Business: January 2008 Archive Page

Jenna Wortham (Wired):

Wednesday is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day, an online protest geared at uniting users eager to ditch the popular social networking site.

This message arrived in my in box today. The author gave me permission to answer it here.

It must have been fate that led me to your site which I perused with great interest. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a 57 year old male, separated after nearly 27 years of marriage, now retired due to a chronic disability. Formerly I was a high technology executive recruiter, prior to that radio disc-jockey. Graduating from Leland Powers School of Radio, Television and Theatre as class president. 

It was my ambition to become a stage actor.  Life had other plans for me. Always being smitten with the written and spoken word I began chronicling some of my adventures and experiences. More than one of my acquaintances suggested I submit my work to publishers. Having entered a small number of contests which have not resulted in lucrative six-figure advances striking fear into the hearts of John Grisham and J.K. Rowling, I quickly realized that I don't know what in the world I am doing.

Having a desire to use language effectively is not enough to be a published author I  soon found. I was told to submit queries, get an agent, find an editor... My question to you is how do I know if I should even go to all the toil and trouble when I don't even know if anything I have to say could be appreciated by potential readers.

As an avid reader with eclectic tastes I sometimes wonder how a given work receives the Nobel Prize in literature. "How can this be?" I wonder after reading some tedious, bloated never-ending tome of drivel.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to hear me out. Any comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. -- Anonymous

I wrote several short stories and two novels as a young man, though I never made any serious attempt at selling them. All my recent efforts have been scholarly (where the rewards I sought were visibility and credibility, since part of my job description includes engaging in scholarly pursuits).

While I don't teach a whole class in creative writing, I do regularly advise creative writing majors to refer to a book like Writer's Market (updated with a new edition each year, listing the contact information for agents, the going rates for various publications, etc.). You can probably find a copy in a local library or you can pick up an older edition at a used book store.  Both the library and the local bookstore can help you find numerous other books that introduce the writing profession to curious newcomers.

A mid-range solution might be to look for a writer's conference in your genre (thriller, fantasy, etc.), and attend the workshops where you can hear from recently published writers.  Your local public library or a local community college might be a good place to start making local contacts.  It looks like the person who sent in this question has valuable experience in business and technology, which might be of great use to another writer who is working on a corporate thriller.  Local conferences are great opportunities to form a community of like-minded writers who can swap manuscripts and help each other develop their ideas.

You might attend a talk given by a local author (lots of bookstores or coffee houses will regularly schedule such talks), and just ask the guest speaker for their editor's contact information. (It would be polite if you also bought a copy of their book, too! Even if you don't like the genre, you can give it to someone who would.)

I would be cautious about publishers who promise to publish your work as long as you pay them a fee.  That publisher is more interested in making money off of you than in promoting and selling your book.

Nevertheless, a good editor's services are valuable, so if you are willing to pay an established editor to give you honest professional feedback, that would be a good way to determine your chances.

A long-term solution, which involves an investment of time and money, would be to go back to school and take some creative writing classes. My own school, Seton Hill University, has a master's program in writing popular fiction.  You meet in person for a week or so in January and July, but otherwise the program is online.

Sometimes the WPF program asks me to help evaluate student presentations, but I'm not otherwise involved with it. I do highly recommend it.

 

A close professional contact who regularly takes on student interns shared this list of guidelines, which she has found necessary to include when orienting a new intern to the routine of office work.

Although the site is a non-profit educational organization, and thus the environment is more relaxed and forgiving than it might be in the typical business setting, I have seen student interns wearing sweats over a team uniform (with bags of gear piled in the corner).

Millennial students are very social creatures, and they are used to being able to choose how to channel their enthusiasm and interests. Students who are used to multi-tasking may be tempted to fill up slow spots with Facebook or Youtube, which may be acceptable in a work-study position that asks them to check out library books or just make sure people don't vandalize the computer labs. But most entry-level jobs require stretches of solitary vigilance -- by the telephone in the front office, in the hall waiting to escort a visitor to and from a meting, or simply waiting to get a word in edgewise while their immediate supervisor conducts routine business with a constant stream of customers or co-workers.

Seeing exactly what my contact felt had to be spelled out is a useful starting point for the professional development component of my "Intro to Literary Study" class.

1. The Center's daily dress code is casual business attire--no jeans or sports clothing.
2. The dress code for Center events is formal business attire, i.e. suit.
3. When you are working, friends may not visit you.
4. Cell phone use during work is strongly discouraged.
5. You are expected to focus on your work, make good use of your time, and avoid interrupting your supervisor or fellow students unnecessarily.
6. Please greet visitors, welcome them to the Center and ask how you can help.
7. When answering telephones, please use this format:  "Hello. You have reached [ORGANIZATION NAME]. [YOUR NAME] speaking. How may I help you?"
8. If you are stuck on a project or need direction, you are expected to make this known in a timely manner.
9. Remember that no task is too small. All tasks are important to the functioning of the Center. You are expected to do your best work on all assignments, and to contribute to the smooth functioning of the Center.
10. Team work is important to the success of all Center events. All interns are expected to take part in planning major events and to contribute ideas for carrying out projects effectively. When possible, you will have opportunities for decision-making and supervision.
11. Interns are expected to act professionally in representing the Center to other departments or even people from outside the University.
12. If you are unable to work during your scheduled hours, you must communicate this to your supervisor in a timely manner. Missing work or events without communicating with the supervisor is not acceptable or professional behavior.
13. You are expected to keep all work areas neat and organized. File folders are to be returned to their proper places before you leave work.
14. You are expected to document progress in planning and carrying out activities on the proper forms in the event folders.
15. You should maintain a folder under your name (Smith, Mary Spr08) on the Center computer that you use. Projects should be organized within your folder by title so that you supervisor or another student staff member can access materials in your absence. You should log in under the account provided to you, not your own account.

The Lego brick system was patented 50 years ago today. Gizmodo offers this timeline.

John Hockenberry, a former NBC journalist who now works at MIT, reflects on what he says is the increasing irrelevance of TV journalism. Some of my most promising "New Media Journalism" students are interested in a broadcast journalism career, taking on internships and entering graduate school, and they all know why I prefer to get my news from the internet.  So I read this article with great interest.

The specific anecdotes about what got aired and what got spiked, such as how the decision to air a particular news item depended on whether the item had anything to do with the plot of a TV drama that led into the news show -- wow.

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

In the years since my departure from network television, I have acquired a certain detachment about how an institution so central to American culture could shift so quickly to the margins. Going from being a correspondent at Dateline--a rich source of material for The Daily Show--to working at the MIT Media Lab, where most students have no interest in or even knowledge of traditional networks, was a shock. It has given me some hard-won wisdom about the future of journalism, but it is still a mystery to me why television news remains so dissatisfying, so superficial, and so irrelevant. Disappointed veterans like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather blame the moral failure of ratings-obsessed executives, but it's not that simple. I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC's news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries. "It's such a great gadget. It changed my life," one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget.