), and a host of academics who were beginning to grapple with the electronic word and what it meant. I also reread Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message), Neil Postman (Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death), and Jacque Ellul (Propaganda).

What came of all of this reading and reflection was a sensitivity to both words as content and media as means to communicate those words/content. (Today we say “content” to collectively include text, photos, art, audio and video.)

Most of us, me included, usually focus on the words or content – the “message.” What we understand less is how different media, or channels, favor some kinds of content over others, and how these channels actually shape the message that’s sent and/or received.

Video, for example, like television programs, movies, network news reports, and uploads to YouTube, appeals to the emotions, the feelings. This is even true for documentaries. To fit the channel of video, a communication has to be shaped in a particular way if it’s to be effective.

This isn’t a complaint or regret, more a statement of what is. Watching a TED talk is not the same thing as listening to a speech, because the screen itself frames the talk, favoring certain kinds of content over others.

The world I currently inhabit for work is that of social media. And it’s a world that’s changing our ideas of authority – who has it, who we listen to, and who is believable or credible. Twitter and Facebook, for example, expand our understanding of authority to include our friends and networks. They increasingly give us filters on news. This can be good (accuracy checks on news media) and bad (205,000 people follow Roseanne Barr on Twitter and consider her a credible source of information on news and public policy).

On Twitter, everything you need to know has to be crammed into 140 characters. Talk about minimalist communication. Nuclear disarmament, or understanding international terrorism, in 140 characters. Or less.

This is how many of us get our information on issues, controversies, and news – and “many of us” includes Christians. Someone says something on a blog or Facebook, someone else tweets it or pins it on Pinterest, and it’s considered of equal importance and weight to what a Ph.D expert who’s spent decades researching and studying has to say.

I’ve taken issue with a few things in The Life of the Body, but to be fair, I’ve seen similar sentiments in Christianity Today, blogs belonging to respected Christians, and Christians posting and commenting on Facebook. We readily accept anything if someone we like or trust says it. Or we google a topic and learn everything we need to know by simply scanning the first page of search results.

Greater discernment is crucial. We live in a time when virtually nothing can be taken at face value. Just because it’s a trending topic on Twitter doesn’t mean it’s true. Even something seemingly authoritative as a scientific journal has to be examined. Did you know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of “peer-reviewed” scientific journals whose definition of “peer review” is a Visa card?

Retweets on Twitter and shares and likes on Facebook are not measures of truth. Volume does not equate to truth. Truth isn’t a popularity contest – the prime example of that being the life of Jesus.

We’ve been discussing The Life of the Body at The High Calling, even if I went off the track today and discussed it by not discussing it. Check The High Calling for the main post and comments.

Photograph by Fran Hogan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Communicating at a Funeral

On Wednesday, Matt over at The Church of No People posted an article about communication – about how we’re losing our ability to do it. Matt runs an interesting blog operation there – he’s a pastor in Kansas City (and a freelance designer, and a teacher), and his church is called Levi’s House. His blog, he says, is full of the messages that didn’t make it for church sermons because otherwise people would second-guess why he’s their pastor. I like that.

Matt’s concerned that, in the midst of the greatest communication explosion in the history of humanity, we’re losing our ability to communicate – to speak to and with each other. Instead, we resort to buzzwords and clichés and think we’re communicating, while we take a break from texting, tweeting and instant messaging.

Take funerals, for example.

When a friend or colleague or relative dies, what do we say to each other and the family? “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.” If we’re not particularly religious, we’ll drop the prayers and say “Our thoughts are with you.” And we’ll say “He (she) will be sorely missed.” Sorely? I’m still waiting for someone to say “He (she) will be tenderly missed.”

These statements have become clichés. They mean nothing to us or to the bereaved loved ones. We say them because we don’t know what to say or, more to the point, how to say it.

Four years ago, a business executive I’d worked for years before died. I’d worked closely with the man until he retired – I was his speechwriter, and he did some remarkable things with his speeches. I got to go along for the ride, and what a ride it was. He was a humble, quiet man, who shocked everyone, himself included, when he turned his industry upside down.

I didn’t know the family, except for a casual acquaintance with a stepson (an allergist who did a patch test on me). I’d never met his wife or other children. When I read the obituary in the newspaper, the sadness I felt for the loss was overwhelming. But the obituary, written by the family, missed what the man had accomplished, because he wasn’t the type to go home at night and say, “Honey, I revolutionized the chemical industry today.” He was the type to go home and say, “Honey, how are you doing? I’m so glad to see you.”

So I wrote the story, went to the visitation, saw the stepson and handed it to him. I said it was a tiny measure of how I felt, and a tiny indication of what he had done for his company and his industry. And then I left.

I also sent the story to the editor of the newspaper’s op-ed page, who said thanks but no thanks, we don’t publish these kinds of things. Okay, I thought, at least the family has it.

Except, at the last minute, a big hole developed on the op-ed page, and the only thing available to fill it was my story about the executive. And they did it right, with a cool graphic and photo.

Nothing I could have said would have meant more to his family than that story. No one in the family knew what he’d done. The response was extraordinary, and not just from the family. I received scores of letters and emails from his children, from people who’d worked with him, from retirees and even current employees of the company who’d never met him but were thrilled to work for a company that had had an executive like that. Strangers sent me letters saying how much they enjoyed the story.

A month or so later, his widow sent me a short, sweet note that brought tears to my eyes. She sent me another one, almost a year later, and said that nothing had given her more comfort than that tribute to her husband. I cried again.

So don’t say “Our thoughts are with you” or “He will be sorely missed.” Say or do something that means something. Or just sit with them and be there, holding their hand. Sometimes that’s the most powerful communication of all.