Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

My latest on Huffington Post: The courage to communicate

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Why speeches still matter (sez me, in my latest Huffpost, on what I've learned in a year of editing Vital Speeches):

The social utility of speeches is undiminished by technological advances such as YouTube, Twitter and even the Kryptonite of rhetoric, PowerPoint. There comes a time—a crisis in confidence, the crescendo of a debate (and, yes, commencement season)—where everyone knows: One member of the society has to screw up the courage to stand naked before other members of the society and share what he or she believes is true. The act is significant for the same reason it always has been: The audience has the speaker outnumbered and can accept or reject the speech before, during or after its delivery.

And the more communication tools we have to hide behind, the more the public speech comes to matter.

HuffPo reading hampered by gaper’s delay

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I like the Huffington Post. 

I read the Huffington Post every day.

I write for the Huffington Post!

The politics is a little left of me some of the time, but that's easier on my ears than the noise on the right.

What's getting on my nerves is that HuffPo—and I hope they don't dock my pay for saying so!—is clearly using celebrity news and tabloid-ish gossip to draw imbeciles to the site, for the purposes of building traffic to sell more ads.

Some headlines I saw yesterday:

Mom's Tweets After Son Drowns Sparks Controversy

Boy Accidentally Shoots Himself With Gun Left Under Christmas Tree

WATCH: Drunk 4-Year-Old Steals Christmas Presents

Stepfather Stuck 42 Needles in Young Boy As Part of 'Religious Ritual'

I don't want to read those stories. In fact, I don't want to sidestep them as I scroll down looking for the latest Jon Stewart video.

Huffington Post used to be a site that was organized to appeal to readers, not accident gawkers. Now don't get too greedy, Arianna.

HuffPo Update, 12/21

Arianna, did you not get my Tweets? Your headlines today:

Pig's Farts Start Huge Gas Leak Scare

WATCH: D.C. Police Detective Pulls Gun in Snowball Fight

WATCH: Badass Cat On Roomba Slaps Pit Bull

Paramedics Ignore Dying Pregnant Woman While On Coffee Break

Interspersing these stories among serious pieces about health care reform and climate change, Arianna, does send a political message to your readers:

It's all bullshit, it's all for fun, it's all for traffic.

That's a nice theory, Arianna.

And an old one, too.

Vital Speeches, back in the day

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Whenever one pundit frets about a loss of civility in the public
dialogue, another cherry-picks some violent quotation from a long-ago
political fight and says, "See? It was worse in 1840!"

So it was with particular interest that I dove into a copy of Volume 1, Issue 1 of Vital Speeches of the Day, dated Oct. 8, 1934.

Seventy-five years ago today, in this then-weekly (now monthly)
collection of U.S. speeches, what were "the leading moulders of public
opinion" talking about, and in what tones?

Read my surprising answer, on the Huffington Post's national politics page.