Cedar Mill Communications

We were playing Loaded Questions following a delicious Christmas dinner with our Olympia, Wash., relatives Ann, Eric and Faye and Eric’s girlfriend Julie. One question we drew was to name a profession that would be extinct in 10 years. Two of the group guessed journalism-related jobs: paper delivery and journalists in general. How could I argue with our own Oregonian shrinking like the Wicked Witch of the East before our very eyes and other newspapers laying off reporters, photographers, even editors. As a copyeditor who’s worked at several newspapers and magazines, I feel sometimes like a horseshoer watching horseless carriages taking over the road.

Here’s an argument for keeping the journalism profession alive. I’m talking about the kind of journalism I went to school to learn and get a degree in, not the kind of stuff we call New Media. My argument goes like this: Someone with writing and reporting skills gets paid to use them for the ferreting out of information vital to us all. I’m sitting here trying to cook dinner, do laundry and walk the dogs, feeling the need to write, but hey, if a paying job comes in I’ll drop the blog post-haste.

When I worked at the News Tribune (sorry, no link; it’s been dead for years) or the Press-Enterprise or the Portland Tribune those folks got my undivided attention because they helped pay the bills. Don’t get me wrong, I admire writers and editors who will work for free. In fact, I advise fresh-out-of-J-school grads to do just that: give away their writing by working gratis for some publication — any publication that will give them clips. But that can’t go for long. Nor should it. I was reminded recently about why we desperately need paid, skilled journalists.

The Oregonian ran an investigative piece on Dec. 30 on the sale of green energy tax incentives to corporations, among them Wal-Mart, Costco and U.S. Bank, that effectively allowed these companies to avoid paying millions of dollars in state taxes — and here’s the clincher — without actually doing anything green. Turns out these tax incentives can be bought and sold just like derivitives — but at a much better rate of return.

‘Course we Oregonians lose the tax income, but that’s business, right?
I’d never have known about that if the Oregonian wasn’t around. Good job Harry Esteve.

Example number two: the graph from the Washington Post that ran on A4 of the same edition showing every U.S. senator’s vote on the health care reform bill along with how much money each has gotten from health care lobbyists and the percentage of uninsured in their states. How can senators Hutchison and Cornyn sleep at night knowing they voted against reform when their state, Texas, has the highest rate of uninsured in the nation? And John McCain (who can Twitter) pulled in more than $9 million in lobby geld voted lock-step with the other pull-up-the-ladder Republicans. His state only has 19% uninsured. I’m sure those folks will understand his vote, right? Interestingly John Kerry got more than $8 million from health care groups but he voted for reform.

I guess you can see where my loyalties lie. Given a choice between blogging and newspapers, I’ll take real journalism any day — every day, pitched on my driveway!

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First of all, I confess that I don’t go in for Twitter. I’m way behind John McCain on that one. I just don’t feel the need to send off a comment about my breakfast (granola and copious cups of coffee, if you must know) or the dust bunnies under my desk (dog hair, actually). Brian, on the other hand, twitters constantly. Nothing’s sacred, though usually it’s comments about music or work or the dogs. Hopefully not too much in the way of personal stuff about me (gasp!).

I’m more of a Facebooker. I like the give and take of posting to people I actually know and getting feedback. Like the day I noticed there is a variation on raindrops on weather.com. Your basic rainy day rates six drops; a gullywasher, a couple more. We take our rain seriously here; so any time someone else does too, even if it’s only a rain graphic, it’s cause for an appreciative nod. When I noted that on my status, I got some almost instant comments from fellow Northwesterners — a couple of Washingtonians, an Idahoan, an Oregonian, even a Californian.

So, regarding the people who partake in Twitter, here’s my question: What do you call them? As an editor, I need to know this. Those of you out there who do imbibe, so to speak, let me know. I’ll fire off a reply to ex-AP Editor Norm Goldstein who writes for Copyediting magazine and who wrote on the subject recently, sharing my burning question. He’s probably a Luddite like me, so I’ll use old-fashioned email.

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The defining natural event of my life and probably my oldest daughter’s (she’s now 23) was the Loma Prieta earthquake of Oct. 17, 1989. Like most major events, though, it has faded from memory, brought up only in discussions with my students about earthquakes — most of the world doesn’t experience them — or in remembrances of our time in San Jose, Calif.

But seeing a Salon posting this morning along with pictures of the Cyprus Freeway in Oakland (the one that collapsed) brought back memories of the most violent earthquake I’d felt in my three-plus decades of California living.

Along with droughts and wildfires, earthquakes and earthquake preparedness are a natural part of life in California. Things start to shake and you scurry under a table, hands wrapped around the back of your neck — a tiny measure of protection if you think about it. The building collapses onto your table, you might last a few seconds more if you remember to keep your fingers laced behind your neck.

So, what was I doing at 5:04 p.m. Oct. 17 (a Monday, I think)? I was changing a diaper, getting Alex and Jessica up from a late nap to head out to the park for playtime. When things started to shake, I grabbed Jessica, pulled Alex out from his exploration of the bathroom trashcan and ran for the doorway (2nd best place to stand, we were told). When it kept up — it felt like an eternity, not the 15 seconds they told us — we took cover under the dining room table. Brian called as soon as the shaking stopped and we guessed the magnitude, at least a 6.0 we thought, which was a far cry from the 7.1 it was officially pegged at.

In the hours that followed, we considered, then rejected, turning off our power; lost phone service — but not TV — and endured too-numerous-to-count aftershocks. That’s what sent Jessica, then 3 years old into our bedroom to sleep. She didn’t sleep alone for years after that. Try telling a toddler that those near constant trembles aren’t just more quakes.

While old town Los Gatos collapsed and unlucky drivers perished in the sandwiched freeway collapse, our damage was confined to potted plants. Even glassware survived, miraculously walking into drawers that opened to catch it.

If we’d truly suffered like so many people did, I’d not be feeling nostalgic. But in a way I do miss the excitement of a good shake. They came out of nowhere, and if you were like most Californians and didn’t suffer much if at all, they made a great story. Just ask Jessica. Or maybe not.

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For those us who have been unable to transition our lives to Twitter and Facebook, we are highly dependent upon email.  Unfortunately, the entire email system is overrun with unscrupulous types who blast out vast quantities of garbage, to the point that we must waste considerable time sifting through these pointless missives to get to the mails we care about.

For the past several years, Outlook has included a junk mail filter. This sounds promising but in reality it doesn’t do a very good job. The spammers have figured out how it filters the mail and game it with ease. What’s worse, it will also trap mails from clients and others I want in junk mail purgatory.  This means that I have to look through all the putrid junk mail in case a mail I want got misfiled.

In my quest for a better alternative, I have landed on the service from Cloudmark. It installs a lightweight toolbar in Outlook and then taps the collective brains of its users to spot the spam.  This means that it can’t get false positives, and it gets the vast majority of spam out there.  I’ve been using it for about a week and in that time it caught an astonding 1,360 spam mails that Microsoft’s junk mail filter missed.  Wow. What a lifesaver.

Here’s a tip for you.  Cloudmark charges $39.95 per year per subscription for the service. Well worth it. But you can get it for less from Sunbelt Software under the brand name I Hate Spam for $29.95 or, and here’s the best part, $49.95 for a home site license.

If enough people start using this, maybe the percentage of people responding to spam (somebody must respond to spam or the spammers wouldn’t keep sending it) will go from .000001 of a percent to 0% and the spammers will all starve to death and leave us alone. One can hope.

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Sitting on the deck tonight, Mary and I discoursed on the topic of the day over a glass of chilled white wine: the much debated plan to reform health care.

 It seems to be one of those issues that defies easy answers and avoids application of common sense solution. Even over a glass of wine. The crux of the problem, of course, is that healthcare costs have risen at an extraordinary rate, far greater than inflation. To be sure the quality of health care has improved as well, driven primarily by technological advances. 

The question I have in all this is why does the cost of healthcare increase far faster than inflation?  Higher education also seems to be on the same trajectory.   Each year, we read about 10-15 percent increases in medical premiums and similar amounts in college tuitions. If only our salaries increased at this rate.

I think this bears more researching. Why, truly, are these cost going up at such a crazy pace, especially in a down economy? Is it greed or malpractice or just bad management? Whatever the case, I hope medical reform includes a stringent cost containment component.

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It’s funny how fast change happens. I think of that credit card commercial about how fast life comes at you. One minute you’re holding a new life in your hands, the next you’re watching her graduate. Geez, it went by fast.

So now I’m sitting here musing on the state of things since December when I sounded smug about not working for The Man. About how cool it is to get up at a reasonable hour — 8 a.m. is reasonable — have a leisurely breakfast, take the dogs out for their morning constitutional, and then tackle whatever work came rolling into my inbox.

Something happened in January. Something bad. Now I’m almost thinking The Man’s not so bad. Paid vacations, health insurance and a regular paycheck sound ok. But at least for this summer, I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel.

Maybe that’s because summer is special in Oregon — one, maybe two solid months of sun. I’d hate to miss that by being in an office. Plus we’ve found there are some cheap thrills that do more for recreating us than the more expensive variety that we must admit we love. Canoeing is one. On the 4th of July we decided to forgo the war zone for canoe/camping on a quiet lake in the Cascades. It turned out to be our personal lake as no one else camped there, and the one group that fished it when we arrived was a godsend — they had mosquito repellent that we’d forgotten. The next day we swam in a nearby lake that had been similarly overlooked. The time together away from the house, computer, cell phone, etc. was therapeutic in a way I couldn’t have predicted.

In all it was one of the best — and cheapest –vacations we’d ever had. And that’s a good thing because it looks like cheap is going be describing our thrills for some time to come.

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A good name is like a good reputation – they are both good things to have. The difference is that a reputation is something your earn and develop over time. A name is something that you just come up with.

I’m in the midst of helping a company we work come up with a name for their social media and blogging site. It’s not as easy as you would think.  I’ve done many naming project over the course of my career and it’s always a challenge to come up with something distinctive that everyone agrees is a winner. Occasionally, the light bulbs will go off and name will instantly materialize. More often than not, it’s a grind.

One of the places I’m looking for inspiration, beside the company website, are blogs and online communities and forums. There is certainly no lack of advice on the naming front.

One of the more interesting is The Name Inspector blog who recently broke down the 10 categories that account for all the name in the TechCrunch directory. These are primarily high-tech startups. The categories span everything from compounds to made up words. My favorites are the puns like LicketyShip and Memeorandum.

I’m also checking out the Snark Hunting naming and branding blog for bits of humor and inspiration. Also offered up there is the “Building the Perfect Beast” free naming guide, complete with a handy tool for evaluating the quality of your selected names.

For additional inspiration, I also visited HotForWords, although it’s not entirely clear what sort of inspiration I’m getting from that one. Got any great tips for coming up with names? Please share them. Or else there will be nothing but a bunch of bad puns on the horizon.

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A while back I mentioned a bit about my life as a freelancer. How nice it is not have to commute to an office every day, how Brian and I can — and do — budget time in our mornings to walk our three dogs (a perk that we certainly didn’t have working for somebody else). I have time for piano lessons and Brian can leave early for his weekly soccer matches. Yes, it’s pretty nice for us.

It’s also pretty nice for our clients. They don’t have to provide us desks, vacations or health insurance. We perform the work and absorb the costs of those things as part of “doing business.” They get nearly a half century combined of pr, editing and writing experience for a pretty fair price, if I say so myself.

In Brian, clients get a guy with all that experience who actually loves technology. He likes to read about it in Wired, online, the Wall Street Journal, etc. He loves to keep up the latest social media (he’s got 300+ followers on Twitter). And he makes sure our setup here at the ranch is the envy of the neighborhood (we were the first on our street to have DSL).

I keep up only so, so. I think of it as technology by osmosis. My Facebook page isn’t too bad and I just updated my Plaxo profile, so I’m getting there.

I bring to the table a love of language on par with Brian’s technology obsession. I pour over our local newspaper, The Oregonian, and The Wall Street Journal every day. I’d take The New York Times too, if I could afford it. And because I love books too, I belong to two two book clubs, one formed with an old friend several years ago and the second I put together with my English students — a group of German women who came to Portland with their families for work. I love to read and discuss books and news and ideas.

One of my favorite books brings it all together: “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way,” written by one of my favorite writers, Bill Bryson. The book blends humor (a must as far as I’m concerned) with fascinating information about English, like how busy and bury came to be pronounced. Why isn’t it bussy and burry? Humm.

So, businesses out there take note. With freelancers — heck with us — you get experienced people who work fast and well and actually love what we do so much, we spend our free time indulging in it. In this economy take on a freelancer. You won’t be sorry and hey, if you come by in the morning, you might even get to walk the dogs with us.

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I didn’t go into journalism to edit. When I was in junior high school and deciding on my career path, I was pretty sure I’d travel the world, find quaint villages or gorgeous places to write about for National Geographic. But back in San Marcos, Calif., where I got my first non-school writing job on the local weekly, I had my first brush with a real, live editor. I’ll never forget how appalled I was with what he’d done to my first news story. It was more red ink than black, but liked it anyway (!).

Since then I’ve written for daily and weekly newspapers, consumer and trade magazines and now for public relations agencies. I love the writing process. I love sitting at my computer, cup of coffee at the ready, a warm dachshund in my lap (maybe the other two dogs flaked out nearby) and pondering each word — each a pearl of course, each perfection for that sentence.

But I’m an editor too. And after the pearls have been strung, after I’ve taken the dogs out or gone to the gym, after I’ve let time clear my head, I have to go back and coldly evaluate. That’s when the real work comes in — deciding which of those pearls to pitch, which ideas just didn’t work and, of course, where the commas should go.

Do it wrong and nobody looks good. Do it right and everyone wins.

In a world where an individual’s or company’s first and only impression may be on a screen or a printed page, taking the writing seriously is obvious, but don’t forget the editor. Everybody needs one.

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When it comes to new gadgets and technology, my attitude is bring it on. I’m willing to try anything. But the things I keep and cherish have one thing in common: they work and they work well.  Whether it’s a bicycle wheel that stays true or a phone that I can drop in the water and have it keep working (the Casio G’zone), things that do their job effortlessly are keepers.

The operating system on a computer is pretty vital.  Its main job is to connect all the applications, printers, Web sites that I need to do writing and PR and to keep them safe from bad guys and prying eyes. Oh, and it needs to do all this quickly. With the Vista operating system, I think Microsoft wanted to make the OS more visible and lost sight of what we really need from an OS: for it to just work. Vista has a tendency, at least on my desktop system, to randomly slow down and then crash, although it does seem secure. But the biggest problem is that it’s just slow. And it’s not my computer, which is plenty fast and has more than enough memory and disk space. Vista is just a slow and inefficient OS.

More than once, I’ve considered switching over to Linux or dropping back to XP. But in both cases, I would have to give up enough in the way of features that I haven’t made the downgrade. Plus, it would be a hassle. Still, I was more than ready when the Windows 7 beta came out last week, with Steve Ballmer proclaiming “we heard you.”

Now, after downloading and installing Windows 7, it appears that Microsoft did in fact hear us, and get it right. It works. I simply upgraded my existing Vista install and everything came up roses — working fine. The user interface is clean and easy to use, and, more importantly my computer is back to being fast. Windows open now. Even Outlook 2007 is running better and faster.  Since this is just beta code, hopefully the experience will continue to improve as we get nearer to production.

If you have Vista, save yourself some time and get Windows 7. Even in beta, from what I can tell, it’s a nice improvement.

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