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♦ If you're an editor, you can view samples of my articles under
    "Contents"--or just scroll down.

♦ If you need help with your writing, I'll work with you.

♦ If you need a PR pro to work with the media, click on About Me
     and My Publishers.

I'm an award-winning business journalist with more than 250 published, mostly bylined, articles and columns for publications ranging from high fashion to high tech. They include business magazines, newsletters, newspapers, trade publications and online e-zines. Here are some examples:

Contents

(Click on any article to view it)

Developing a Marketing Strategy
Newsletter Design
Economic Ignoramuses
How the Media Handle Economics
      News
Working With Generation X
NCBA Crisis Communications Plan
The Answer to Fielding Hardball
      Questions
Keeping Up with the Media
Alternative Capital Source
American Journalism Review
Affordable Housing Finance
Port of Seattle flourishes
Mediation for Small Business
Debt Collection No-No's
Putting PR to Work
A fighter sure to shake things up...
Tough Customers
Microsoft adjusts its game plan...
Alzheimer's Assn. targets boomers
The  Global  Obesity  Epidemic
The New Rules of Advocacy
Running With the Video Game Talent
Boeing adjusts PR course...
Preventing Workplace Violence
 

In the twenty or so years since it became professionally correct for physicians to actively market their services to prospective patients, a growing number of MDs have developed highly effective, ethical marketing ways to attract and retain patients. Despite lingering negative connotations of self-promotion, they have discovered that marketing is not a dirty word. Many clinicians would prefer to maintain their existing patient base without having to bother with cultivating new patients, but for an increasing number of providers, today's economic realities are making marketing essential to remain competitive. 

• Association publications can learn from for-profit newsletters.
  Targeting specific markets, newsletter publishers and editors have finessed certain "tricks of the trade.”

• For-profit newsletters focus on content rather than design.
   Readers often want informative — not ^"pretty^" — newsletters.

• Content should be "need-to-know" information.
  In this way newsletters capture and increase their readership. 

• Increased postal rates affect every publication.
  But some newsletter publishers have found ways to cut costs.

For association publications, staying ahead of the competition means more than just growth in ad pages and revenue. Most savvy association publishers and editors know there is another kind of competition--for their readers' time. Other publications (association-related or not) are also striving to capture the attention and valuable time of the same readers. And associations who think they have a captive audience soon have a shrinking audience.

What's the answer? For a start, association publications should examine how newsletter publishers and editors--their for-profit brethren--deal with the same challenges.

THE AVERAGE AMERICAN IS AN ECONOMIC IGNORAMUS, and a study report about to be released by the Commerce Department and the Advertising Council purports to prove it. High-lights of the study, made last November and December among some 3,000 persons, are:

·    Only one in seven really understands the roles of business, labor, investors, and consumers in the economy.

·    Even among businessmen and the best educated, only one-third understand how the economic system works.

·    Economic illiteracy is found in all segments of the economy, but particularly among low-income groups, the elderly and retired, homemakers, those with little education, blacks, those inactive in community affairs.

·    Most Americans consider the essential benefits of the economic system to be their personal freedoms and opportunities rather than broad functional aspects such as a free, competitive market or the availability of a wide assortment of goods and services provided through profit incentives.

Editor & Publisher, which has claimed that many business and financial writers just don't understand economics and don't usually move to their jobs by choice, says they need to broaden their scope to interest their readers. Newspapers have been missing stories, says E&P, because they don't know what to look for. Business reporters and writers can use some formal training in economics, the magazine adds; to start, they need to learn the basic technology. It might even be a good idea for newspapers to have an ombudsman for their business section. 

EARLIER THIS YEAR, 90-year-old management guru Peter Drucker told The Wall Street Journal "We grew up with the belief that the employee needs the company more than the company needs him. Try to tell that to my grandchildren," Indeed. In the GenX generation, companies are scrambling to find talented, creative, in­telligent, think-on-their-feet types who'll stick with the company longer than a few years to help build its fu­ture. In an age where dot-corn fever has put every busi­ness on time-crunch status, GenXers come in looking for a lot more than security. To some, that notion itself died with the dodo.
 


 

When a case of mad cow was reported in Washington last year, the NCBA already had a crisis strategy in place. These days, the group remains proactive during a time of regulatory change.

Ever since Britain’s mad cow epidemic, the U.S.—and especially the nation’s $621-million beef industry—has been on the alert for any sign of a similar problem here. Last December 23 it came, and things haven’t been the same since.

(Published in Wire Journal International)

Co-host Tucker Carlson (objecting): “Does it serve America’s interests to make this into some sort of circus?”                        

                                                                
Are you keeping
up with the media?

By Alvin M. Hattal

You're driving along Memorial Parkway, and just as the Washington Monument comes into view, the newscaster patches in a live report from an astronaut orbiting the Earth, but you only half listen. The big story is somewhere else, and you know it: it's local. Even here, in the news center of the world, where communication is the buzzword of all Greater Washington association executives, local news comes first. In fact, the Washington Post, which many consider a national newspaper, insists it is a local one.

There has been a significant change in both print and electronic media from broadcasting to narrowcasting. People, more than ever--whether in business or at home--look first to the news that most directly affects them.

Some of the world's biggest corporations got their start with financial help from SBICs: Intel, FedEx and Apple Computer all received early financing from private sources under a federal program to aid struggling new enterprises.

Don't Read This Story – Yet 

By Alvin M. Hattal

When NBC broke an embargo on a study released by the American Association of University Women last June, the group's protests renewed debate about how editors handle such restraints. In an age when news can travel from one side of the world to the other in seconds, have embargoes become dinosaurs?

Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, says he approved a story about an AAUW sexual harassment study for the nightly news a day early because some newspapers' bulldog editions already had the story. 

"We don't break embargoes if they're fair to all parties," he says. AAUW spokesperson Gabrielle Lange says the embargo was designed "to give reporters time to do their homework. I'd hate to think we won't be able to use them as a tool anymore."

"Financial institutions are under significant pressure to improve the flow of credit to underserved markets, and we recognize there are hosts of risks that, until now, haven't been fully understood." So says James H. Carr, a Fannie Mae vice president who heads the company's Office of Housing Research (OHR).

According to Carr, Fannie Mae has embarked on a major effort to identify these underserved geographic markets and determine their potential for home mortgage credit, using a complex new statistical and econometric model. The initiative is part of OHR's effort to find solutions to the nation's housing and urban problems.