When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel - and a Mystery

If you can think back to a time before Amazon, before Google, before Facebook and Twitter and even before My Space, you might remember how the worldwide web was first breaking into the public collective consciousness. In Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger describes how his newspaper encountered the early web and tried to understand what it meant – and how to make it work.  

This new thing had arrived on the communications landscape, and no one understood if it even mattered, or what you might do with it. At the exact same time Rusbridger was grappling with the question at The Guardian, we were grappling with it out our company. His efforts had one major advantage over ours – a small “skunk works” of IT people at the newspaper were working on the technical idea of the web for the newspaper. At our company, the IT organization had looked at the web idea and concluded that it was a passing fad, that the business’s future was more in the province of software programs like Lotus Notes. 

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

Photograph by Umberto via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: The King’s Communications Man

This is the first in a series of profiles of some of the main characters in the novel Dancing King. Every character has a story, one that is much larger and more detailed than what can be included in the narrative.

In Dancing King, Jay Lanham becomes the communications director for Michael Kent-Hughes and the monarchy. He is all of 29, but he already has considerable communications experience behind him. He was graduated from the University of Northumberland, receiving a communications degree (with honours). He had had internships with The Guardianand The Telegraphand was hired by The Daily Mailright after graduation (from an editorial perspective, The Guardianwould be considered on the left side of the political spectrum, The Telegraphslightly more toward the center, and The Daily Mail on the right side of the spectrum). 

He worked for The Daily Mail for three years, and he then joined the communications staff of Britrail. He quickly gained a reputation for crisis communications following two train accidents, but what put him on the map in the communications industry was his adroit handling of a threatened strike by rail workers. Lanham didn’t know it at the time, but he effectively countered the plans of the would-be strikers whose unions had hired Geoffrey Venneman of the FBL public affairs firm. Two years younger than Venneman, Lanham had successfully anticipated almost every move by the unions.

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

Photograph: An idea of what Jay Lanham might look like. Photo by Ali Morshedlou via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Writing Who You Are

The spoken word has much to do with how I write fiction.

My professional career in corporate communications spanned some 40 years. For most of that time, I was either a corporate speechwriter or not very far away from speechwriting. Even when I was serving as a spokesman for a crisis (a plant explosion, a train derailment, government actions upending a product and its market, to mention a few), I would usually have an executive speech assignment waiting on my desk.

It’s perhaps the toughest job in corporate communications (or any other kind of communications). You’re writing for another person. To do your job well, you have to write like that person speaks. That means you have to listen more than you talk. You must understand what’s on the audience’s mind. And you’re constantly moving across communication media – from the words you’re writing to the words an executive is speaking to the words the audience is hearing.

To continue reading, please see my post at Christian Poets and Writers.