Writing Boots

Harold Hill, meet Medill

11.24.2010 by David Murray // 10 Comments

Maybe the Medill School of Journalism hasn't demeaned itself by changing its name to the "Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications" (Remember Bob Newhart's Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Co.?)

But riddle me this: If this gas cloud known as integrated marketing communications has become as substantial and socially useful an institution as journalism, why can't it find its own goddamn founder? Instead, Medill is desperately repainting the lemonade stand sign to read, "Cranapple Juice Too."

If you ask me, aspiring reporters (or salespeople for that matter) shouldn't pay for four years of higher education to study abstractly a craft that can only be learned on the job. So I'd be fine if Medill disappeared altogether.

In fact, I've always thought that the only honest good that could come of going to j-school is the late-night dope-smoking sessions where the kids think aloud and place their aspirations on a scale from Edward R. Murrow to Hunter S. Thompson.

Now what on earth will even the squarest of these journalism students have in common with some Young Republican marketer at once too soulless to go to college for a high purpose and too stupid to get a degree that could actually pay?

That IMC geek had better have good grass.

Audiences are polite. The Cicero Speechwriting Awards judges aren’t.

11.24.2010 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

The speaker seemed to like the speech. It seemed like it hit on all the key points. It seemed to go over well with the audience.

But the speechwriter entered the damn thing into the 2011 Cicero Speechwriting Awards, to find out for sure.

And did so by the Feb. 11 deadline, of course—in heartpounding hopes that the speech would be good enough that Vital Speeches editor David Murray would read an excerpt to several hundred fellow speechwriters at his closing keynote "jam session" at the 2011 Speechwriters and Executive Communicators Conference in Washington, May 8-9.

Crests and troughs, in the dark

11.23.2010 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Here's a preview of the story I'm writing about the sailing trip from Annapolis to the British Virgin Islands. The rest, if you're interested, when the magazine comes out. —DM

Almost half of a sailing passage takes place in the pitch dark. Much of that time is lost to blank-minded staring, but some of it isn't.

Alone on a flat-water night watch on the Baja Ha-Ha [from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas], I saw phosphorescent dolphins swimming alongside the boat. In a raging storm on Lake Michigan I held the wheel at due north for two mad hours and then, relieved and sent to the high side, giggled hysterically until near dawn.

And on this trip, as on the other two, there was the thrill of the dark bunk on a fast sail. “Feels like an ungainly rocket ship, not a boat,” I wrote in my journal the morning after we blasted down the Chesapeake. “It feels as though you’re plunging not through water but through space, and not at nine knots, but at 900.

“In the dark of the cabin, so unconnected to the water does this shaking and skidding and rushing feel, that half-sleeping mind imagines the sound of the water streaming in gurgles and pulses past the hull as the sloshing of bodily fluids, the sounds of a sea we contain within.”

Of course, less rhythmic night seas produce less lyrical journal entries. “Last night’s sleep proves the theory,” I wrote after a night bouncing insanely between hull and lee cloth and back, “that a person tossed out of a high enough building, would eventually fall asleep on the way down.

“But it wouldn’t be a great sleep,” I added. “I find myself on watch, staring into the starry blackness, seriously contemplating a book idea. But I never get further than the title. Should it be, Assholes I Have Known? Should it be the more constructive, Assholes to Avoid? Or should it be the elegantly simple, Types of Assholes? I spend at least one whole hour failing to make this decision, my reverie interrupted only when the coffee pot that I have not fully replaced in its holder shatters all over the galley floor.”