Monthly Archives: April 2010

News today is prolific and unfiltered.

An educated readership must actively participate in sorting through layers of available information and draw their own conclusions about bias and credibility.  According to Brent Cunningham and Alan C. Miller:

All information is not created equal, and it is crucial for the health of our democracy that people have the skills to find what is credible — and to understand why the distinctions matter.

In their article in the Apr. 13 issue of USA Today , As journalism changes, so must you, they describe an explosion of news and an internet that can no longer maintain boundaries between “opinion and fact”, “professional and amateur.”

Of course they concur that news today is deeply democratic, allowing all sides to participate in a conversation about current events.  But it is just this point that throws a wrench into the works — sides.  The journalistic pursuit of objectivity and integrity in reporting is no longer a requirement of much of what is written.  Agendas, biases and misinformation continue to contaminate much of today’s news.

As our “relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized and participatory”, we as readers must be involved in dissecting the information presented to us.  We should consider it with a keen eye and an ever so slight air of suspicion.

Health news in particular requires a supremely literate readership.  When it comes to disease, medicine and what we put into our bodies, misinformation is potentially lethal.  As the lines blur between truth and sensationalism, we must consider that the complexity of health related issues makes it an easy target for irresponsible content.

The authors argue that, “we need a national effort to create a savvy, digital-age citizenry that is informed and engaged.”  As true as that is, health education should be on the top of the list.  The legislation and science behind the big health decisions of our time should not be presented as esoteric gibberish; rather, it seems to be the responsibility of the legislator, company or researcher to explain their choices and their knowledge coherently to the public.  It is then the responsibility of the consumer herself to assess the validity of the information presented.

Communicating ideas well is the first step to educating a public, and this particularly applies at a time rife with healthcare debate.  A PR strategy must consider the extent of information available and aim to disseminate the most intelligible message that will not be lost among the white noise.

In Adam Bryant’s interview with Guy Kawasaki (a co-founder of Alltop, a news aggregation site, and managing director at Garage Technology Ventures) from the March 19 issue of the New York Times, the two discuss the basic tenets of succinct communication.

When the question is posed “What should business schools teach more of, or less of?”, Kawasaki answers:

They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations.  If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off.

When asked why, he replies:

Because no one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails.  Who has the time?  Ditto with 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting.

What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world.  In school you’re always worried about minimums.  You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever.  Then you get out in the real world and you think, “I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.”

Public and investor relations are built on sentences and slides — e-mails, press releases and corporate presentations.  When faced with hot news or crisis management communication, people often focus on the strategy and the content.

Form and limitation can offer the boundaries needed to think and communicate this content clearly, while remaining creative and out of the box.  Five sentences…10 slides…one is forced to decide what information is the most important.

Assigning priority begins with your audience — Who are you trying to reach?  Once you select your audience, you can begin to cull data and details to fit the audience need.  Your message can also be tailored to fit your relationship with that audience.  Each decision you make cleans and hones the communication until it becomes the bespoke nugget of information that gives everyone what they want.

And then, the slide deck.  Corporate presentations have become stale and predictable.  But what if in 10 slides you can tell the old story and showcase the new one with brevity?  A presentation should not be a data download, but a narrative.  The best speakers do actually tell a story.  10 succinct slides with a built-in narrative arc are not only easier to understand, but they serve to underscore the logic and competence of the decisions that were made to bring the relevant company to the current state of affairs.

Kawasaki makes an interesting point when he comments that we are conditioned to attain a minimum of pages or slides — now we have a new goal to attain:

Be brief.