The “NASCAR Story” Always Attracts Attention
No, I’m not talking about Matt Kenseth winning the Daytona 500.
Instead, consider what brings the vast majority of folks to the racetrack.
It’s the possibility to witness a high-speed wreck.
I’ve come to call the type of story that offers up the possibility of a wreck - defining “wreck” as an element of the story tied to the protagonist going horribly astray - as a “NASCAR story.”
I recently saw a front-page note in the San Jose Mercury News asking readers if they’re out of work, searching for a new job and interested in Warholic fame to drop the editors a note. The Merc will pick a few folks to follow on their job hunt and report on each saga.
This is a NASCAR story because the potential exists for a wreck. Given that almost 600,000 folks lost their jobs in January alone according to the U.S. Labor Department, there’s no guarantee that these stories will close with the birds chirping and everyone living happily ever after.
I suppose it’s a similar dynamic to reality TV and what keeps people coming back to “American Idol” (as an aside, my daughter has Lil Rounds as the early favorite). The unscripted nature of this type of story means the reader/viewer doesn’t know the ending, with the potential wreck always lurking around the corner.
I’m surprised more communications professionals don’t develop and pitch NASCAR stories. No question, there’s a dimension of risk, but the reward can be opening doors at heavyweight publications without the typical news announcement.
I flagged a story last month in The Wall Street Journal titled “Cooking Up Ways to Improve Steaks on a Plane” (provided the link to the story on MSN for those without a subscription to the online Journal). It’s an entertaining read as columnist Scott McCartney essentially places himself at the hip of the Singapore Airlines’ head of food service, Mr. Freidanck, as he evaluates one of the airline’s food vendors, the Chelsea Food Service based in Houston.
It’s also a NASCAR story.
McCartney’s unscripted “access” makes for drama and a narrative rich in anecdotes:
Because the dry air of a jet cabin dries mouths, taste is diminished in flight. So Singapore and other carriers exaggerate flavors in meals.
The piece also contains a few mini-wrecks in which the caterer’s executive chef gets raked over the coals (couldn’t resist):
Mr. Freidanck tastes while Shashi Nath, Chelsea’s executive chef, awaits judgment. A corn chowder isn’t thick enough. Oops, celeriac and pear cream soup is too thick. “Do they really understand celeriac here in Texas?” Mr. Freidanck asks the throng taking notes on every order.
A sauce is too starchy; beef soup is too salty. “Something was lost in translation on the beef soup,” he says. Crabmeat on top of avocados in one salad looks messy and he redesigns the layout himself, then photographs it when he gets it exactly as he wants it. Mushrooms in one dish are chopped too small, their variety unrecognizable. Muscovy duck is undercooked and doesn’t taste right. “It’s not Muscovy!” Mr. Freidanck says.
“It is positively,” Mr. Nath insists.
I can almost picture a shouting match: “It’s not a Muscovy duck … Yes it is … No it isn’t … Yes it is.”
Yet, even with the negatives, the reader takes away an overall positive impression of Singapore Airlines and its quest to serve the customer.
Kudos to the Singapore Airlines PR team (assuming the seed of the story came from them) for not only manufacturing the storyline but for selling the concept to management.
The media loves NASCAR stories.
It would behoove communications professionals to push beyond their comfort zone and that of their company to develop these types of angles with unhandled access. Such an approach certainly better aligns with the needs of the media than a news release.
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Hard to Beat the Classic Immigrant-Makes-Good Story
The San Jose Mercury News ran the feel-good story “From Strawberries to Startup” on the front page above the fold.
No doubt, the Merc’s editorial decision-makers - and for that matter publication bosses from around the country - figure the onslaught of negative news starts to numb the readership.
Check out the Merc’s front-page headlines leading into the piece:
Our Shrinking ECONOMY (their choice to go uppercase), The “Worsts” Keep on Coming, Jan. 31, 2009
Closing in … housing crisis reaches wealthier valley communities, Feb. 1, 2009
Super Steelers (relief from the Dorito bowl), Feb. 2, 2009
Home Prices: bad to worse, Feb. 3, 2009
Needless to say, you don’t need the M.B.A. brigade for deep analysis to discern the trend.
To break the pattern, the Merc highlighted a story that never goes out of style: An immigrant capitalizes on America’s opportunities through old-fashion hard work. If this post was multimedia, you’d hear “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” playing in the background now.
What took the startup called Ooyala from the Business section to the front of the paper is the contrarian angle.
We’re not talking immigrants from India, China, Taiwan, Israel or Eastern Europe who regularly impact the tech scene.
The chaps who lifted Ooyala to stardom come from Mexican heritage and their parents were migrant farm workers.
From these humble beginnings, Bismarck and Bel Lepe gained entry to Stanford which led to a gig at Google and set the stage for their own undertaking.
Merc reporter Scott Duke Harris develops the compelling tale with ample use of anecdotes. I particularly liked:
“The Lepe brothers say their parents’ hard work provided them with privileges not common to working class kids, including piano and karate lessons.”
I think it’s fair to say that the children of migrant workers aren’t typically learning Tchaikovsky.
The quotes - unlike the typical generic filler - also enhance the story:
“To stay at Google would be like living in your parents’ mansion: It might be nice but it’s still their mansion.”
Lest you think serendipity landed the profile, the company has secured visibility in targets ranging from Global Burger to a Fortune profile penned by heavyweight Adam Lashinsky.
Obviously, the Lepe brothers learned a thing or two about building a company image from their time at Google.
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Steve Jobs Hoopla Dominates Media
When we last addressed Mr. Jobs he was taking a pass on Macworld.
More recently, unless you’ve spent the last week in the proverbial cave, you’ve seen the cavalcade of stories on Steve Jobs taking a leave of absence from Apple.
The common denominator in the stories revolves around understanding his replacement, Tim Cook.
It’s revealing to contrast a blog posting from The Wall Street Journal by Nick Wingfield with a story in the San Jose Mercury News penned by Brandon Bailey ”Iron Reporter”-style (further proof that I’m spending way too much time on the Food Network).
Let’s start with the headlines.
“When Steve Jobs Met Tim Cook” (Journal) versus “Tim Cook – Jobs’ temporary replacement at Apple – seen as strong manger” (Merc).
No contest.
The Journal story promises to put me in the room for the first Jobs-Cook interaction, with instant drama coming from the question “what happened?”
Was it “like” at first sight?
Did Cook wear a “Vote for Ike” button as an icebreaker?
On the other hand, the Merc header indicates that we’re likely going to read a rehash of what’s already known by even pedestrian Apple watchers.
And that’s about how it plays out.
Wingfield deserves credit for tracking down the recruiter at Heidrick & Struggles who served as the matchmaker back in 1998. (The fact that the recruiter no longer works for Heidrick tells me that Heidrick PR did not pitch the story angle.) While the walk down memory lane won’t evoke foreshadowing like F. Scott Fitzgerald, at least it’s different from the thousands of Cook-knows-how-to-make-the-trains-run-on-time stories. The anecdote that Steve isn’t big on collecting barber chairs adds some levity.
The Merc story kicks off with the premise that Cook is the right man for the short-term gig, supported by “scintillating” quotes from two sources:
“He’s the guy that makes sure everything gets executed properly. He’s excellent at getting things done.” (Tim Bajarin from Creative Strategies)
The 48-year-old Cook is “not a product innovator. But he runs a very tight ship.” (Brian Marshall from Broadpoint AmTech)
Needless to say, we won’t be adding these quotes to our art of storytelling curriculum … which isn’t to diss the two sources. We know Bajarin, who is absolutely clued into Apple and often communicates with a compelling bent. But what shows up in this particular article from the sources interviewed doesn’t make for an enlightening read.
It turns out that the best color in the Merc piece gets borrowed from Fortune’s profile on Cook last year:
A recent article in Fortune magazine described a management meeting in which Cook was discussing a problem with Apple’s Asian operations. “This is really a problem,” Cook reportedly said. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes later, Cook turned to a subordinate and calmly inquired: “Why are you still here?” The man immediately left the meeting, the magazine said; he drove straight to the airport and flew to China without a change of clothes.
Even with the limitations of a 24-hour news cycle, you would think the paper in Apple’s backyard could do a little better on the original reporting front (although finding a tidbit in the Cook family’s hometown paper, the Robertsdale Independent was a nice touch).
I do recognize that both the Journal and the Merc have published multiple stories on this topic. It’s plausible that with a little more initiative on my part, I could have found a dull Journal piece and a Merc story with panache.
It’s also not lost on me that the blog as a medium for reporting offers the latitude to capture vignettes that otherwise wouldn’t be substantial enough to make the printed page.
Still, I think this exercise sheds light on how to create – or suffocate – drama in business communications.
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The Engima of Business Journalism, The Economist
Cloaked with a veneer of secrecy that leaves readers to wonder “Who the hell wrote that article?” The Economist takes pride in baffling the garden-variety PR person.
Its editorial decisions can at times seem quirky for the sake of being quirky. I mean, do we really need 499 words devoted to ornithology and a bio-acoustic monitor that can distinguish the chirps from 110,000 species of birds from the hiss of a snake?
Yet, contrary to popular belief, this is not some niche publication only serving the British intellectualazzi. Its readership tips 1.3 million with about half of those copies ending up on American doorsteps.
For this very reason, when we supported the announcement of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk a few years ago, we zeroed in on The Economist to tell the in-depth story. It didn’t hurt that our homework revealed that Economist technology editor Tom Standage had penned a book that also took liberties with the same topic, “The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine.”
But more than serendipity, our continued success with The Economist comes down to building the right content that aligns with the book’s approach to storytelling. I touched on the importance of anecdotes using one example from The Economist back in July.
Taking this a step further, we analyzed the tech-related articles (list of articles included at the end of this post) in The Economist, covering the April through November 2008 issues.
Seventeen percent of the content fell under the anecdotal umbrella.
It just goes to show that even high-brow business journalism depends on the amusing, provocative or downright weird to keep the reader’s interest.
Economist Articles Analyzed:
November 14, 2008
November 5, 2008
October 29, 2008
October 22, 2008
October 15, 2008
October 8, 2008
October 1, 2008
September 24, 2008
September 17, 2008
September 10, 2008
September 2, 2008
August 27, 2008
August 20, 2008
August 12, 2008
August 5, 2008
July 30, 2008
July 23, 2008
July 16, 2008
July 9, 2008
July 2, 2008
June 18, 2008
June 11, 2008
June 4, 2008
The FAST track to better health
May 28, 2008
May 21, 2008
May 14, 2008
May 7, 2008
April 30, 2008
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When Competing News Helps Your Story
Everyone recognizes the benefit of steering clear of major media events when making an announcement.
It’s safe to say that January 20 is not the time to roll out a new line of laptop computers.
But there are scenarios when news relevant to your story hitting in roughly the same timeframe works to your advantage.
Take the well-crafted story by BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm, titled “Making Computers Based on the Human Brain.” The story kicks off with the classic BW anecdote:
When Lloyd Watts was growing up in Kingston, Ont., in the 1970s he had a knack for listening to songs by Billy Joel and Elton John and plunking out the melodies on the family piano. But he wondered, wouldn’t it be great to have a machine that could “listen” to songs and immediately transcribe them into musical notation? Watts never built the gizmo, but his decades-long quest to engineer such a machine has finally resulted in one of the first commercial technologies based on the biology of the brain.
Hamm goes on to explain that a startup venture called Audience has created a chip that’s somewhat sensory.
Here’s the rub: The story also features the Pentagon’s DARPA passing $4.9 mil IBM’s way to fund research on building intelligence into computers and Jeff Hawkins of Palm Pilot fame striving for software that takes on the characteristics of the cerebral cortex.
I’m sure Audience wasn’t thrilled at sharing the stage.
Yet, the serendipity that landed all three vignettes on Hamm’s desk at roughly the same time provided the collective heft that enabled the piece to run in the print edition.
Otherwise, the piece maybe makes the online version.
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