Much to my chagrin, I have witnessed several local television reporters over the past six months throw out this less-than-professional instruction to their source during live interviews: “Talk about…” As in, “talk about this” or “talk about that.” To interpret more cle...

Graphics treated as fine art:

I once attended a graphic design session at a magazine conference in Los Angeles in which the speaker showed a variety of magazine covers minus their banners. None of us in attendance knew for certain which magazines were being displayed, b...

Don’t use terminology your subordinates do not understand:

Sadly, the following is a true story. A company holds an annual retreat for its managers and executives. They attend training sessions about management styles and new ways to prioritize their assignments. They p...

Treat employees fairly, but not necessarily the same:

U.S. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf is best known for leading coalition forces as they liberated Kuwait from Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. While his incredible military career was epic, I often remember...

I recently heard a story about a departmental meeting in which an attendee was asked a question by his boss, but did not reply. He wasn’t asleep; he was looking at his smart phone. 

Fortunately for the employee, his manager was a patient man and took the time to explain...

Hours after 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 others at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. in the early morning hours of June 12, a former co-worker described the killer as racist, belligerent and toxic. 

Daniel Gilroy, who once wo...

Donald Trump’s parents didn’t create Donald Trump,
the media created Donald Trump:

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has declared war on the media and that’s a hard fact to ignore as journalists go about their business of covering the 2016 preside...

The other Ali

Muhammad Ali not only rocked the boat in the early days of his career, he turned it on its side.

Upon his recent death, the media has portrayed Ali as “The Greatest” and the “People’s Champ,” but the perception of those who witnessed Ali’s rise...

We all make typos while entering our stories, some of us more than others. But newsroom standard operating procedures aid in catching and correcting most of our typos, misspellings, poor sentence structure and awkward headlines. If individual spell checks don’t catch t...

 The Artist ...

In 1992 agents for Prince let it be known that the artist would be represented by a symbol instead of by the name Prince, and they sent the media a package containing a strange new symbol in clipart form as well as on a disc. The media began referring to...