T-t-t-Too C-c-c-Cold For ANYBODY To Read

When you were in school and had to give a speech to the class, odds are you spent quite a bit of time preparing your speech, and practiced it out loud several times. Your teachers told you that practice makes perfect. Actually, the quote is “practice to be perfect”, which is more than slightly different.

Professional speakers are often challenged to do a “cold read” of a script, flawlessly. Cold, in the sense that you’ve never seen it before, and you’ve got to deliver it without stumbling. Same concept in the music business, where the top studio players can “cold read” a piece of music they’ve never seen, and play it without a mistake. While the skills involved in cold-reading script and music are different, the concept is the same.

Cold-calling in the sales profession is giving a sales presentation to a person or group you’ve never met, and “winging it” through your tailored pitch. Sales, speaking, music – to do it “cold” requires substantial skill.

News anchors, particularly radio news anchors, are called on to “cold-read” news copy constantly. TV folks generally have the luxury of reading scripts from a TelePrompTer - scripts which they’ve had time to review and “practice”. The amateurs and pros are separated not when the TelePrompTer breaks down, because there’s usually a printed script on their news desk, but when they’re narrating live coverage of a breaking news event without a script of any sort.

This is the point in this rant where you find out it’s still another slam against the children who are attempting to write (and in many cases attempting to deliver) news these days.

I have a friend who’s a morning radio news anchor on the number-one news station in one of the largest markets in the nation. I have had the pleasure of working with her, and I’ve never worked with anyone who was better at “cold-reading” a piece of news copy. She’s a top-flight professional. Often, she’s handed a script just moments before it has to go on the air, and one of the reasons she’s so good at what she does is she can “sight-read” right through typing errors, grammar errors, spelling errors, and make the copy “sing”.

Last week she sent me a copy of a script she was handed in the middle of a live newscast. Just for fun, try reading the next three sentences out loud, as if you were a big-time newscaster:

“The lawyer and wife of imprisoned former Illinois Governor George Ryan say they’re asking President Barack Obama for clemency because of health concerns. The 75-year-old was sent to says Ryan has kidney disease and other problems, andprison after his 2006 conviction on corruption charges. His attorney his wife has a terminal lung disease”.

I’m willing to bet there’s not a person alive who could read that paragraph without stumbling.

It looks like it’s a horrid copy-and-paste job that went fatally wrong. I mean, even if the writer stole the copy outright from some other news source, you’d think they could do a better job of lifting it. It’s obvious whoever “wrote” it never proof-read it. There’s only so much even a top-notch pro can do to save a mess like that.

Reminds me of the sort of thing I hear on weekend newscasts around here.

The Financial Wannabees...I Mean, Financial Media

Did you know that Nike sponsors (pays for and has its logo on) the “in-the-field” clothing worn by reporters for the Fox Business Channel? Neither did I, till a few days ago, when one of their young field reporters did a stand-up from Ponte Vedra, Florida, as they breathlessly awaited the big statement from the golfer whose many girlfriends undid him.

As a former news anchor – and note, I did not say “journalist”, because I am not now one, and never was – I though it just a bit of a conflict that the “reporter” who was covering the “event” was wearing a polo shirt with two logos: one, the big Nike swoosh, and the other, the Fox Business Channel logo, to cover a “news” event concerning a golfer who makes millions from Nike.

I also noted that neither the in-the-field reporter nor the in-studio anchor on “Fox and Friends” could pronounce the name of that Florida city. (Homework? ME, do homework? Accuracy? Credibility? Hey, I’m on TV – that’s credibility enough.)

Let me make a clear distinction here between the men and women who are writers – journalists – for publications like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily, and the like. These are smart, impartial, hard-working scribes.

Then there’s the TV gang.

Let me throw out a couple names: Neil Cavuto and Jim Cramer. What a pair to draw to! The former on Fox, the latter on CNBC. The words “huckster”, “shill”, and “carnival barker” come to mind. It’s a side-show worthy of any three-ring circus.

Stuart Varney: does his British accent make him more distinguished, more reliable, more credible? No. Maria Bartiromo: hobnobs with CEO and CFO’s, drops more names than El Rushbo, has filed to trademark the name “The Money Honey”; had the notorious dalliance with failed CitiGroup exec Todd Thompson.

Real, sterling journalists there.

Let me make another clear distinction, while painting with this broad brush: Christine Romans of CNN. I see her reports on the CNN morning news broadcast, and she seems to play it straight down the middle, as befits the morning show of “the most trusted name in news”.

Although, for my money (excuse the pun), John Stewart is the most trusted name in news. Often, I watch the repeat of his Comedy Central nightly broadcast at 6 PM, rather than the local TV news. He’s actually doing “real” news, albeit with a bite.

It’s the sort of “anchoring” that’s near and dear to my heart. If only I was 15 years younger…and about a hundred pounds lighter….

Sheep

I’m in the middle of reading the new book “Game Change”, by distinguished political writers Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. It’s a unique look deep into the last presidential election, loaded with great inside information from the candidates’ closest staff members and friends. I read very few books about politics, but I’m glad I bought this one.

For me, the 2008 election will always elicit the memory of a warm October afternoon in Minnesota, at a John McCain rally, when a grandmotherly woman who had the mike said to McCain about Obama “he’s an Arab”….and the Senator took the mike from the woman and said “no, he’s not. He’s a decent man”. In the background, you can hear people yelling “liar!” and “terrorist!”, referring to Barack Obama. The video is still up on YouTube.

For some people, Barack Obama is and always will be an Arab, not an American; he was not born in the U.S. and therefore is not the legitimate President; he’s a terrorist who hates capitalism or a socialist or an anarchist or an anti-Christ or the devil incarnate.

Founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin said time and again that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of a democratic society, and the first protection under the Bill of Rights is free speech and a free press. But facts apparently aren’t what they used to be.

I read a paragraph the other day written by Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for commentary. It says “To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper’s online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all the information that does not validate what we wish to believe.”

This guy really knows how to write.

That senior citizen in Minnesota was not convinced by her candidate, John McCain, that Obama is not an “Arab”. Nobody will change her mind. To me, she’s typical of so many people who have a set of beliefs, and no facts, no logic, no appeal will change their mind. I still, to this day, get junk e-mails from acquaintances, with some new piece of “proof” that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States. For God’s sake, people – let go!

It doesn’t take a logician to figure out that objective reality doesn’t change because you refuse to accept it. But apparently the concept is beyond the thinking power of an awful lot of American citizens.

Print journalism sure picked a bad time in our country’s history to go belly-up. If ever there were a time when we needed MORE truth uncovered, MORE facts revealed, it’s now.

The Kathy and Dave Show

Round One of the latest dispute over the 9-1-1 dispatch center goes to Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz. Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas issued a temporary restraining order late last week, that prevents County Executive Kathleen Falk from implementing a phone-tree system for non-emergency calls.

It’s the most public spat the two elected officials have ever had, in a relationship almost always characterized by genuine friendship and a work-together-for-the-common-good ethic.

If you’re not following closely, Falk wants to charge Madison taxpayers about 30 grand a year to continue dispatching calls about parking violations. Mayor Dave says the ultimate decision on that rests with the Public Safety (9-1-1) Board, which has already voted to delay implementation of the charge. Not that Cieslewicz disagrees with the concept; he says in essence you can’t just spring this change on the city and wants more than a week’s notice. The judge agreed.

Cieslewicz says the flap should be sorted out by the 9-1-1 Board and the County Board; Falk thinks she’s got the juice to “just do it”, saying the idea was approved in a consultant’s report long ago.

And, just so you know, the status quo has been in effect for over two decades: the 9-1-1 Center dispatches City of Madison parking complaint calls. Cieslewicz says the city and county need to work together on a 3-1-1 system for non-emergency calls. He wants it up and running in 2 to 3 years.

Well, Amen to THAT!

People call 9-1-1 for the most stupid and inappropriate reasons. When does deer hunting season start? Who do I talk to about getting a building permit for a new porch? Who won the hockey game at the Kohl Center tonight? Where can I go to get a good hamburger?

Think I’m making this stuff up? Ask any dispatcher about some of the wacky calls they get on every shift, from people who apparently have confused the 9-1-1 emergency call center with some sort of telephonic Google.

I’ve got an audio file from a friend in St. Louis of a call to the 9-1-1 center from some woman asking where she could find out what shade of lipstick a local TV anchor was wearing that night.

I’m not so sure that if Dane County manages to get a 3-1-1 center up and running that the number of idiotic calls to 9-1-1 will decrease one bit. There are a lot of really stupid people out there.

As to where our story stands now, Mayor Cieslewicz says if County Exec Falk is willing to settle the dispute outside of the court system, he is, too.

It’s a start. But I suspect a few more lawyers will be running a lot of billable hours over this spat in the next few weeks.

I'm In Telemarketing Hell

It’s a strange love-affair we have with the telephone. The cell phone lets us communicate with anybody, anywhere, at any time, at a reasonable cost and, in my case, with reliable service. All I do is place and receive phone calls and text messages with my cell phone. No need for games, apps, GPS, internet, none of that stuff. I’m a dinosaur.

But this convenience has a price, in terms other than dollars and cents.

A few weeks ago some young lady, Crystal, gave MY cell phone number (by mistake, I hope) to about six million of her closest friends, and I’m still getting calls for her. Got one the other night right in the middle of Lindsey Vonn’s fabulous downhill run at the Olympics. A telemarketer.

Crystal’s real human beings, with one exception, stopped calling as soon as I explained she’d given them the wrong number. The other fellow, who may have been her father, called no less than a dozen times until I finally laid an insult on him that would cause any father’s blood to boil.

A couple months ago, for business reasons, I had to re-install one of my old land-lines for my home office. Didn’t need any bells and whistles: didn’t want caller ID but got it anyway; part of the package. So was a bunch of other stuff I don’t care about. Part of the package.

Can’t I just buy/rent/lease a damn phone line?

Voicemail available: no thanks. On and on, the telephone salesperson went down the list of options. Want it unlisted? Sure, that sounds good…this line is 100% for business purposes, 99.9% of which will be outgoing calls, and I don’t really want it in the phone book or available through directory assistance. That will be $5.95 a month. Seventy-two dollars a year for unlisted service? No thanks.

Big mistake.

Now, every telemarketer in the known universe has the phone number of my land-line, and they use it. Auto warranties. Home improvement loans. Siding for my house. Computer training. Police charities. Life insurance. Health insurance. Car insurance. Homeowners insurance. Pet insurance. Unemployed Rodeo Clowns Retirement Fund.

I signed up for the no-call list from the state Consumer Protection Department when the first telemarketing call came in, but my number doesn’t go on the list until the first of April. And, it will come OFF the list in two years.

A couple questions: why does it take so long to get your phone number on the no-call list? Lord knows the telemarketers can find you in a few hours, once you put a phone line in. And what kind of idiot crooked politicians made it so that your phone number comes OFF the list in two years, and you have to go through the whole “registering” rigmarole again?

Of course, after the first few days, I just shut the ringer off on the land-line phone. But the caller ID shows me that the telemarketers haven’t given up.

I wish I could find Crystal’s real phone number, and give it to the telemarketers.

It's A Dog's Life

I always root for the Collies and the Shelties – herding dogs – when the annual Westminster Dog Show is televised. That's my Collie, Shadow, above. I guess it’s natural, because I’ve only known two dogs really well. The first was our beloved family dog, a purebred Shetland Sheep Dog our daughter named “Nippy”. She was the dog the kids grew up with, who enlivened the household chasing our two cats around and constantly announcing her presence with her friendly bark.

Herding dogs are barkers. You gotta know that before you decide to share your home with one. She was always trying to herd those damn cats, who defied her every attempt to organize them.

Nippy had a tough life. As it turned out, she was from a puppy mill in Iowa, even though the dog store where my wife bought her had all the AKC papers and documentation. We spent a fortune on vet bills to keep her going, through a couple of “toe” amputations which made her walk in a funny, swaying gate, and through so many serious bouts with viral infections it seemed she couldn’t go two months without getting sick.

But we loved her dearly, and when her enlarged heart got so big it started to block her windpipe and made it difficult for her to catch her breath, we had to make that heart-wrenching decision every pet owner eventually faces. On a warm late-March day in 2006, Nippy died peacefully in my arms in the vet’s office.

A month later, my wife had completed her research on our next canine friend, and decided there would never be a Sheltie to replace Nippy, and set her heart on a Collie. We met our next dog, a six-month-old sable Collie puppy, at the breeder’s ranch in mid-April. Her parents – both national champions with pedigrees that had the prefix “Ch” (Champion) back five generations, were on-site, along with assorted aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews.

But this was no stand-offish, uppity high-strung show dog puppy. The first thing she did when my wife met her was put both front paws up on my wife’s shoulders and proceeded to give her about a hundred enthusiastic doggy-kisses. The deal was sealed at that point; the rest of the day was spent just having fun watching the breeders put their champion dogs through their paces.

Collies are 38th on this year’s AKC list of most popular breeds (Labs, German Shepherds, Yorkies, Golden Retrievers, and Beagles are the top 5), because Collies don’t make good “city dogs”. They need room to run. And run they do! There are few sights as magnificent and beautiful to me as our Shadow, at full-tilt-boogie, racing across our property at about 30 miles an hour, fluid and floating over the ground, her sleek coat ruffled by the rush of the wind, and then to see her change direction effortlessly without losing a step.

Collies were bred to run all day, and to use that long nose to separate sheep and herd them across expansive pastures in the British Isles.

My friends Glen and Marilyn have three greyhounds, rescues all of them, on their expansive property southwest of Madison, and those dogs can hit 45 miles an hour in three strides. Now that’s MOVIN’. But when they’re in the house, they’re just as docile and well-mannered as my Collie.

Tomorrow, we’re loading Shadow into my huge, gas-sucking foreign-made SUV and heading down to the breeder’s ranch again. There’s an 18-month-old Blue Merle Collie lass that my wife has her eye on, and I think Shadow is about to have a wonderful playmate to run with and patrol our property with….if the stars align properly.

I have a feeling they will.

Strategic Default - and Paying Your Mortgage Last (not first)

It was one of the golden rules of finance our parents harped at us about: pay your mortgage first. No matter what, stay current on your home mortgage, they said. It’s the biggest investment you’ll ever make, and come hell or high water, make sure you pay it on time.

Now, not so much.

An ever-increasing number of Americans are not paying their mortgage first. Some aren’t even paying it at all. They’re paying their credit card bills first – just the opposite of the way it was, not that many years ago. The number of Americans who are current on their credit card bills but behind on their mortgage payments has increased nearly 50% in just the past year. The figures are tracked by Trans-Union, one of the big three credit-monitoring services.

A combination of factors has led to this change in priority of paying bills. A couple years ago, a lot of folks were able to get into their homes with no money down, during the wide-open (and long-gone) days of “mortgages for everybody”. Experts say with those people, there was no real sense of having worked and saved hard to make the down payment on a house. It was easy to buy a house.

When home prices slid downward, falling 30% or more from their peak in the first half of 2006, a lot of mortgage-payers saw the value of their home drop well below what they owed on their mortgage. Right now, about one in four homeowners is in this situation, which bankers and realtors call “under water” – you owe more on your house than it’s worth, and it will probably never regain enough value to catch up.

While this was going on – the stuff in the housing market that led up to the recession – credit card lenders were going in the opposite direction. Remember when you got at least one “pre-approved” credit card offer in the mail every week? Those days are long gone, too. Credit cards are much tougher to qualify for now, so card-holders are concerned about hanging onto the cards they have. No more “transfer your balance to our credit card for our introductory 6-month rate and save a ton” offers.

There’s another factor that influences decisions on which bills to pay and which to let slide. Credit card companies will shut you off in one big hurry if you get behind on your payments, but a foreclosure takes a long time – anywhere from six months on the short end, to a year and a half on the long end. Go two months without paying your credit card bill and your card suddenly doesn’t work at all. Go two months without paying your mortgage, and you get a snotty letter.

Credit cards can be used to buy gas, groceries, clothes, and all manner of goods and services. With unemployment where it is and the economy where it is, more and more people are paying the credit card bill first, and the mortgage last – just the opposite of what it was a few years ago.

Like the man said, the times, they are a changin’.