I’ve evaluated the situation and concluded that there’s no way to launch the world’s four jillion, five hundred bazillion, thirty-nine gazillionth blog without sounding like a self-important fool.

I would, however, for readers who don’t know my writing from Ragan publications, like to introduce myself. Just so you know who you’re dealing with here:

• I once met Studs Terkel and was upset to find myself stupefied with nervousness. I thought, If I can’t be at ease with a great humanist, who can I be comfortable with? It wasn’t until later—after I met a few other luminaries and treated them as if they were lucky to run across me—that I realized with relief that after meeting my greatest public hero, I would never be intimidated by anyone else.

• I’ve met Studs Terkel on a number of subsequent occasions and am still flummoxed in his presence.

• Shel Holtz has dubbed me “the world’s youngest curmudgeon.” Half my crustiness is a phony attempt to disguise the fact that had beautiful parents, have been lucky in love and rich in friends and have a life that I often think of as nearly perfect. I mean, who wants to read a guy like that?

(• The other half of my crustiness comes from anger at myself for being the sole source of every problem that I do have.)

[• This is the last time I will ascribe my crustiness to anything other than the rich deservedness of its targets.]

• I can sit quietly and think of Mister Rogers—and all the kids whose parents couldn’t love them sufficiently who heard the dear man on the TV tell them there’s no one in the world exactly like them—and cry.

• I have a generally stronger point of view than most people I know but a weaker point of view than any of my close friends, including Steve Crescenzo. [This is the last time I’ll admit that, too.]

• I believe there is a right and proper amount of money for every person. (I guess this amount is different for everyone, which usually keeps me from drifting into socialist rants about wealth caps.) For me, enough is: Enough to send my daughter to a decent private school, play golf on decent public courses, and own a 40-year-old truck with a sign on the door that says, “Murray’s Freelance Writing.” But not so much to be tempted to restore the truck so that the speedometer works or the passenger’s door opens.

• When strangers ask me what I do I for a living, I always try and always fail to hide my intense pride when I answer, “I’m a writer.”

• I like employee communication because I like employees and I like communication. I’m looking forward to talking with others who feel the same way.

Let’s get on with it.

Don't know if you read last week's New Yorker. It had a long article about Wal-Mart's big PR operation.

The piece attacked Wal-Mart's PR operation from every angle, with writer Jeff Goldberg saying, implying or attempting to demonstrate it is at once overlarge (56 people staff the company's "Action Alley" PR war room), sneaky, boorishly stupid and ineffective.

It focused on Leslie Dach, a former Democratic political operative known for his work on environmental issues, who moved from Edelman to Wal-Mart. The piece accused Dach of selling out his environmental idealism for Wal-Mart money.

The article came off as a hatchet job. But it was a pretty thorough, entertaining and well-crafted hatchet job on a company that's been under constant attack for half a decade.

How to respond? If I were Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations--Wal-Mart's PR agency, which has 20 staffers at Wal-Mart's Bentonville HQ--I think I'd feel I had two options: No response at all, on the old saw that you don't fight with people who buy ink by the barrel, or a vigorous response, attacking Goldberg's article point by point and strongly stating the case that Wal-Mart is a good company that deserves the best public relations.

He chose a third route: Adding a P.S. to a light item on his blog about going to an Allman Brothers concert:

"I also take exception to the article by Jeff Goldberg in this week’s New Yorker Magazine on Wal-Mart, because it is biased and hopelessly one-sided. His characterization of my former colleague, Leslie Dach, now a senior executive at Wal-Mart, is fundamentally flawed. Leslie is a gifted PR man, with a genuine commitment to the environment and social equality. Goldberg depicts our profession as based on spin, hardball tactics and messages, an Orwellian world of mind control. In fact, the best PR is premised on truth and that is why Wal-Mart’s leadership on environment, prescription drug prices and affordable products is getting favorable coverage."

That's it? The New Yorker's piece is thousands of words, dozens of quotes and specific examples, statistics, hard facts and well-told anecdotes. Edelman's defense is 103 words with no factual backup.

Sticks and stones will break my bones but words--you're "biased" and "one-sided," we're "gifted" and "genuine"--will never hurt me.

Edelman, if you're going to defend your firm, your client and your old colleague against an unfair writer, then get out the sticks and stones. If you're not, then don't let out what amounts to a little public sob.

So I had a story in the Chicago Tribune Magazine last Sunday about how Cook County's Forest Preserve had improved the hell out of its golf courses.

Monday, I showed up at a Forest Preserve course to play 18 holes and my playing partner, probably hoping for a discount, couldn't help but ask whether they'd read it and mention that I was its author.

The guy behind the counter said he'd heard about it but hadn't read it yet. When we made the turn after nine, the crew inside hailed me. "Hey, this is the guy who wrote that great story about us! It's Mr. Miller!"

So it goes.

The first problem with "employee engagement" is the illusion, mostly promoted by consultants who sell tricks, that there's a trick to it.

There is no trick to it.

It came out Monday that the Chicago Tribune had been sold. The Trib's top political columnist John Cass walked into the office the day after the news broke, and he wrote about the experience:

"As I wandered through the newsroom Monday morning, a colleague stopped me with a question. I figured it would have something to do with anxiety and all the other emotions running through all of us employed by an organization where big news was made about some awfully big changes around here."

But no. She asked him about a story he was working on that she needed his help with.

"Her desk was piled with documents and other papers, and bits of notes and scraps of ideas and old phone numbers written in margins, and electronic nuggets of information on the computer screen before her."

The reporter wasn't frozen in fear about what changes the sale might bring. She wasn't going through the five stages of grief. She was busy doing the job she loves.

If our organizations did more work that employees loved--more work they could connect with what matters to them, more work that demanded their best skill and thinking--we wouldn't have to worry about "engagement."

Since they don't, we do.

The engagement problem is so much more fundamental than we make it out to be. It's nothing short of: What can this company do to make our products, services or culture worthy of the earnest effort of our most intelligent, passionate employees?

If an organization's top leadership is willing to ask that question, the employee communicator should be there 12 hours a day helping them answer it and get it across.

If not, do the only thing we have a right to expect of any employee whom we haven't managed to inspire: An honest day's work for an honest day's pay.

I'm defending the honor of organizational photojournalism. Lord help me.

Suzanne Salvo, the best organizational photographer in the business as near as I can tell, has included me on a panel at IABC's International Conference in New Orleans in June. The subject is the ethics of electronically doctoring photographs.

I think she's invited me less because of my knowledge of photojournalism and more because she knows I've got a chin like Chuck Wepner.

My role on the panel is to defend my opinion--against two panelists more powerful and nimble than me, before a crowd that probably knows better too--that photographers should not use digital technology to alter the content of their shots.

Photography, it is my job to argue, distinguishes itself from heavily massaged prose only to the extent that our readers know "pictures don't lie." If we start spinning our pictures too, I shall ask archly, what in our publications can readers believe?

Looking for some backup on this thesis--June approacheth--I e-mailed Phil Douglis, the man who invented organizational photojournalism (and if he didn't, whoever did is long dead and can't contradict me here), writing for IABC's association magazine starting in the early 1960s.

I guess I hoped Phil would give me some old-school ammo against post-modern technowhizzes who see an honest photograph not as a beautiful and miraculous creation, but merely a start.

Unfortunately, Phil does not do as he is told, does not say what he is told to say. Instead, he says:

"I look at this entire issue as it relates to content and intention. I don't think you can intelligently debate the merits or demerits of digital enhancement and manipulation without thoughtful consideration of the message, the medium, and the audience. Take photojournalism, for example. It is easy to say that we should never change the facts of an image by moving pixels around. But what if those 'facts' distract the eye, and dilute the point of the picture? Can't we clone out a distant tree coming out of somebody's head, and still maintain the integrity of the message? I would say go ahead and make such a cosmetic adjustment if need be, yet not affect the factual substance of the image itself. I would certainly stop at something like cloning out a sign, a person, or any object that is part of the story itself. I would never alter a subject in journalistic use just to make it 'look better.' I would only remove distractions that have no factual bearing whatsoever on the story. I think journalistic images need to be factual to be credible. To enhance an image while maintaining the integrity of the facts is OK, such as making technical adjustments to correct exposure issues, color problems, increase contrast, or sharpness. Such technical adjustments are no more unethical than cropping a journalistic image to enhance its impact and meaning. If we were free to enhance the technical aspects of print in the darkroom, we should equally free to enhance the technical aspects of a digital image on the computer. On the other hand, I would never digitally manipulate a photojournalistic image to knowingly change fact into fiction."

Assuming we can trust corporate editors to differentiate between cosmetic and factual changes, I cannot disagree with Phil here, except to note the massive size of the assumption.

But it's what Phil said next that made me question the very relevance of my noble point of view:

"Ironically, many of the people who you will be talking to at this conference are probably not even using images as journalism or communication to begin with. They are probably still using pictures as 'recognition rewards' or decorative illustration, so this entire discussion about digital manipulation is really irrelevant in such cases. If the images they are using are actually fabrications to begin with--grip and grins, mug shots, posed pictures of people pretending to work, etc.--moving pixels around in them will not make them magically communicate. Digitally manipulating such images is like embalming a corpse. Such images, in terms of their ability to communicate, are already dead, and no amount of pixel shuffling is going to bring them back to life."

Readers, do you have your own Shades of Gray on this issue? I'd like to hear them all.

Is it just me, or are these celebrity outbursts of racisim--Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, Don Imus--starting to seem as if they're based on some disciplined production schedule?

"Okay, boys, here's how it'll work: Every even month, we'll have an Inconceivably Stupid Racial Remark From a Celebrity. On odd months, we'll have a Pretty Girl Who's Missing and Presumed Dead ...."

My wife Cristie teaches art in a Chicago elementary school. It’s a charter school, and for a big fundraiser that's coming up, she has worked with another teacher and a graphic designer to create a little book of kids’ art and kids’ poems. They’ll give it to potential donors at the event.

The art is amazingly cool, and some of the poems are poignant, too, although my personal favorite, entitled “Booger, Booger, Booger,” didn’t make the final cut.

And the design of the book is pretty good—in a small way, I believe, because of an outsized rant I let loose one evening when Cristie brought the galleys home and complained that some of the layouts were confusing. And then shrugged, saying that the graphic designer went to school for this and her expertise had to be trusted.

I won’t be so intemperate to repeat what I said, because it would hurt my relationship with graphic designers everywhere. Let’s just say I suggested that graphic designers are more to be trusted for their taste than for their broad understanding of how communication works. They’re generally more interested in creating something that’s visually appealing than in actually getting the words on the page into the reader’s brain.

I was just getting warmed up. I recalled several astonishing conversations I’ve had recently with editors who take the following ignorant and cowardly and irresponsible position: My job is getting the words right, the designer’s job is presenting them to readers.

“No, no, no!” I bellowed. “Nothing great was ever created by a team of equals. Everything great was overseen by one person, who after respectfully taking in everyone’s input, took responsibility for the final product!”

By the time I wrapped up about 45 minutes and two glasses of wine later, Cristie had gone to bed. But maybe she agreed with me, because the next set of galleys I saw were much improved.

Looking at the over-designed, typographically insane copy-jumbles that pass for employee publications these days, I wonder whether it hasn't occurred to editors that they need to be the boss, or whether they've thought about it and have concluded that they and their graphic designer are equal partners in communication.

P.S. I say this having always gotten along beautifully with graphic designers. This is a collaboration and I’m usually amazed at what designers contribute. But I’ve never operated under any assumption other than this: I, as the editor, have the final say.

P.P.S. How happy is my relationship with designers? I once signed a Ragan designer’s birthday card, “It doesn’t matter what I write here because you never read the copy anyway.” (And had she read the copy, I’m confident she would have laughed.)

The big world is lonelier today. So is our little world, where Kurt Vonnegut worked as a PR man for G.E. in the late '40s. He remembered it fondly:

"Believe it or not, GE was a wonderful company to work for, and we had genuine news to report, good news for the world,'' he once said. "I was proud to work for GE. The only reason I left was that I could make more money writing short stories.''

In his honor, let's either quit and write short stories, or dig harder for genuine news in our organizations, good news for the world.

... of an all-company e-mail Ragan's IT man just sent out. Here's the text:

"Sorry for the inconvenience, but the Creative Server has crashed. B—— and I are currently investigating the circumstances that caused this…in the interim, the server must rebuild critical volume information and as a result, will be unavailable until this process has been completed. We’ll send out an email when functionality has been restored. Hopefully, it will be within the hour."

When my Creative Server crashes like this, it ain't never up within no hour. That's all I got to say.

A couple weeks ago I chucked away a billable afternoon at Murray's Freelance Writing in order to go to contest a parking ticket in person.

I did this partly because I was outraged at the charge: I'd gotten a ticket for briefly getting out of my car at O'Hare to hug my sister-in-law and her girlfriend goodbye as I dropped them off after their Thanksgiving visit here. It was a good hug, but it wasn't worth $90.

I also did it because I thought I'd feel more connected--to my city and even my country--by actually participating.

Had I forgotten all my Kafka? This "connection" was somewhat undermined by:

• A metal-detector and a police pat-down at the entrance to the court building.

• An impassive hearing officer who managed to radiate three messages from her pores: (1) I will not be rushed. (2) I've heard it all, suckers. (3) I'm not only good at not giving a crap, not giving a crap is my core competency.

• And a court procedure that absolutely forbade communication.

I was invited to make a statement about the circumstances of my ticket. At the end of my statement, the judge asked whether that was all I had to say. I should have said, "That depends on what you say in response!" I didn't. I said that was all.

In finding for the city (big surprise!) the hearing officer said a couple of things that I didn't agree with. But I'd already said (under oath) that I had said all I'd wanted to say.

Bang, went the gavel: $90, please, and if I didn't pay within three weeks, my car will be "boot eligible."

I had wanted at least to get an answer to the question: "Is it illegal to hug your sister-in-law and her girlfriend at O'Hare airport after their Thanksgiving visit?"

But the hearing officer was so big and I was so little. I thanked her meekly for her consideration and slunk out of the hearing room and out into the rainy cold afternoon, not quite crushed, but certainly not feeling inspired by my participation in our democracy.

On the dreary way home, a troubling idea popped into my softened skull: Is this how an CEO town hall meetings feel to employees? Like a tease? Do they communicate the opposite of what they're meant to communicate? Do they say:

"Hey, you can talk to the CEO! But you'd better distill all your ideas and feelings about the company built up over 10 thoughtful years into 30 seconds, and if the chief misunderstands or dodges your questions, well--tough gazzotts, pal. You can't say you didn't have your chance."

I've advocated CEO town meetings over the years, mostly as a way for executives to say symbolically to employees: "I'm interested in hearing what you have to say."

But if town meetings feel to employees anything like my day in court felt to me, maybe the truth is that there's no way to "say" you're interested in listening. You either listen, or you don't.

Watched some of the endless, mindless coverage last evening regarding the nightmare at Virginia Tech.

Was reminded, as cable news anchors prematurely speculated on whether or not or how and when the campus communications staff might have warned students not to go to class, that e-mail and text messaging have not changed a few core truths about the communication business:

1. To quote the popular TV commercial, "Life comes at you fast," making the term "crisis plan" nearly an oxymoron.

2. It's hard to get a hold of everybody all at once without loudspeakers or a siren.

3. Communicators will always come up short against what seems to everyone else to be a clear best-case scenario.

It may turn out that the Virginia Tech communicators blew this. Or that the administration hampered their best efforts. Or that everyone did the best they could do with the information they had. Or all of the above or none of the above.

But these three truths remain. We have always had to deal with them, and we always will.

Hate to jar you back into last week and the Crucial Racial Conversation We Were All Going to Have In America before another event made us forget all about Don Imus, but ...

... one of the most sensible communication bloggers, Houston PR man John Wagner, identifies the significance of the Imus affair to us.

This is the Editor's Letter I wrote for the March/April issue of Ragan's Journal of Employee Communication Management. I reread it the other day and thought I'd like to get others' thoughts on it. So if you're winding down on a Friday ....

***

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to connect with other people.

An old friend of mine asked me recently why our e-mail exchanges are so infrequent these days. She and I used to type hundreds and thousands of words back and forth, arguing about politics, articulating our views on religion, exercising our rage, expressing our joy and generally indulging in no-holds-barred repartee.

It was a hell of a lot of fun, for the years it lasted.

But she’s right: We don’t do it much anymore. Forced to think about why, a number of reasons occurred to me. I’ve had a child, who takes a lot of the spare energy I used to pour into these e-mails. Also, my friend and I have gotten to know each other better, and so there’s less to discover.

There were other reasons, too, some of them personal.

But there was one reason I forgot to include in the 1,000-word e-mail that I used to begin to explain our relative quiet lately.

Oh, maybe I didn’t forget.

Maybe I just didn’t want to say it.

Maybe, as a writer, I’m afraid to think it.

But here it is:

I don’t think I believe in words as much as I used to.

W.H. Auden said words aren’t everything—just all we have to work with.

When I read that in college, I had no idea what he was talking about. To a young English major, to a young lover, to a late-night theorist, words were everything.

That has changed over the years, as I’ve watched, in roles ranging from observer of employee communication to husband and brother and son and friend, the loudest words be drowned out by the subtlest contradictory actions. And as I’ve watched humble actions overwhelm the fanciest words.

I’ve also found words wanting in so many moments: In trying to understand what’s really happening in the mind of a troubled loved one, in trying to explain what’s happening in my own mind, in trying to change what’s happening in anyone’s mind, in trying to show love and respect. What you say at the wake means so much less than your having showed up.

I know that my slow-shrinking faith in words is not part of some larger social trend. Quite the opposite: All the bloggers and the podcasters in the world must think they are making a difference with all their words, and Time Magazine must agree, as it named their collective influence the “Person of the Year.”

Perhaps my faith in the power of words isn’t shrinking at all, as much as my faith in actions is growing, and looming large in comparison. To me, being a fellow traveler—being an effective communicator—means less frequent sharing of insights and more simply showing up, listening when you’re asked to, responding when you’re asked to do that and trying to offer some humor in between.

My dad is a writer, too, and he once said, “You know why old people are quieter, don’t you? Because they have more to be quiet about.”

And less, I would add, to be constantly talking about.

So I’ll end here.

The postmodernists said there is no reality. That's because the postmodernists had a dual reporting relationship with employee communications and HR.

Since time out of mind, communicators have complained about HR people: They're narrow-minded technocrats much more interested in covering the company's ass (and their own asses) than in moving information and insight around the organization to for the good of the culture.

The surest way to get the heads nodding in any audience of employee communicators is to declare, "HR people just don't get it."

Well I found myself at a fancy Italian restaurant on Saturday night with a half-dozen women, all chummy colleagues at a Fortune 100 company. They had gathered for a weekend of fun in Chicago. (One of them is a family member, which is how I got the invitation.)

They're all in HR and they're from all over the U.S.

I don't like spending tons of money on Italian food—I like spending tons of money on golf—so I felt compelled to write this dinner off by making it a market-research exercise.

I asked the HR folks how many of them had close and regular dealings with employee communicators. All the hands went up.

I asked them, one by one, to describe the difference between HR and employee communications. What's the typical role of each?

The basic answer: We do employee relations, and employee communicators write about what we do.

At this, one laughed. "We usually have to do the writing, too," she said. Why? Because employee communicators are too lazy and mentally weak even to read the HR policies closely enough to write intelligently about them.

Well then, why would companies hire employee internal communicators at all? For their technical expertise—they're the ones who know the password to post stuff on the intranet—and for their ability to spin employee relations reality into palatable internal public relations.

"We just want to say stuff," said one HR woman. "But you can't just say stuff." The employee communicators "soften" the hard reality of HR policies. And often they don't even do that very well. "Mostly what they do is add semi-colons to my writing," one woman said with a chuckle.

In short: These HR women told me at this fancy Italian dinner that they're the gin and tonic and we're the lime, they're the spaghetti and we're the bay leaf, they're the brains and hands and we're the lipstick, often overapplied.

Meanwhile, we think we're the princes and HR people are the frogs, we're the music and they're the static, we're the light and they're the bushel.

And meanwhile, as I said while these six HR women and one employee communication pundit spent 20 minutes trying to tally up the restaurant bill, "Somewhere a CFO is laughing."

So I listened to the "OnStar" thing on the Ragan Web site (www.ragan.com) and fear gripped my heart and I thought I was going to hyperventilate. Seriously.

The trained actress who plays the "customer"--Suzanne Ecklund, who works on the Web site--tells me I must be weird.

Am I weird, or does Suzanne just not understand how terrifying communication technology is?

Is anybody listening to John McCain, who at this very moment is announcing his presidency? I've got two things to say about this speech (a reference you'll get when you hear the soundbites):

It's not good enough for America, and it's not good enough for me.

Until this year, my friend Pat McGuire was an English tutor at Joliet Junior College in Joliet, Ill. Now, after winning an election last fall, he is treasurer of Will County.

This is good news for Pat, who loves politics and who needed a career change. It's also good news for me, as I see this as longitudinal study I'm calling, "If Writers Ran the Circus."

So far, so good. Pat's first concrete move has been to simplify, consolidate and make more graphically friendly the tax bill Will County sends out. The graphic improvement is the most dramatic, but the language has improved, too.

For example, the old version of the bill said, "Interest is applied at a rate of 1.5% per month after each installment due date."

Pat's form says more directly, "Avoid late payments. 1.5% per month interest is assessed after each due date."

Potentially more profound are some unexpected cultural changes happening at the treasurer's office. An e-mail from Pat yesterday:

"Jan, Deb, and Andrea are three fiftyish women in my office, hard workers who resolutely take their scheduled fifteen-minute breaks. They don't flirt or flatter me; they've seen treasurers come and go. They are among the bulwarks of the office.

"Yesterday I came back to the office from an outside appointment and saw these three taking their afternoon break in the sun at a picnic table outside the building. I intended to merely wave at them and continue into the building. What's worse than the boss ruining your break by stopping by to chat? However, Jan waved me over.

"The three of them had two reference books I'd brought into work, The Elements of Style and Words into Type, plus an old secretary's reference book. They sincerely told me they were pleased to have just found in one of the books an answer to something they had become curious about: When typing a letter, is 'c/o' lower or upper case? Furthermore, Andrea asked me to explain what a gerund is.

"Either they are pulling my leg so hard I can't feel the pain, or we've righted the world a sixteenth of an inch or so."

Pat and I promise to keep you posted as our fledgling study continues.

I spent yesterday editing essays for the Journal of Employee Communication Management, of which I've been editor since 1996.

Maybe I've been at it a little too long. Though I still love the magazine, I spend my editing time cursing my writers—writers who write for us for free, mind you—for the pettiest things.

Like, why in the name of Alden Wood do they still insist, 20 years after the last typewriter was melted down and made into a ship to carry manufacturing jobs to China, do so many writers insist on placing two spaces after a period?

And what insane graphic designer do they work for who wants dashes - short dashes like this - that have spaces on either side? (Rather than—as we all know is right and proper—long dashes, with no spaces?) Three words for you: Shift/Option/Dash!

And is Microsoft Word giving people royalties every time they use one of these Auto Format Features for Morons? I nearly died, yesterday, in a hail of automatic bullet points. We're writers! We don't need this crap! Why are we so slavishly using it? (Microsoft ought to come up with a Word program for writers only. It wouldn't ask you if you need help when "it looks like you're writing a letter." It would ask you if you need help when "it looks like you're trying to add two double-digit numbers.")

I almost wish the content of these Journal articles wasn't so good. Then maybe I wouldn't sweat the small stuff so much. (Space, space.)