St. Louis Media Halls of Fame

If I told you my wife said I had to post this, I would not be telling a lie.

Back in March, I received an email from the St. Louis chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, announcing the opening of voting for the St. Louis Media Halls of Fame/Advertising and Public Relations section. The Halls of Fame program started in 2002 for radio; television and print journalism were added in 2006; and advertising and public relations in 2007. Different groups vote to select winners in the different sections.

There were a whole bunch of nominations in Advertising and PR, like 30 or so, and we could vote for a total of seven. So I scanned down the list to see who had been nominated. And right there at the bottom (it was in alphabetical order), I found my name.

My first thought was, someone made a mistake. My second thought was, I'm not that old. The list of people named in 2007 and 2008 have a lot of "emeritus" types of titles. I've never been named emeritus anything, at least not yet.

One of my colleagues at work distributed the email across the department -- there were three people connected to my company on the PR list -- one deceased, one retired, and me. I looked at the people who had been elected in 2007 and 2008, and there were NAMES, names like Al Fleishman and Bob Hillard, as in the founders of Fleishman-Hillard. Oh, boy.

Votes were sent in and tabulated, and then, a long period of silence. I had forgotten about it (seriously) until I was called in late June and asked for a photo and a bunch of background information. Oh, boy. I was one of five St. Louis PR people named in the class of 2009.

The web site for the Media Halls of Fame is maintained by the Missouri History Museum, and the list of new inductees was just published in the St. Louis Journalism Review. If you want to see my brief summary description on the web site, it's here.

Yes, my wife made me post this. But yes, I think it's kind of cool, too.

But I still don't think I'm that old.

A Long Week

I've not been posting much this week. Lots of things have been happening at work -- retirement announcements, team changes, meetings -- the whole gamut of stuff. In a week or so, I'll have more about it. But it has been a wild ride, especially today.

Yesterday, I met with six local PR people as part of a study program for the Public Relations Society of America accreditation exam. My topic was social media, and we had a really good discussion. One of the participants asked if I thought social media would have an impact on corporate structures generally, and I said most definitely yes. I said we're already seeing corporate America go through the five phases of social media adoption -- total denial it even exists; a couple of experiments with it; wild enthusiasm until something bad happens; almost total withdrawal; and then a more measured and balanced involvement.

Also on Wednesday, InsideWork published one of the posts from this blog -- one about layoffs. We've been blogging the experience at work on our intranet, which hasn't thrilled Human Resources but which has drawn thousands of employees to the stories.

My ribs continue to mend; I'm making do with Aleve and Tylenol. My lung is back to normal. Last week, I was actually given the OK to do the stationary recumbant bike for a short stretch. If things continue to go well, I'll get to be up on my road bike by mid-September, at least for a 20-30 minute ride. Unfortunately, that means I'll miss the MS 150 over in Columbia, Missouri, for which I'm registered and have my new team jersey, a fiery red in color -- perfect for someone my age to look totally foolish in.

I've been reading Shawn Grady's Through the Fire, and it's extraordinarily well done. It's a first novel, but this guy knows how to write and he knows about fighting fires (he's a firefighter in Reno). Take a look at his web site -- it includes the "soundtrack" for the novel -- the music he listened to while writing the story. (I'm listening to it right now, in fact -- songs from U2, Led Zeppelin, Cold Play, Jars of Clay and the Dave Matthews Band, among others.)

More soon.