Shareware Grab Bag/Shareware Grab Bag.iso/002/editad.arc/EDITVSAD

Text File | 1987-07-06 | 7.6 KB | 179 lines

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Copyright
[c] 1987 by Michael Finley Writing Services
2096 Dayton Avenue * St. Paul MN 55104 * [phone]


CONFESSIONS OF A DUAL CITIZEN

Michael Finley


I read the other day that "growing numbers" of individuals are resorting
to dual citizenship, carrying passports for the USA and another country,
generally for sentimental reasons.  And that dual citizenship often
causes problems.

I know the feeling.  My professional life as a writer has been divided
between two citizenships -- one for the land of journalism and the
other for the country of promotional (ad and PR) writing.  And it
has caused problems -- with both countries.

An instance?  I'm doing PR for the University of Minnesota a few
years back and along comes the rarest of offers -- a news editor's
position on the Worthington Daily Globe in southwest Minnesota.
Now, lots of journalists go on to commercial work, but the other
way around?  Never.  Many sell out, but nobody sells in.
Which
explains why the paper's reporters decked their terminals with wolfbane
at first, afraid I would infect them with the virus that made me
one with the undead.

Then I learned about "news holes."  News holes are the great humiliation
of a journalist's life.  They are the ad schemata of each day's paper,
  dictating to news people what spaces around ads the editorial copy
must fill.  News holes are misnomers -- "ad leavings" would be more
to to the point.  They literally and figuratively put news in its
place -- wherever something of actual  importance, an ad, is not.

Another
instance, years later.  I'm writing a marketing column for the late
great BUSINESS/MINNESOTA Magazine, and after a few issues, I notice
several of my copywriting clients shying away from me.  Once again
I have the sense of emitting an aroma unknown only to me.  Instead
of winning new work writing promos -- I'm getting it in my own mail.
 I ask a friend what gives.  "We figured you didn't want to do business
any more," she says, a trace of hurt in her voice.

I found out, in addition, that some clients were terrified I would
call them wearing one hat in the morning ("Bubbe, let's talk annual
report.")  and another after lunch ("Where was your directorate on
the afternoon of May 11th?").

After all, who was I exactly?  A double agent?  The incredible two-headed
transplant?  A typewriting extortionist?  Think about it -- add writing
acumen to the ethics of pondscum and you've got one smarmy business
plan.

Typical day:
 9:00AM: Flatter and cajole.
10:30AM: Toady up to betters.
11:30AM: Nervous breakdown and lunch.
 2:00PM: Open can of worms.
 4:15PM: Tell all, spare none.

It's a great life, but keep your ID handy.

The heightened sensitivity really shows up at parties, when, tongue
loosened by a bottle of Moussy, you've just told one person you're
a journalist and the next person you're an adman, and the two compare
notes and confront you in the patio.  So which kind of liar are you,
they want to know.  Exactly which way do
you strive night and day to interrupt the mental tranquility of ordinary
citizens?

Why are the two citizenships so incompatible, like oil and vinegar,
 like Israel and Libya, like corporate and philanthropy?

My Edit friends tell me my commercial work is degrading and crass.
 Me, I feel liberated by it.  It's so single-minded, and yes, so
innocent.  Readers know
what axe you're grinding in Ad.  With Edit, God knows, and sometimes
not Him till the thing's gone to press.

With Ad you don't have to juggle contradictions for the sake of
'balance.'  You're not tied to conventional chronology or even to
the law of gravity.  You get to make
stuff up.
 It's less you-against-the-world.  You find your market, you learn
what it likes, and you sell it to them.  You're on the winning team
and Big Brother loves you for yourself.

Then Ad friends put me on the defensive for my Edit work.  Editorial
work is for folks who've gone a little soft in the tires, they say.
 People who, lacking marketable skills, would sell their mothers
up the river for an exclusive.

Quite true, I say, but at least you're not selling door to door.
 Absent is the sense of creativity by committee, with layer upon
layer of client input crowning your idea like cement.  Plus, you
get a byline -- nephews think you're somebody important.

I guess I'm tired of the distrust and friction between the two lands,
and I wish some benevolent bully would force us together and make
us shake hands and get along.  When will that sage individual step
forward with fresh perspective on the interaction of the two nations,
so I can avoid these long, unasked-for, dissembling apologies?

Lacking such a person, hear me out.  I have come up with a theory
that the combination of Edit and Ad creates a kind of bazaar [sp]
mentality -- half the people trying to sell you baskets while the
other half entertain by charming snakes out of them.  Selling and
telling is what makes TV, radio, newspapers and magazines the spellbinders
they are.

To one group, Ad is the bread and Edit the circus; to another group
the roles are reversed.  In either case the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts.

I believe that there is a lot less love lost between the two lands
-- and between them and their publics -- than we let on.

People complain about ads and commercials, they flip 'em and they
zap 'em, but they like 'em deep down.  They hate Ad's overall noise
level, but they like Ad because it is useful, because it's often
entertaining in its own right, and because it offers them a chance,
on the level of gamesmanship, to dally with Machiavellian types like
myself who stay up nights concocting new consumer insecurities to
vanquish.

And true, people hate bad news and cliche coverage of events --
David Letterman's show is one elongated sendup of the banalities
of high-tech truth-telling.  But people love reading and watching,
it's the stuff of dreams and waking both, and Ad without Edit, or
Edit without Ad, would not be as satisfying.

Like yin and yang in the oriental tantra, Ad and Edit complement
opposite human impulses -- together they are stronger than either
is apart.

I've started to think of the nature of Ad as an abiding exclamation
point.  When we're looking at an ad there is a beautiful simplicity
of encounter -- we know somebody's selling us the goods, and if they're
doing
the job halfway right, why, we're just the persons who might want
those goods.  Advertising is a meeting of the minds, a conjoining
of interests, an unambiguous '!' .

If that's true, let's give Edit more ambiguous punctuation, the
question mark.  If Ad supplies the certainties that emotionally buoy
the reader/viewer in making economic decisions, Edit provides the
deeper experience of wondering what really is what.  Politics, art,
lifestyle trends -- Edit seeks to persuade on these and countless
other issues, but in a different dimension or hemisphere.  Ad is
like an arrow, clarity in motion; Edit is more like some strange
soup one stirs while it stirs you right back.  Call it the "?" factor.

Ad
decides, Edit ponders.  Push, pull.  Neither in itself is art enough
to mirror life's rich pageant, but together they're better than a
poke in the eye.


Meanwhile, like a crowd crying to the man on the ledge, people are
telling me to choose, choose.  And I can't.  How do you choose between
one thing you love and another you like very, very much?  Especially
when you're not sure which is which?

#  #  #

Michael
Finley really is a consulting copywriter working both sides of the
Twin Cities streets.