Like most of you, I’m horrified, ashamed and frustrated by many of the events of the last eight days — much less the last three months — in the United States.
Is this a turning point? we might ask.
Not if the last 50 years — Watts 1965, Newark 1967, Miami 1980, LA 1992, Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014, Baltimore 2015, Charlotte 2016, etc.,…
“You were warned.”
What an arrogant, infantilizing, alienating, counterproductive communications tactic.
Well, we feel guilty and stupid now, so of course we’ll absorb your wisdom more attentively next time. Count on it.
Manu Lall and Paulina Concha of the Columbia Water Center published an op-ed this week for The New York Times, alerting us to the tens of thousands of dams in the United States that are in danger of failing, as the two in Central Michigan failed last week.…
Every client I work with quickly reveals their safe words.
No, not like that. Not “pineapples.”
At first, my clients use these safe words to mean: this content angle we’re developing is probably too risky. It’s tickling a tripwire for their audiences.…
Fast science in a pandemic — that’s a good thing, right?
Often yes. But sometimes no.
And right now, we have no idea how big that “no” is.
More than 10,000 research studies have been published on COVID-19 since January.…
Your organization had an opportunity these last two months that most research-driven organizations didn’t take.
Did yours?
The opportunity, that is, to answer a simple question, posed nicely by Geoffrey Director, the VP of Intelligence at the content marketing firm Manifest:
…What is the content that only your brand can provide that would also be genuinely valuable to your audience?
Normally I would be all over this new Cal Newport piece in WIRED about how Expert Twitter could be so much more helpful about the pandemic if only it were supplemented by blogging.
In the new piece, Newport (author of the bestseller “Deep Work” and high priest of social media renunciation) begrudgingly admits that Twitter has introduced us to all sorts of crucial expert voices and angles — such virologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute.…
Take a look at these eye-popping stats, from journalist and technologist Frederic Filloux’s recent essay, “COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure”:
Politico reports this morning that Morgan Stanley economists are now predicting a 30.1% annualized decline in US GDP for Q2 — which would be the worst quarterly performance in 74 years. That’s the good news. The bad news: lots of other economists think that prediction might be optimistic.…
Humanity is conducting some gigantic experiments right now — and the biggest might be in how we’re communicating the science of this virus and how to stop it. #Flattenthecurve is the meme, the brand, the call-to-action rolled into one. The universal visual (CDC version, as published in WIRED):
The meme seems to be working, for a lot of people and leaders; we can’t really measure its effectiveness.…
It’s a boom time — thank God — for explanatory, research-based and research-expertise content about the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. Here are 12 informational resources from the last week that I’ve found very valuable and/or very interesting:
3Blue1Brown: “Exponential Growth and Epidemics” (YouTube): Send this nine-minute explainer video to all the virus-complacent in your life; it patiently walks through why COVID-19’s threat is about its exponential growth path, not the small-seeming number of cases being reported today in your city, state or country.…