My blogging took a bit of a downward turn over the last few months as events at work have heated up. As I’ve noted before, there are only so many decent communications molecules in any given day, and there are times when I use all those up before I sit down to blog. On the plus side, I’ve got a long list of ideas kicking around in my head for future topics.

Sunday last I participated in the third Mountain to Sound Relay, a 100 mile event. Our team did pretty well, finishing 9th overall! The downside was that Sunday was the first real hot day in the Seattle area, and I was running the 13.5 mile leg, starting at about 1 p.m., when the temp on the trail was between 90-100 degrees. I thus had lots of time to consider the impact of heat on exercise, and now wish I’d seen this NYT article a few weeks before the event.

Ah, well, had a good run in Chicago yesterday, proving indeed that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Happy 4th!

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It's been a busy few months, and has really reinforced for me why I think I have the best job in PR. :)  If you have a little time, check out this video on the Microsoft press site, it is a great look back at the history of the company and where it is going.  And just from an evolution of communications standpoint, the mix of online/print/broadcast has been very interesting -- Fortune devoted a ton of online real estate and resources to augment their print coverage. And the BBC did a great package as well, both via their broadcast and online. The key remains understanding which medium works best to communicate a message. Some of the history and narrative really calls for the kind of color that shows up best via long from journalism, other pieces (like the recreation of the Albuquerque photo) really work best in multi-media, told in the voices of those who were there.

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A must read piece from Slate, providing tips and insight into what works in online writing/reading. As a web reader, my anecdotal experience bears out much of this. I also like the piece  because it conforms to my view of great content being valuable over time, as it notes:

But Nielsen's idea is that people will read (and maybe even pay) for expertise that they can't find anywhere else. If you want to beat the Internet, you're not going to do it by blogging (since even OK thinkers occasionally write a great blog post) but by offering a comprehensive take on a subject (thus saving the reader time from searching many sites) and supplying original thinking (offering trusted insight that cannot be easily duplicated by the nonexpert).

Other good tips/info about as well, including looks at readability, hints for maximizing reading speed/comprehension online, and tips for the writer:

Nielsen's apt description of the online reader: "[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don't actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don't see what you need, you're gone.

And it's not you who has to change. It's me, the writer:

• One idea per paragraph

• Half the word count of "conventional writing"! (Ouch!)

• Other stuff along these lines

I’m a huge reader of online content, but given the choice will still print something out if I need to make edits, ensure I really have grasped the overall flow – especially true when reading longer documents. When I have a touchscreen on my desktop computer at work, that may change. :)

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Charles Fitzgerald takes a break from his usual fare to unravel some of the newspaper drama in the U.S. and specifically in seattle. It’s a good read. In addition to hashing through some of the numbers, he makes an amusing point re: transparency, noting (bold mine):

Despite this cushy arrangement, the two have been at odds, spending five years battling over the terms of the JOA.  Both papers have gone to great lengths to keep the terms of the JOA secret (transparency is kind of like anytime, anywhere communications -- it is great other people are always reachable, but we're not so sure we want it ourselves...).  The area of greatest competition between the two papers in recent years has been around who claimed to be losing the most money, which was at least in part jockeying for negotiating leverage.  Amidst these negotiations, the Times, historically the afternoon paper while the P-I was the morning paper, moved to the morning in what could only be characterized as a go-for-the-jugular move.

Ah yes, the lens of transparency does work both ways, and the journalism field has traditionally been loath to have that happen.

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During the past several months, the city playground in Madison Park near my house has been undergoing a pretty significant renovation, and it opened up on Saturday. Rain or shine (and it was a bit of both), summer arrived in Madison Park, along with hordes of kids and their families. The playground changed a bunch. Trees were cut down, playground equipment was taken away, new sod was put down, paths where no paths had been, then new play structures came back. During the winter, a chainlink fence guarded the site, and people picketed, complaining about the trees, and the change, because change for many people is bad. As a communications guy, I tend to look at the world as an ongoing set of communications challenges, and I would’ve told the park planners that the problem they were having was a direct result of not being clear enough about their end point – what was the world going to look like on June 7 when the park opened again. In the absence of this vision, it was easy to lionize the past, and wail about the present, and mourn the future.  But when the park opened, the persistence of the people who had planned was made clear, and for all the kids and families scrambling over the equipment, the change was good. I’m pretty sure the kids all along were looking to the potential new, not with fear but with anticipation, a lesson for us all.

Then on Sunday, I went for a run with my bro, the latest training run leading up to the Mountain to Sound relay. I’ll be running the half marathon leg, and the team I’m on has a name (“Faster than last year”) which sort of means work harder in training. We’d both gotten the latest issue of Runner’s World, which said that the way to run faster over a race was to train so that the last few miles were at race pace, give or take. So off we went, 12 miles, starting slow with the intent of finishing fast. Many of my runs these days cover some seriously beautiful areas. My runs from the house take me along Lake Washington, where I can see the lake and the sailboats and both bridges and Bellevue in the distance, and on clear days the mountains that surround us. On longer runs, I’m on the Burke Gilman trail, past the University of Washington and out toward Sand Point and back. The path is filled with runners and walkers and cyclists and skateboarders and inline skaters, everyone just out and about. It’s good distraction. At the turnaround, we picked up the pace, going uphill and into the wind, which is always the way it seems to go. Six miles to go, and I thought we were going a bit fast, and then at the mile mark we found out we were – our goal was to finish the last two miles at a 7:30 pace, and we hit 7:38 at mile 7. It’s never good to go too fast too early, and I started thinking about all the reasons to slow down. I was tired, my legs hurt, we were still running uphill. I run with a heart rate monitor, which is sort of a mixed blessing. I knew that I was now running at something close to my race heart rate pace – and I’ve not been able to sustain that pace for more than a few miles. But I thought of all the miles I’ve logged in the last year. A year ago, I was going to run the 10k portion of the relay, and the idea of running even 10 miles seemed like a bad idea. Now I was 7 miles into a run, faster than I’d run the 10k a year ago. Pat suggested thinking my heart slower…being more efficient on the run. Another mile passed, then another, all at the same pace and it was time to speed up again. I remembered what I’ve known before…that with persistence and a clear goal, anything is possible. At mile 10 we clocked a 7:07 mile and then eased up to the finish. The sun came out, and it was summer still.

Who knows what pace I’ll run for the race. But the lessons for the weekend – embrace change, be persistent – are ones that will last.

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