Monday, Jul 7, 2008
To be in the news, try making some -- or at least what passes for it these days.
Aug 28, 1999 | In a meeting room of the Crowne Plaza Holiday Inn off San Francisco's Union Square a psychic, a carpet cleaner, a ceramicist, a rockabilly singer and 15 other seekers of truth, financial freedom and better news coverage gathered on a recent Wednesday evening to hear publicist and media coach Susan Harrow tell them how to sell themselves without selling their souls.
Harrow gave us each 20 seconds to describe what we do.
There was a management consultant, speaker and "facilitator of new ways to see and be in the world." There was a psychic who helps people "see who they really are inside"; a ceramics artist who makes non-functional teapots; a rockabilly singer who "thinks it's time to get more visibility in the press"; a consultant who helps start-ups write business plans who's "been in midlife crisis for 30 years"; and there was me, "a writer hoping to find something interesting and amusing to write about."
It was weird. Why was it weird? It was weird because they were in a class learning how to dupe me, the enemy, but I, the enemy, was there.
I know what Harrow was thinking. She was thinking, "Come on, let's be open about this: Journalists need material and entrepreneurs need exposure. Let's just get the two together!" That's the supply-and-demand principle behind the bordello. It's practical, but it's not for everybody. It's not the way it's supposed to be.
The way it's supposed to be is the journalist spots his subject in the wild, studies her habits unobserved, interviews her associates, arranges to meet her, charms her, gives her trinkets, persuades her of his bona fides and then and only then does he finally get to do with her what he wants to do with her, which is, of course, to write nasty things about her private life.
That's the way it's supposed to be. But I've only lived in Northern California 23 years so I'm not quite used to the way things are done here.
People are optimistic here. They will pay $39 to get famous. It's only $29 if you're a Learning Annex member. The Learning Annex distributes free monthly class catalogs where you can sign up for a class on how to have an out-of-body experience ($29, $24 for members.), or Mega Speedreading with Howard Stephen Berg, the world's fastest speedreader ($79, $69 for members) or other classes that could change your take on life or just take your change, depending. If this group had mules, shovels and weather-beaten faces they could have posed for a portrait of our hardscrabble Forty-Niner forebears. But they didn't have shovels or mules or anything, not even weather-beaten faces. They were all scrubbed and eager - just like the Crowne Plaza Holiday Inn.
I understood the premise with my head that I think with, but in my other organs of knowledge I knew that our having come together in this hushed hotel meeting room on Sutter Street was off the scale of bogus. Here is what I would have said had I been Bruce Willis playing John McLane in a "Die Hard" movie where in order to prevent Chester A. Arthur School from blowing up with hundreds of kids inside he had to stand up in a hotel meeting room and explain something about journalism:
No matter how well a spiritual healer with a self-published book or a carpet cleaner with his life mission written on the back of his business card sends timely and compelling press releases; makes polite follow-up phone calls; thinks up clever tie-ins; attends relevant conferences; networks with peers, competitors and the press; chooses smashing and publishable glossies; and buys journalists lunches good enough to be memorable but cheap enough to be ethical, he or she still must face the cold, weary eyes of us, the journalists, who early on in life found ourselves constitutionally unfit to sell Amway products, run chip-making factories or peer into the luminous recesses of the soul for $200 an hour and thus after long years of studying history, literature or philosophy fell into such nihilism and despair that we volunteered to man the wretched, stinking trenches of the culture wars and now find our meager pleasures in a good headline, a crooked politician, an occasional corned beef sandwich and most of all in preventing crackpots, nincompoops, dunderheads, peabrains, angel collectors and reputable business people from monopolizing the front pages of our nation's news.
That's what you're dealing with, I would have shouted, if I were Bruce Willis.
But I was not asked for my overall thoughts on that topic. I was asked something else.
Get Salon in your mailbox!