writer, photographer, web person from Washington, DC.
I love walking in DC. On Monday after work, I stopped off at Macy’s and then walked home, taking a little detour to go by the White House. It was darker than this photo appears and the absence of light caused the iPhone to do a bit of a long exposure, allowing me to capture this cyclist in motion. She’s on a Capital Bikeshare bike – these bright red bikes are a common sight in DC, and are used by everyone, from tourists to businessmen.
“Reporters are lazy,” a PR director once told me. “They won’t do any work – they want everything explained to them.”
I’ve been on both sides of the table, as a freelance writer and as a communications manager. It’s not that reporters are lazy. They just have different objectives than PR reps. The job of a reporter is to find news and report it back to an audience. If you’re in public relations, your task is to get favorable media coverage for your organization.
What looks like journalistic laziness is in fact a relentless search for news. Reporters don’t have time to unpack the complexities of your press release. Don’t ask them to parse a technical document. They won’t sit through a press conference unless you have something really special to announce.
If your communication is not clear to them, they move on. If you can’t explain the story in a sentence, then they’re going to find something else to report on.
So, what do reporters want?
Reporters want interesting stories that audiences will read. Help them out by producing news and not news releases.
And check out these tips on pitching from editors and reporters. Note how publications have very different and unique requirements.
What do the life of Steve Jobs and photographers have in common? Find out in Steve Jobs: Life Lessons for Photographers, a new post on my Steve Jobs – Life Lessons blog. I’ve been fascinated by how much creative people can learn from studying what Jobs did in his life.
I’m a jaded Washingtonian. I’ve lived in DC for so long that I no longer notice things like the Washington Monument and the White House. They are just there, part of the scenery.
I had some time to kill before a happy hour downtown. I wandered into the Portrait Gallery, which is open until 7. While walking through the museum, I noticed that the lights had been turned down low in the courtyard. I had to investigate.
Museum staff were setting up for a dinner and adjusting the light levels. Spotlights were turned off and on, blue gels were placed over lights and the overhead lights were turned down and then back up.
That’s when I got this picture. In it you can see the silhouettes of museum-goers in a lone spotlight, the red tables set up for the dinner and the glimmer of the lights in the glass canopy, which look a little like stars in the firmament. It’s an iPhone pic, one of the first with my new iPhone 5 – I was impressed that it could capture such a dark scene.
I literally saw the Portrait Gallery in a different light. The courtyard looked fresh and new in the darkness. One magical moment watching the lights wax and wane and I became de-jaded.
Steve Jobs and government bureaucrats – what could they have in common? A lot, as I write in Steve Jobs for Govies, recently published on GovLoop.
This is the new L St bike lane – also called a cycletrack, according to WABA. I took the photo with an iPhone 4, right around sunset, before editing it in the great new Flickr mobile app. I’ve come to love the Narwhal filter – it creates such an interesting, distressed kind of look, as if this print was just discovered in some antique chest of drawers.
Joe Konrath had a really important post on how to sell ebooks. This successful indie author made the point (among many other great ones) that it was important to experiment. In his words:
There isn’t a single thing I’m saying here that you should automatically believe. Don’t trust me, or any other so-called expert. Instead, try things out for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Or to quote screenwriter William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.”
That’s the case with art and marketing – you can’t predict what’s going to work. At best, you can try and try again.
I love my book Don’t Mess Up My Block. It’s a funny, cynical look at the way we work now. The people who have read it have liked it, especially if they have experience in the bureaucracies of Washington.
Yet, this novel is hidden far down the long tail of Amazon, unlikely to emerge from obscurity.
For my first novel, Murder in Ocean Hall, I had this great cover by Dave Newman. It’s a classic.
But this time, I’m experimenting. I was inspired by Seth Godin and the Domino Project, which has set out to revolutionize publishing. He’s rethinking everything the book world does, including covers. Why do you need a title and a name on a cover for an ebook? For example, here’s his book Poke the Box:
My second novel Don’t Mess Up My Block is a journey through the dysfunctional American workplace, from companies obsessed with the latest management fads to federal agencies unable to get anything done. What would make a good cover?
Fortunately, I had exactly the right picture, taken while I was at work one day. I was amused by the cheap stapler they had given me in my new job and just how beige and early 90s everything in the office was. I snapped this Instagram picture, thinking it perfectly captured the banality of the white-collar workplace.
So, that’s it. That’s the new cover of Don’t Mess Up My Block. It’s a funny and absurd cover for a funny and absurd book.
My novel Don’t Mess Up My Block has its first Amazon review! And it’s a good one:
As someone who spent many years dealing with consultants, federal contractors, and federal employees …. this book rings all too true. The people, places, and situations are much too familiar … for me, it was a non-fiction “day in the life” – or “you won’t believe the day I had”. Well done Joe! The author has captured life on the Beltway merry-go-round.
I know the reviewer and if anyone is an expert on the Beltway merry-go-round, it is he. Glad that my book rang so true with someone so attuned to the absurdities of life in Washington.
So, what are you waiting for? Don’t Mess Up My Block is just 99 cents on Kindle.
14th St is rapidly becoming lined with condos and apartments. Where once stood a KFC and other low-rent retail establishments, another new building rises.
Shot with an iPhone 4 and edited in the Flickr mobile app. The photo also appeared in PoP in a post on, appropriately enough, hating DC.
The DC Shorts Film Festival has a great new tagline:
DC Shorts champions short filmmaking.
Marketing taglines are a lot of times so much fluff, filled with words like “leveraging” and “cross-platform” and other tired buzzwords.
But “DC Shorts champions short filmmaking” really communicates what the festival is all about – it’s a celebration of short film and filmmakers.
And now the festival is trying something new: DC Mentors. Taught by film professionals and peers, these interactive sessions are designed to build upon one another, creating skills needed to better compete in the festival circuit. Over four weekends in DC you can learn how to write a script, find actors, shoot your film and then market it to film festivals – you can sign up for the whole program or just take individual classes. And at $160 for seven classes, it’s literally .01% the cost of film school.
And I’ll be one of the writer-mentors for the March 3 class on storytelling. I’m a writer who won the Film DC Screenplay Competition and has been a judge for DC Shorts and other local festivals. I like helping writers. There’s so much “fear to start” among new writers that can be overcome with a little bit of encouragement and practical advice. I can provide that.
Sign-up for DC Mentors and learn filmmaking over four weekends in spring.