Category: Media Engagement

“It’s not about you”

Will Dena McMartin’s recent op ed in the Regina Leader-Post help prevent a flooding disaster and save lives?

It just might.

And even if it doesn’t, the informed analysis of the University of Regina professor of environmental systems engineering offered citizens valuable and timely information about her city’s pending spring thaw.

At the same time, its existence underlines one of the key messages of the workshops and guest lectures Informed Opinions delivers:

“It’s not about you.”

Because we’ve found that’s the best way to motivate educated, articulate, expert women who decline media interview requests because they don’t cherish the limelight or want to be seen as promoting themselves.

First we invite them to share some of the specific changes they’d like to see in the world. Then, after we’ve filled a whiteboard with their goals for greater social equity, better environmental sustainability, and more comfortable footwear (ok, that’s just me), we point out that media engagement is one way to amplify their voices, increase their power, and make it easier for them to bring about the changes they seek.

Being reminded of the bigger picture — the potential for enhanced impact on an issue that has significant implications for the lives of others — makes all the difference.

The Motivational Power of Guilt

Guilt didn’t play a big role in my upbringing: I was never discouraged from having sex in order to prevent my mother from having a heart attack, nor was I warned to do well in school to compensate for any sacrifices my parents suffered in raising me.

So it comes as a surprise to me to hear — as I have twice in the past week — that my voice apparently rings in the heads of others as a guilt-inducing force.

Thoughtful scholars with important insights into two critical issues recently agreed to do radio and TV interviews, despite their discomfort with the activity, because they remembered my explicit encouragement during Informed Opinions workshops about the importance of women not abdicating the field. But both confessed to me afterwards that this pushed them over the resistance hump.

“When I was first asked to go on CBC Radio earlier in January, I said no. Then I immediately felt guilty because I knew you would be so disappointed. I’ve now been on their show twice and on the local CTV station as well.”

So wrote Kelly Grindrod, a pharmacist and professor at the University of Waterloo pictured above, who also published an op ed this week in The Toronto Star. Her piece offered clear, concrete advice about how we can — and must — collectively address the critical problem of the overprescription of antibiotics. In compensation for the time she invested to craft, polish and submit commentary on a timely issue, Kelly’s insights received more than 10,000 hits, and over 500 Facebook recommendations, making her piece the most read op ed of the month!

So although guilt may be the initial motivator, what keeps experts agreeing to interviews (despite the inconvenience, the time challenge, and even the nerves) is experiencing that kind of impact — knowing that thousands of people will benefit from the knowledge shared, and be able to make choices that may make a positive difference to some aspect of their daily lives, or those of others.

For scholars interested in becoming more comfortable and more effective in media interviews, the Informed Opinions website has a useful primer, accessible here.

Getting Ahead

… of the news story, that is.

It’s a great strategy to increase your likelihood of publication: if you know that a research report, government announcement or legal decision is about to be released, and your informed opinion about the issue can offer insightful context and analysis, contacting op ed page editors in advance of the breaking news can:

  1. Demonstrate to editors that you’re on top of the news in your field, and therefore a valuable resource;
  2. Let them know that you can provide a topical op ed in advance of the story breaking, allowing them to have something in the paper immediately afterwards;
  3. Give them the opportunity to save space for the piece;
  4. Save you the trouble of writing something entirely on spec, only to be told when you submit it that the paper has already agreed to run someone else’s reflections on the same issue. 

Last week, University of Ottawa law profs, Liz Sheehy and Carissima Mathen contacted Ottawa Citizen op ed page editor David Watson, offering to write an op ed about an about-to-be-released Supreme Court decision. This advance notice was a win on all fronts:

Watson knew that he’d have a timely piece written by two experts within hours of the decision on a controversial case being released, and Sheehy and Mathen knew that their analysis would be published.

You can read Battered women’s defences still in question in today’s Citizen, in print or online, and as of Monday, it will go up on Informed Opinions’ site alongside more than 75 other commentary interventions made by women experts who’ve participated in our workshops.

Informed Opinions salutes the regular media engagement of both Sheehy (who also serves on our Advisory Committee), and her colleague Carissima Mathen: they frequently provide thoughtful journalists and the broader public with informed analyses of justice issues.

New Year’s Resolution: How to disregard criticism by applying the “reasonable man” test

Celebrated American poet and critic, Ezra Pound, in his considered advice to beginning poets offered the following advice:

“Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.”

But he could have been speaking to female opinionators a century later. So many of the trolls who trash women daring to comment in prominent places “have never themselves written a notable work.”

Earlier this year, when speaking with members of Women in Capital Markets in Toronto, I was reminded of how much more of an obstacle such criticism seems to be to female commentators, relative to their male counterparts. The women with whom I sat agreed that we tend to take negative feedback much harder, and more to heart.

“Guys shrug it off,” said one; “they don’t take it personally.”

This jives with dozens of studies done over the years finding that when women do poorly at a rigged test, they blame themselves, whereas men are more inclined to blame external factors.

Individually and collectively, we need to get over this — because it holds us back. So — inspired by the example of my husband, who is a master of moving beyond small setbacks — I now try to apply my version of the “reasonable man” test.

Here’s a sample of how it works: In response to criticism, the woman asks herself the following:

“Would a reasonable man fret over the incoherent criticism from three anonymous trolls, OR would he assume that their ignorance rendered them unfit to weigh in, and focus instead on the seven emails from people who expressed appreciation for the insights offered?”

Feedback on the helpfulness of this strategy welcome!

Google delivers news hooks as they happen

At our Informed Opinions Writing Compelling Commentary workshops, we ask participants to identify a news hook related to their thesis that will ensure editors view their op ed as timely and relevant. It helps to give them a reason to publish the commentary now, versus three weeks from now (which often translates to never.)

Because it’s not always possible to find a current news hook for the op ed they’re working on, we encourage them to monitor the news regularly until they find something that can be used to help get their informed opinion onto the commentary pages. This can be a time-consuming task.

But Google Alerts is a helpful and easy-to-use tool for keeping a close eye on what’s happening on the web and in the news around your area of expertise. By submitting keywords related to your topic or area of research or interest, along with your preferred email address, you will receive all related web content (news, blogs, videos, discussions, books) straight to your inbox either as-they-happen, once a day or once a week.

This allows you to start crafting your op ed as soon as you see a news hook that inspires you, or adapt a previously started op ed to make it more relevant to breaking news. At the same time, it supports you in keeping on top of the coverage of your issue, to make sure you are providing new information, a fresh perspective, or an angle that hasn’t previously been considered or explored.

Most common errors made by aspiring op ed writers – part 2

Far too much research has already documented that when something goes wrong, women are highly inclined to blame the problem or setback on their own deficiencies. This tendency operates in stark contrast to men, who are more likely to blame external circumstances, regardless of the actual cause.

There’s an upside to women’s default of accepting responsibility for a failure: it gives us the opportunity to revisit what happened and fix our part of it, which means we’re not likely to repeat the mistake.

So if you’ve submitted an op ed that hasn’t been published — whether it’s been a week or a month or a year — this posting and the previous one on common errors — may help you identify aspects of what you wrote that got in the way of being considered for the newspaper you sent it to.

6. You didn’t provide anything new. It’s not enough to have an informed perspective on a current news story if your commentary merely expands upon content that’s already been covered. Op ed page readers – and the editors who manage them – expect your analysis to provide new information, a fresh perspective, an angle that hasn’t previously been considered or explored.

7. You don’t give readers a reason to care. You care, or you wouldn’t be writing in the first place. But most other people don’t, and if you want them to understand why they should, you need to make clear what the implications are for them or their families or their community.

8. You’ve failed to anticipate – and refute – the common misconceptions about a controversial issue. If you’re writing about something that is widely misunderstood (a worthy goal), you’ll need to devote some of your limited space to acknowledging the erroneous perceptions, and – respectfully – explaining why they’re wrong, while or before you lay out your own compelling case.

9. You’ve revealed a predictable or alienating bias in the first sentence – which means you’re not likely to sway any opinions: most of your readers will be those who already agree with you. Those who disagree and read on anyway will – having been forewarned – be too busy arguing with your every claim to accept that you may have a point (or two). Whether you’re asking for a raise or writing an op ed, an indirect communications strategy – providing the reasons first, and then the conclusion – is often a wise approach.

10. You’ve used conceptual, hard-to-visualize language.  We live in an age of images, and if your argument is primarily made in theoretical terms, you’re likely asking your reader to work too hard. (Because she has other options: the editorial cartoon! the sports section! Dilbert and the plummeting stock diagrams!) Regardless of what you’re writing about, paint a picture with analogies or use metaphors we can visualize – especially off the top. 

Don’t Bury the Lede!

If you saw the following sentence at the start of a piece in your daily newspaper, would you keep reading?

“You don’t see a lot of naked men in advertising.”

Lots of people did — no thanks to me.

The lede I’d originally placed at the top of an essay I wrote 20 years ago was so much less interesting, that I’ve no idea what it said. Probably it made reference to the recent news event that had given me the idea for the essay in the first place: controversy over an Adidas ad.

But the Globe and Mail editor responsible for the Facts & Arguments page at the time called me up and informed me that I’d “buried the lede”. Three or four paragraphs into the piece, I’d made the observation above about the general absence of male flesh in commercial images. This sentence, she assured me, was the the one that belonged at the top.

Did I want people to keep reading, or not?

Reading this morning’s Globe, I was reminded of this advice. The comment page featured a thoughtful, articulate piece about post secondary education penned by President of Queen’s University, Daniel Woolf.

But I’m guessing that for readers of the page not already interested in the subject, the first line may have been a bit of a snoozer.

“The Ontario government recently released a discussion paper on postsecondary education reform. Among the topics on the agenda: system transformation; a potential move in some programs to three-year degrees; greater use of “technology-enabled learning”; and…”

Only the most committed are going to keep going after “discussion paper”, “education reform” and “system transformation”. Which is a shame, because Dr. Woolf makes some important points.

But like many scholars and administrators accustomed to writing for academic colleagues, he definitely “buried the lede”. Because later on in his op ed, he made the following statement:

“Contrary to popular myth, universities are not impervious to change or insensitive to external circumstances. They would not be around 800 years after the medieval church created the institution had they been incapable of both incremental, evolutionary change and, at a few key junctures, much more profound fundamental transformation.”

This is an interesting and compelling point; it offers up a contradiction, grounds an idea with concrete images, and tells people something new (or at least forgotten). It might not work exactly as written for the lede, but tweaked slightly, and then integrated into the rest of the argument with an appropriate transition, I think it would have engaged more readers.

In the Writing Compelling Commentary workshops I deliver for Informed Opinions, we spend the better part of an hour on ledes. Every participant has a chance to craft one or more options, which she shares with the rest of us. We all vote on whether or not we’d keep reading. And if we think the draft opener is eyes-glaze-over material, we brainstorm other suggestions. It’s one of the most interesting and appreciated parts of the session.

For more on common errors, keep reading…

Most Common Errors Made by Aspiring Op Ed Writers – part 1

Whether you’re picked last for the ball team, get rebuffed on the first date, or fail to elicit a positive response from an editor, rejection stinks. That’s why Informed Opinions offers online editing feedback (free to our workshop participants, but available for a fee to others).  We’ve found that many aspiring op ed writers – even if they’re great communicators in other arenas — often misjudge the degree to which the exercise requires the use of a few writing muscles their day job doesn’t demand. Here are a few of the errors we help people to correct most often, linked where possible to previous posts that provide additional context.

  1. You’ve opened with information that is neither newsworthy nor interesting: Don’t devote your first sentence or paragraph to reiterating the details of an already published story, regardless of when it happened, or how central it is to your own argument. You need to demonstrate right off the top that you’re not rehashing old news, but providing a new angle or perspective that people haven’t read before. If you need to remind them of a few details, do so a couple of paragraphs in, as briefly as possible, in the context of giving them something unique and different. Otherwise, why will they bother reading your piece?
  2. You’ve buried the most compelling lede somewhere in the commentary: This is often the companion error to number 1. Although four paragraphs into the op ed you may offer an astonishing and relevant anecdote that makes clear how people are affected and/or why readers should care, many in your audience will never get that far without sufficient motivation to keep reading past the very first paragraph. So look for a way to start with the anecdote, or conundrum, or provocative analogy.
  3. Your thesis isn’t clear: The point of writing an op ed is to provide insight and analysis not previously available; to provoke readers and possibly change the way people think about an issue or a story. To achieve that, you’re going to want them to have a clear idea, by the end of your piece, what it is that you believe or are advocating. If they get to the last paragraph and don’t know, you’ve wasted your time and theirs.
  4. You’ve used inaccessible, insider language: Your degree, research, publications or years in the field make you an expert, and that authority will be referenced in the slug that describes your credentials or affiliation. But most readers of the newspaper or website on which your analysis appears don’t share your particular expertise, and using language they have to work to understand is likely to irritate or bore, not impress. If your neighbour or an intelligent 9th-grader isn’t going to be able to follow your argument, you’ve probably used too much jargon. Take it out.
  5. Your word choice and phrasing are repetitive: When you use the same word or expression repeatedly in a commentary, readers who are scanning the piece will start to feel like they’ve just read the same sentence over and over again. Consult a thesaurus in search of substitution words or phrases, or restructure a few sentences so one builds more directly from the previous one, avoiding the need for repetition.

It’s sometimes possible to convince an editor to publish your piece even if you’ve made one or more of these mistakes. But the editor — although critically important as your first reader — is only the gatekeeper. And you want to engage or persuade the potentially hundreds of thousands of other readers once the gate has been opened.

Ideas about knowledge mobilization from Queen’s University’s “death and grief girl”

When Jill Scott, a professor in Queen’s German department, participated in an Informed Opinions workshop last year, I had no idea she was the self-proclaimed “death and grief girl”… Until a few months later, she wrote a thoughtful op ed for the Toronto Star, providing insight and analysis relating to the outpouring of emotion that greeted NDP leader Jack Layton’s death.

In a recent presentation at the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Science’s annual Congress — as accessible as it is thoughtful — Scott spoke about how she came to have a public voice on death and grieving, and why its relevant to other scholars working in humanities fields:

“Humanists are trained to complicate stories, to show the complexities and ambiguities in any given situation, where mainstream media often tend to focus more on the black and white.”

I couldn’t agree more — and that’s why writing op eds is a great place for scholars interested in contributing to the public discourse to start: your analysis doesn’t get processed through the media’s default two-sides-to-the-story filter: you can offer a more nuanced and complex perspective.

Scott also says:

“Some people think that speaking to general audiences dumbs down research and devalues it. Quite the contrary, I think that connecting research to current events in the media reaffirms its value.”

She sent us the link to her cartoon-festooned slides because she makes mention of Informed Opinions. But her provocative and entertaining reflections on how and why researchers might want to replace yelling at the TV, with being on TV will be of interest to many others, and you can access them here.

Getting to “yes”

“I’m happy to try to help you.”

These are the words I’m now recommending women train themselves to utter when reached by a journalist looking for context to a story. Although the default response for many remains

“I’m not the best person.”

… the truth is — as I’ve discussed before in this blog — most journalists don’t need you to be “the best person”.  They just need you to know enough to provide some informed analysis and insights that wouldn’t be commonly available to their readers, viewers or listeners. And chances are you can do that.

Last week in Calgary I had the opportunity to speak to an inspiring group of women whose social enterprises and non-profit initiatives receive money from the Canadian Women’s Foundation. When I asked those assembled how many of them had ever declined an interview opportunity with the above declaration, at least half the hands in the room went up.

But I reminded them that the inclination to defer to others often runs counter to the interests of the organizations they’re leading and the people they’re working to support. And even if they’re not “the best person”, the chances of them being able to add value is significant.

So starting the conversation with a journalist by offering to try to help opens up the possibility of you being able to contribute to the story in a meaningful way, without suggesting that you know all the answers. My guess is that — more often than not — you’ll be able to deliver on the offer.