Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

What was it really like to be a communicator back in the day? What is it really like today?

01.18.2011 by David Murray // 5 Comments

The illusion of progress is lucrative, in the communications business as everywhere.

"Everything has changed. Oh, you didn't know that? I can show you the way."

So when consultants talk about the stone age of communication, I'm always suspicious that maybe the stone age felt a lot like the modern age.

The other day I found myself rereading a personal memoir written by Ragan Communications' late founder Larry Ragan, and I came across a time capsule. He's writing about his first communication job, editing the employee newspaper at the Chicago plant at Ford Motor Comapny, from 1953 to 1957.

Judge for yourself how much has changed and how much has remained the same.

Interviewing for the job at Ford, I was told that the pay was $400 a month. That seemed like an astonishing sum of money; I had been getting $250 or $275.

But—wonders piled upon wonders!—a cost-of-living allowance was paid every three months, and that amounted to $130 a quarter.

Rich at last! Or so it then seemed.

My job was to edit an 8-page monthly tabloid-size newspaper. It was one of 30 similar Ford newspapers across the country. Although I did some writing—safety stories, retirement features, personality profiles, inquiring reporter departments, women's page stuff, occasionally; at least half of the newspaper was written elsewhere, mostly in the headquarters office in Dearborn. We were also permitted to pick up stuff that the other Ford papers used. Besides, to eat up space, we used a lot of pictures, playing them big.

The newspaper was intended to occupy two-thirds of my time, the other third being spent as an organizer and coordinator of recreation activities for the plant's employees. Never was any one person less suited for the job of coordinating the annual golf tournament, the bowling party, the formation of a new bowling league, a picnic for employee children, and a Christmas party for them as well. It was awful.

I worked in the Industrial Relations Department. With me were Employee Relations, Safety, Suggestions, Benefits, Labor Relations. All those jobs were filled by men who had once worked on the line during the depression, some of them as far back as the twenties. They enjoyed reminiscing about the "old" Ford days of a hard-driving assembly line, of no-smoking prohibitions, Harry Bennett's goon squads, inability to leave the moving line to go to the restroom. Now "Young Henry" was running things, the grandson. He turned the company around and provided decent working conditions, with the help and pressure, of course, of the United Auto Workers union.

When I left Ford, I would look back at my experience and shudder. While I was going through it, however, I found the work undemanding and sometimes pleasant.

Why would I "shudder" when I looked back at my Ford days? Probably because of their dullness, their sameness, their conformity. We all began at 8 and all left at 5. Well, almost all. There was an unspoken rule that the executives, and most of the men in our department fit that description, however loose it may have been, were expected to avoid the wild five-o'clock rush to the parking lot. They usually stayed another twenty minutes, if only to polish their shoes or chat with each other. I never bothered with that custom (as I did in my refusal to buy a Ford, because we had a contact that presmuably would sell us second-hand Dodges cheap).

Everyone began at 8. No exceptions, not even the plant manager (2,700 people turning out one car a minute). Almost everybody left at 5. Most of the people with whom I worked there were older and of considerably less education. Once [wife] Jeanne and I went to a small party hosted by a co-worker and were shocked by the extent of the (there is no other way to put it) dirty stories that were a part of the evening.

Maybe what I craved was the possibility of growth, of meeting new people, coping with new problems, working to solve larger problems with others. Instead, I was isolated, on the far southeast side of Chicago, the city limits, working in what came to be a corporate cog that was unfulfilling and, ultimately, dispiriting.

Communicators, as they used to say in the English books, compare and contrast.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // 1950s, employee newspaper, Ford Motor Company, house organ, Larry Ragan, Torrance Avenue

Thirty years ago, communicators had built a “gargantua”; what do we have now?

01.06.2010 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Studs Terkel called this the "United States of Alzheimer's," because we forget where we came from.

I always thought he was being kind.

More often, we don't even ask.

That's why, when IABC veteran Wilma Mathews told me over dinner recently about a long ago speech about the communication business that she still remembered, I asked her to fax it to me.

It was delivered on November 15, 1977, by Jacob Whittmer, then president of IABC, at a meeting of the association's District II, in Winston Salem, N.C.

The speech is dated in many ways—early on, he jokes that "the new definition of a ghostwriter … is a person who wrote an unsatisfactory speech for Idi Amin"—and comfortably current in others. Here's an excerpt, and then I'll share Wilma's remembered reaction to the speech:

All in all, I've been kicking around the communications business since 1935—that's a long time—when I served as editor of my high school newspaper back in Southern Indiana.

Frankly, I really wasn't much concerned with talk of "power centers" or even audience impact back in those days. In fact, I was a pretty naive country bumpkin.

My first exposure to the power syndrome business—if you can call it that—came a couple of years as a sophomore journalism/political science student at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I distinctly remember hearing the cocky law students going around singing their favorite ditty: "Oh there's power, power, wonder-working power in the law, in the law. Oh there's power, power, wonder-working power in the Indiana law."

Even then there were, of course, some journalism professors and newspaper publishers who talked about the "power of the press." But no one took them very seriously—at least not in the same frame of reference in which we think of media power today.

As for industrial editing or business and organizational communications, it was practically unknown, especially to the journalism profession. Where it did exist, it was primarily a paternalistic device written in gossip column style—usually by the boss's secretary to keep everyone up to date on social and personal goings on. …

Over the years a gradual evolution occurred to give us the gargantua we have today—a billion dollar multi-media giant that rivals in importance and influence the rest of the entire communications industry in North America.

For example, organizational publications alone have a per-issue circulation today of more than 300 million in the United States and Canada. By comparison, the 1,888 daily newspapers in the countries have a combined circulation of only 66 million. A recent survey by Syracuse University of just IABC members indicated they have a circulation of 228 million.

And what about media such as management newsletters, newsboard or bulletin board programs, employee meetings, letters to the home, payroll stuffers, booklets and brochures, complaint and grievances systems, videotape, film, closed circuit television, cassette tapes, computer printouts, special direct mail, and on and on. The scope and variety is almost mind-boggling. …

No doubt about it, a new "power center" has come into being as the need for communications has become more intense and complex. And we as the business and organizational communicators are at the controls. We are the professionals being looked to by managements for the leadership and know-how to win out in the mounting competition for attention.

With that leadership comes the responsibility to maintain the highest ideals of performance ….

We are professional communicators representing our audiences as well as our employers. Our job is to listen, to research, to study, to consider, to interpret, to explain, to educate, to inform. By so doing, we help people to know, to understand, to work better, to achieve their dreams and expectations. Lofty ideals and objectives—certainly they are. But to set our sights lower would be to betray ourselves, our fellow professionals, our employers and our audiences.

I asked Wilma to remember what she thought of the speech and she reminded me that at the time IABC, seven years after a merger of two predecessor organizations, had 4,000 members, as opposed to around 14,000 today.

"Jake told us what our jobs where and our careers could be," Mathews remembers. "He helped us put into perspective the field  of organizational communication and he guided us to professionalism. This was a time when the role of 'house organ editor' was taken away from Suzy the secretary and put in the hands of college-educated, professionally trained writers and communicators. It was a big deal!"

Readers, what was the last big-deal speech you heard (or article you read) about the communication business?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // communication profession, house organ, IABC, Jacob Wittmer, newsletter, organizational press, Wilma Mathews

Now Available

An Effort to Understand

Order Now

SIGN UP TO RECEIVE BLOG UPDATES

About

David Murray writes on communication issues.
Read More

 

Categories

  • Baby Boots
  • Communication Philosophy
  • Efforts to Understand
  • Happy Men, and Other Eccentrics
  • Human Politicians
  • Mister Boring
  • Murray Cycle Diaries
  • Old Boots
  • Rambling, At Home and Abroad
  • Sports Stories
  • The Quotable Murr
  • Typewriter Truths
  • Uncategorized
  • Weird Scenes Inside the Archives

Archives

Copyright © 2025 · Log in

  • Preorder An Effort to Understand
  • Sign Up for Blog Updates
  • About David Murray